Original | Odaily

Author | Qin Xiaofeng

Recently, there have been many new developments in the bankrupt FTX, and the questioning of Binance's "liquidity crisis" has further triggered market panic. Under multiple factors, the attention to Proof of Reserves (PoR) on CEX platforms has increased again.

It has been 10 months since FTX collapsed. Does CEX, which once claimed to improve industry transparency and regularly release PoR reports, really fulfill its promises?

Odaily conducted an investigation on several platforms including Binance, OKX, Bitget, Kucoin, Bybit, HTX (formerly Huobi), Gate, and Crypto.com, and found some interesting situations.

1. Binance and other platforms regularly publish PoR reports

Binance, OKX, Bitget, and Kucoin, have been releasing PoR reports on time every month since November last year after the FTX incident, and provide Merkle Trees for users to perform open-source verification. Among them, Binance upgraded its system in January this year-using zk-SNARK technology to upgrade its reserve proof system, "missing" one edition; Bitget also lacked one report in February due to a platform-wide upgrade.

Among the other platforms, Bybit releases a report every two months, with a total of five updates to the PoR report. HTX (formerly Huobi) claims to update data at the beginning of each month, but historical PoR reports cannot be viewed on its official website. Currently, only the data from September 1st can be seen-the data mentioned in the following analysis is taken from the official news releases and may not be complete.

(Gate Report)

Gate currently only has "reserve evidence" issued by third-party audit institutions. The release times are May 2020 and October 2022, and no related data has been presented since then, nor has it provided verification tools; Crypto.com only released an asset proof in December last year, and the promised Merkel Tree asset proof has not been launched for a long time. & nbsp;

II. Binance Total Reserve Is Far Ahead, CEX BTC Reserves of Multiple Exchanges Are Climbing

From the data collected by various exchanges, Binance's total asset reserve is far ahead and ranks first each month, even more than the sum of reserves of other exchanges; OKX is second only to Binance and has always ranked second; starting from May this year, Bybit has surpassed HTX (formerly Huobi) and ranks third. The changes in reserves of various exchanges are shown in the video below:

     

(Binance Asset Reserve Changes, click to play the video)

OKX has undergone several noticeable changes in the past 10 months: first, the BTC reserves have continued to rise; second, the stablecoin reserves have also grown, from an initial $3.06 billion to $5.43 billion, an increase of over 70%. However, the reserve value of OKX's native token has remained above $10 billion, surpassing 40%.

Both Bitget and Bybit have seen continuous growth in their BTC reserves and total asset reserves, indicating a positive trend. This may be attributed to their strategy of securing various new coins and gaining high market visibility.

In general, there have been no major changes in Kucoin. Additionally, according to Nansen data, the platform token KCS accounts for 12.7% of the reserves on Kucoin addresses, and the cleanliness of its reserve assets exceeds 85%.

About the asset reserves of various CEX, Odaily will continue to track.

Recommended reading:

"Traditional audit withdrawal, where will CEX asset reserve proof go?"

"Analyzing the details of asset reserves of seven major exchanges, who exposed potential risks?"