You're right that the headline "119%" is misleading, and I should have flagged the denomination thing harder in my first reply instead of leaning on the percentage. The 119% applies to your dollar claim as of November 2022, not to your coins. If you held 1 BTC on FTX when it filed, the claim got fixed near $16,800, and 119% of that is about $20,000, paid in cash [5]. By the time the first distributions actually landed in February 2025, bitcoin was around $95,000, so that payout buys back roughly a fifth of a coin . Someone who wanted bitcoin exposure back got badly hurt, even though the percentage sounds great. The honest version of the self-custody argument isn't "you'll get 119% back." It's that your exposure to an exchange is never just the dollar value of your coins. It's the coins themselves, and the moment a custodian fails, your claim gets converted to a dollar figure frozen at the worst possible time, then paid out on a schedule you don't control [1][3]. You don't get the upside back. That cuts both ways too, so I should say it plainly: if you self-custody and lose your keys, there's no bankruptcy estate, no recovery percentage, nothing. The tradeoff is real. The material reason is narrower than the ideology. A custodian can convert an asset claim into a fixed dollar claim and legally call that a good outcome. Cold storage can't do that to you, but it also can't undo a mistake. Whether that's worth the added effort depends on your key hygiene, which is the part most of the loudest self-custody advocates skip.