Introduction

It is one of these moments that you see your efforts built over years collapse in a single moment that the whole universe eventually decides to act against you. Everything started on summer 2026 after a notification from CoinBase Centralised Cryptotrading Platform requesting to confirm my tax information by the end of 2026 due to new tax regulations in the USA although I am not a US citizen.

CoinBase has never been my favorite CEX, I used it in the past only to receive their Learn and Earn drops of several altcoins since any staking opportunities where very limited and the interface was very difficult to understand and use in comparison with other more popular CEXs such as Binance.

Therefore, since I was never a KYC supporter my eventual decision to CoinBase request was to withdraw my funds from there and terminate my account completely with them after several years of minor involvement.

And this is where things started going wrongly...

What is CoinBase

For those who are unaware, Coinbase may have achieved the strongest brand recognition amongst cryptocurrency exchanges in USA since its foundation in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ersham. It is Based in San Francisco California, United States and following the great explosion in the cryptocurrency trading market in the United States, it since grown over the years from a small-medium enterprise (SME) into employing 500+ people and growing rapidly and a $8 billion valuation following a successful Initial Public Offering at NASDAQ trading market.

How the Failure unfolded

The drama unfolded when i decided to terminate my CoinBase account after a request to confirm my tax information at the platform. And in order to do so, I had to withdraw first my funds from there. Funds that were accumulated through the now retired CoinBase Learn and Earn feature that it was used in the past to promote specific altcoins for marketing interest. But the most significant funds there were my 0.003393029 that were partially staked in the platform for years and partially were accumulated after exchanging the majority of my altcoins funds since the amounts were too tiny to transfer into my Metamask wallet.

The failure happened when mistakenly instead of transferring my ETH to my Metamask wallet, after several wrong taps, the app froze in my device, while it was trying to synchronize with the CoinBase database. Then I realised that I had actually sent my ETH to the wrong address and precisely to the saved addresses 0xca309e421c20cb7d71b01e2249afea5f372c2f13 named after Seferoglou. 

Seferoglou, it was actually a young greek Dj and trader that I had a chat with him few years ago in the Greek RollerCoin FB Group who requested to send him 0.01 ETH to complete a Rollercoin event with the promise that he would return the funds when he will get paid from his job as a Dj. Indeed, Seferoglou returned the funds in USDT through the MEXC trading platform P2P service to avoid paying any fees for the transfer and later i withdraw them into my wallet before terminating my account there too. 

Yet, for some unknown reason, the address 0xca309e421c20cb7d71b01e2249afea5f372c2f13 that I saved in the past under the name Seferoglou wasn't his address but somebody else who I can't remember him at all! and the most surprising from all was that according to Etherscan, the owner of the address 0xca309e421c20cb7d71b01e2249afea5f372c2f13 grabbed my ETH funds without a second hesitation and moved them into another live address 0x683FD6428E912F82a260f36162d99573639C4903 that contains today 1.067756788507613558 ETH !!!

So many would imagine that after sending my CoinBase ETH to the saved address 0xca309e421c20cb7d71b01e2249afea5f372c2f13 under the name Seferoglou, it would have been logical to contact him on FB again and explain him the situation.

Indeed, I contact Seferoglou who at the meantime decided to focus on his Djing and quit all of his crypto-activities and explained me that he isn't the owner of the address 0xca309e421c20cb7d71b01e2249afea5f372c2f13 and that he would honestly had returned my CoinBase ETH if they were sent to him for real!

So who was the owner for the address 0xca309e421c20cb7d71b01e2249afea5f372c2f13 is still a mere mystery and until now i have no clue who is the owner, why i have sent him funds in the past and most importantly why i saved the address under the name Seferoglou and not the real recipient!

Final Thoughts

Undoubtedly, the responsibility for the execution of the failed transaction lies exclusively to me but every Failure is a Step to Success. Many would claim that the ETH amount lost of roughly $6 and currently $8.97 is insignificant, but the lost funds were accumulated for years through the CoinBase Learn and Earn campaign and staking services and losing them had a real impact in my psychology for weeks. Especially due to the reason it actually happened and not as a result of a lost trade, a lost bet or an exchange for my entertainment. And I do still have my CoinBase account but my plan is still to terminate it soon for sure since I don't feel I really need it anymore and i have already managed to move the remaining funds from there. Also, it is a step into minimizing my personal digital fingerprint on the cryptoworld, especially after the latest BitGet hack incident.

Yet for those you would like to compensate me for my loss, you are welcome to donate your ETHs into my GoMining ETH wallet. Mind that the minimum deposit amount is 0.0005 ETH sent only via the Ethereum Network and using any other network will result in loss of funds.

Disclaimer: All information found on this article is for informational purposes only. I do not provide any personal investment advice so please make your own research before proceeding to any investment/trading actions

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