Oh man... when will this stop. LUNA crash... 3AC going down... small exchanges dying in the backwash... and then we thought it was over, but the biggest (so far...) implosion of FTX dying spectacularly (plus, all the wallet draining and crazy stories afterwards...) was completely unexpected and for many even tangentially involved in crypto, quite heart-breaking. Unlike the regular scammers that inhabit the on-chain spaces... FTX was trusted by many and held up as a shining example of a decent exchange doing things right, and whilst they were preaching lecturing from a mountaintop, they were doing shady and corrupt things with customer assets. It could have been worse... they were the goto people for US legislators trying to regulate crypto, and if that had happened, well... things would have gotten quite bad.

So, the fact that FTX and Alameda were such trusted and big players in the crypto industry combined with the speed and completeness of their fall... well, there are BOUND to be many knock-on effects. There will be projects that either held their treasuries with FTX/Alameda, those that had funds issued by Sollet, and projects that expected funding from FTX/Alameda. These will all be in dire straits now... and it is still not completely clear who is exposed or not... and as this year has taught us, we shouldn't trust anyone who says that everything is fine.

Meanwhile, the size of the black hole in FTX's balance sheet has cast scrutiny and doubt again on the balance sheets of ALL centralised exchanges (hehe... notice my vastly reduced crypto tools links?). It doesn't help that they are all currently playing games with moving funds around (even to and fro from exchange to exchange...), and releasing "proof of reserves" without a proof of liabilities. Okay, it is hard to provide proof of liabilities as the off-chain liabilities will be impossible to take without trust. This is one of the problems that crypto was meant to solve...

Anyway, on a personal front... I lost a little bit on FTX... not a lot, mostly just in the exchange token FTT which I had held to use FTX as a nice bouncing off point for fiat/crypto due to the perks of having free withdrawals on any chain! Sadly, that is now gone, and I will have to try to figure out another low cost way of doing the same thing.

Meanwhile, in the less reputable exchanges where I would buy up interesting low cap tokens... well, I've basically removed all exposure to any exchange tokens, sold up what I could, and withdrawn to onchain Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether. I'm not the only person doing this... getting everything off exchanges and back onto private wallets... and I definitely DON'T want to be the last!

I had a bit of a scare this morning when an Ethereum withdrawal from Crypto.com didn't go through for hours... but some Crypto-Twitter sleuths found the problem, CDC didn't have ETH for gas and had backlog of transactions! I did find it odd, as my BSC Tether withdrawal went through fine and fast... but CDC is definitely one exchange that is being openly questioned about liquidity and full-backing of customer assets.

Anyway... I have had a good morning of tying up several exchanges (MEXC, Gate, CDC, KuCoin are all done...). Tomorrow, I will start moving more of the Binance stuff on-chain as well... it is annoying work, but in the end easy enough. Weirdly enough, I feel more comfortable doing this (moving crypto...) than I do making large bank transfers! Perhaps it is the practice and familiarity? Or perhaps it is the fact that I can actually track the transaction itself...

So, a word of advice for anyone else doing the same thing... go slowly and surely... sure, there is panic and hysteria in the air, but make sure that you aren't making mistakes and making your own crypto unrecoverable... and while you are on the way out onto your own non-custodial wallets... it doesn't hurt to pick up a little bit more on the way!

I can also be found cross-posting at:
Hive
Steem
Publish0x

Handy Crypto Tools

Ledger Nano S/X: Keep your crypto safe and offline with the leading hardware wallet provider. Not your keys, not your crypto!
Binance: My first choice of centralised exchange, featuring a wide variety of crypto and savings products.
GMX.io: Decentralised perpetual futures trading on Arbitrum!
Coinbase: If you need a regulated and safe environment to trade, this is the first exchange for most newcomers!
CoinList: Access to early investor and crowdsale of vetted and reserached projects.
Cointracking: Automated or manual tracking of crypto for accounting and taxation reports.