When you strip away the noise, institutional-grade custody might be the only defensible long-term moat for major exchange platforms. Building secure, compliant custody infrastructure is genuinely hard—combining regulatory complexity, technical security, and operational risk management. Most other services? That's commoditized territory. Whether it's trading, lending, or staking, competitors are already doing it or will soon do it better. The barrier to entry in those verticals keeps shrinking. But custody? That stays sticky because it demands deep institutional relationships, insurance frameworks, and years of security audit trails. That's where the real business endures.