Undoubtedly, the collapse of FTX — one of the world’s largest and most trusted crypto exchanges — caused a lot of damage to the crypto industry, leaving an estimated 1 million creditors with their assets frozen on the platform. Although Chainalysis’s report admits that FTX customers will "likely lose any funds they kept on the exchange, and the likelihood of recovering them is unknown," the exchange’s demise doesn’t represent the highest realized losses for individual crypto investors this year.
The report, based on the weekly data of realized gains and losses of all personal crypto wallets in 2022, suggests that the collapse of Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin UST and the failures of crypto lender Celsius and hedge fund Three Arrows Capital hit the wider crypto markets harder that FTX’s swift downfall.
Chainalysis estimates that the Terra crash in May resulted in $20.5 billion realized losses for investors. A few weeks later, the fallout of Celsius and 3AC wiped out a whopping $33.0 billion. In contrast, FTX's bankruptcy caused about $9 billion in realized losses. However, it's worth noting that the data doesn’t take into account customers’ funds stuck on the platform.
“From a market-wide point of view, the data above suggests that as of now, the heaviest hitting crypto events of 2022 were already behind investors by the time the FTX debacle took place,” Chainalysis concludes.
