I turned $64,000 into $584,475. Then I looked away.
Two and a half years on FTX, rebuilt from 99,648 lines of the exchange’s own ledger and priced day by day. Drag across the chart to ride along.
Account value in US dollars, May 2020 to the November 2022 collapse
$76.4Mtraded in futures across 23 markets
3,668trades, 1,304 of them in April 2021 alone
2,200 ETHmy biggest position: $4.4 million of exposure
$58,360paid in funding to traders on the other side
The ride
Ten moments, in order. Scroll and the chart follows.
Drag the market down
By mid-2022 I was holding 82.8 ETH, 5 BTC and 127 Monero futures, with $208,576 borrowed against them. Borrowing doesn’t shrink when prices do. Start at the November 2021 highs and pull the market down to see where the floor was.
FTX doesn’t phone you first. When what you own no longer covers what you owe, its engine sells everything, automatically, at whatever the price is that minute.
16 June 2022
Market down0%
What I owe$208,576
What I own$0
Account value$0
What I own
What I owe
Real money in, real money out
Every deposit and withdrawal, valued on the day it moved. The peak was never real money; this is.
$80,540taken out: ETH, BTC and USDT along the way, plus the 2025 bankruptcy payout
+$16,264net, after everything. About 3% of what I once had on screen.
The last chapter wasn’t mine
On 11 November 2022 FTX filed for bankruptcy and froze every account. I still had $4,157.48 inside: mostly $3,307 sitting in a subaccount I’d topped up in early 2021 and forgotten about, plus the scraps the liquidation left.
It took the bankruptcy two and a half years. In June 2025 the recovery trust paid out the claim in full, plus 20.5% interest.
$5,009.31, arriving 934 days after the music stopped.