If you need a barometer of how quickly users were pulling their money from FTX on Wednesday, this is it.

There were a few moments where the world's leading hardware wallet provider, Ledger, wasn't able to handle the sheer volume of withdrawals coming from FTX.

To the extent that a few of their servers went offline.

The good news is, the issue was quickly fixed and demand continued to be met...

But here's the story behind the story:

Trust in centralized storage solutions just took a huge, quantifiable, hit.

The thing with Ledger devices is, you need to update their firmware from time to time - you can miss a few and still use the device, but miss too many and you'll need to update.

Ledger CTO, Charles Guillemet, said that Ledger Live had an “unusual load on the device manager service,” which was most likely due to users updating their device for the first time in a while.

Which indicates a large swath of users weren't using their hardware wallets at all - they'd put complete faith in centralized exchanges, like FTX, to store and manage all of their crypto.

And considering that FTX was one of the most trusted centralized exchanges in North America - this weeks events will no doubt spur a new line of thinking:

"If it can happen on FTX, it can happen anywhere."

It's a tough lesson to learn, but a valuable one.