One day after pulling out of a plan to acquire the ailing cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Binance published a list of its cold wallets and reserves.
A close to 21.7 billion of its stablecoin BUSD (worth $21.9 billion) and 58 million of its BNB tokens (worth $16 billion) are also held, according to the cryptocurrency exchange, along with about 475,000 bitcoin (US$7.8 billion), 4.8 million ether ($5.57 billion), 17.6 billion USDT ($17.4 billion), and 601 million USDC ($607 million).
Binance Shares Hot and Cold Wallet Crypto Addresses
Based on current market prices, the total market value of the reserves reported was about $69 billion. In the upcoming weeks, it also stated that it will disclose its Merkle tree proof-of-funds.
The “leaf nodes” of the Merkle tree are where exchanges store the hash value of the assets associated with each user account. The second stage entails auditing the assets in the leaf node of the Merkle tree and having a third party independently confirm each user’s holdings. Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the CEO of Binance, announced to the public that Binance would provide proof of reserves just before the exchange abandoned its plan to buy FTX.
All cryptocurrency exchanges ought to use Merkle-tree proof-of-reserves, according to CZ. “Banks rely on little amounts of reserves. Bitcoin exchanges shouldn’t. Binance will shortly begin performing proof-of-reserves. Full disclosure,” CZ said on Twitter. Binance posted a blog entry on Thursday in response to CZ’s analysis on proof-of-reserves.
For networks including BTC, ETH, BSC, BNB, and TRX, the exchange has shared hot and cold wallet addresses. According to Binance’s release, “This is a beginning step while we strive to develop a Merkle tree [proof-of-reserves] that we could share with the public in the coming weeks.”
