Promoting FTX was their side hustle. Now they are picking up the pieces.

The first time Gabriel Trompiz heard about the FTX student ambassador program was through a LinkedIn message.

He had been identified as someone who could represent and promote the crypto exchange at his college. Trompiz immediately applied through the link he was sent and became an FTX campus ambassador shortly after.

No contracts were signed and Trompiz says he was not paid. But he was given a task: to promote the company to fellow students to help build up the user base in Europe.

FTX already ran a campus ambassador program in Africa, with the same goal of advertising the exchange to fellow students. Calls for students to get involved and become campus ambassadors were shared on the FTX Africa Twitter account.

Fortunate Atueyi, who attends the University of Nigeria, was one of them and often hosted events and workshops on FTX.

“They expect to see about 500 to 1,000 or 1,500 students in attendance. So you’re teaching them about cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology and most importantly the benefits of using FTX,” he told CNBC’s Make It.

Unlike Trompiz, Atueyi says he was paid – as long as he fulfilled certain tasks and met targets. The role was not limited to providing training about the exchange. Instead, he said referring people and getting them to sign up and getting them to start shopping and depositing money was a crucial part of that.

Documents seen by CNBC confirm Trompiz and Atueyi’s involvement with FTX as student ambassadors. Neither FTX nor the law firms representing the controversial crypto exchange, Sullivan & Cromwell and Landis, Rath & Cobb, responded to a CNBC request for comment for this article.

In Europe and the US, FTX was best known for trading cryptocurrencies. But in Africa, the platform was also used to exchange local currency for US dollars and store funds for individuals and businesses – effectively using FTX as a de-facto bank.

FTX filed for bankruptcy and halted the withdrawal of funds from clients in November 2022. Many had tried to withdraw their investments after rival exchange Binance sold all its holdings of FTX’s original token FTT and concerns about the firm’s liquidity quickly spread.

A bankruptcy court case is underway in the US, but it remains unclear how much assets can be recovered and when customers can regain access to some of their investments.

Elsewhere in Nigeria, Imran Yahya was an FTX campus ambassador at Bayero University. “As an ambassador, you preach by using it,” he told CNBC’s Make It.

In addition to promoting the exchange on campus, he advertised it to his wider community and created content for FTX.

“There is nothing shady on my part,” he said. He gave people information about FTX without any commitment to spend money, and they trusted him and his advice, he explained. Many of these people lost money in FTX’s collapse.

Like investors and other FTX employees, the student ambassadors were blindsided by FTX’s bankruptcy. Atueyi first noticed rumors about how bad the company’s financial situation really was on Twitter, but several senior employees assured him that FTX was “bigger than this” and that the rumors were being spread by competitors.

“I saw it as normal business strategies,” he said.

Trompiz and Yahya were similarly surprised, and all three lost some money. Partly this is because as students they only had limited disposable income to invest, but Trompiz also already stored most of their crypto investments in a wallet rather than with FTX.

Despite the losses, the three student ambassadors are not ready to give up crypto and digital assets. Although they have learned some lessons from the experience, their outlook has not changed significantly.

“The one thing that the collapse of FTX taught me is that no company is too big to fail,” Yahya said, adding that the only thing he would do differently in the future is to be more cautious.

Atueyi takes a similar view: “I just have to play it extra safe,” he said.

For him, this is about trust and understanding that as much as exchanges may say they are decentralized, they still control your money.

“I kind of trusted them. I was like I was part of the crowd that said FTX was too big to fail,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to leave your money there and they have full control over your money. So just like any bank,” Atueyi explained.

Trompiz shares his views on decentralization. “The more I get into crypto and the more I learned about it, I see that the point of it is decentralization,” he said.

He believes exchanges like FTX are useful for the wider industry and for increasing the use of digital assets – but using them is “like contradicting yourself.” Going forward, he therefore plans to rely less on them and refocus his investments on other digital asset areas such as DeFi.

So while the collapse of FTX lost them money, caused guilt and affected personal relationships, they are coming to terms with it. As Atueyi says, “I personally love cryptocurrencies… Things like this are going to happen.”