The $14,200 I Left on FTX Slept There for 11 Days Before I Checked

It was 6:40 AM on November 9, 2024, and I was standing at the kitchen counter in my socks, stirring coffee I had already forgotten about, scrolling the FTX app for the eleventh day in a row cuz some part of my brain refused to accept what the balance line was showing me. Fourteen thousand two hundred dollars. That is what it read. Not $49,000, which is what it had read on November 1st when the withdrawal button still worked and I had looked at it and figured, maybe tomorrow.

Here is what was actually at stake that mornin. My daughter's preschool tuition ran $11,400 a year, due in three installments, and the next installment hit December 1st. I had told my wife in March that the FTX money was "the tuition fund." She never asked about it again. That silence should have scared me more than it did.

The crazy part is not that Sam Bankman-Fried stole it, or however you want to phrase what the courts decided. The crazy part is that I knew. I knew on November 6th when withdrawals slowed to a crawl. I knew when people on Crypto Twitter began posting screenshots of failed transfers. And I still typed my password eleven mornings in a row hoping the number would climb back up.

the withdrawal screen that mocked me

Let me walk you through November 8th expressly, because this is the part I replay. The interface loaded fine. That matters. A bank that is quietly failing still shows you a beautiful app, the same way a house that is burning down from inside looks normal from the curb. I clicked withdraw. I selected 0.35 BTC, around $5,800 at the time. Processing. Then nothing. No error banner, nothing cinematic. It just sat there in a pending state like a letter nobody intended to mail.

I called my brother Dan that night. He got out in June, moved everythin to cold storage after the Celsius freeze. He told me, verbatim, "Rusty, pull everything now, even at a loss on fees." I said the withdrawal might clear by mornin. He hung up before I finished the sentence. Eleven days later his number was right and mine was zero.

eleven days of clicking refresh

Denial is expensive and it has an awfully specific texture. Mine tasted like reheated coffee at 6:40 in the mornin while my thumb did the same scroll-down gesture over a dead app. Day five I emailed support. Day seven I filed a claim form that went nowhere for months. Day nine I stopped mentioning it to my wife, which was its own kinda confession.

On day eleven something clicked, and it was ugly but useful. I grasped I was not checking the balance to get information. I was checking it to postpone grief. Every refresh was a slot machine pull, except the jackpot had already been paid out to somebody's Bahamian real estate portfolio.

the app that loaded fine anyway

A dead interface is still an interface. That distinction did me more damage than any hacker ever could.

what the Celsius crowd already knew

There were about 600,000 other creditors in the same boat, according to the bankruptcy filings, and we all made versions of the same mistake, just with different excuses. Some people trusted SBF cuz of the Congress hearings. Some stayed because moving to self-custody felt complicated and the fees annoyed em. My excuse was the worst one: inertia dressed up as patience.

Compare that with what happened on exchanges like Kraken during the same period. When FTX imploded, sane people pulled funds off every other platform within seventy-two hours. Proof of reserves pages got traffic they had never seen. The ones who panicked early kept their coins. Panic, it turns out, is underrated.

the hardware wallet sitting in a drawer

Here is the detail that made me laugh, bitterly, on day eleven. In March of that year I had snagged a Ledger Nano S Plus for $79. It sat unopened in the drawer under the TV remote for eight months because setting it up required writing down twenty-four words and I kept planning to do it "this weekend." Eight weekends. Every one of em cost me, eventually, money I will describe below without rounding.

My coworker Priya set hers up during a lunch break using her phone camera and a piece of paper from a legal pad. Twenty minutes. I have spent longer choosing a streaming show.

November 12th, the night I finally moved

The remaining coins I held elsewhere — about 2.1 ETH and some BTC on Coinbase totaling approximately $3,900 — came off the exchange the night of November 12th, between 11 PM and 1 AM, while my wife slept. Setup took forty minutes total including the firmware update, because eight months of dread turned out to be worse than the actual work. Transferring onto the Ledger took another fifteen minutes and about $6 in network fees.

The feeling when the transaction confirmed is hard to describe honestly. Relief, yeah. But also anger, because it had been this easy the entire time. Every weekend I postponed it, the twenty-four words waited patiently in a sealed box on a shelf like a fire extinguisher behind glass that says break only in case of catastrophe.

the recovery check, four years later

The bankruptcy process eventually paid back, depending on claims class, somewhere near the November 2022 petition-date values, which meant I recovered a fraction of the actual dollar amount I lost. My claim, filed at 1:47 AM on day twelve, ended up worth approximately $5,300 in distributions across 2024 and 2025 against the $14,200 that vanished. Take the difference yourself. Call it the tuition for the most expensive online course I never signed up for.

People ask whether I sold everythin after that. No. I still hold bitcoin, but none of it has touched an exchange custody account since 1 AM on November 13th. If I buy now, it moves off within a day. That rule costs me a little convenience and maybe $60 a year in transfer fees. It snagged back somethin I did not price correctly for years.

This past February I stood at the same kitchen counter, same socks, coffee goin cold, and opened the Ledger Live app instead of any exchange. The balance was boring. Up some, down some. Boring is the whole point. My daughter asked what I was smiling at, and I said nothin, and finished my coffee while it was actually still hot.