​Huobi reports reserves of $3,5 billion

What’s new? Cryptocurrency exchange Huobi published a report on the composition of reserves. In total, the platform’s hot and cold wallets hold about $3,5 billion worth of digital assets. The company promised to re-audit the reserves with the involvement of third-party experts and the use of a Merkle Tree algorithm within 30 days.

The full version of the report

Merkle trees organize data (such as transactions in smart contracts or transfers between accounts) into hashes arranged as a series of parent and child nodes, which theoretically allows a third-party auditor to verify the relevance of reserves in cryptocurrency services.

What reserves does the exchange have? As of November 12, Huobi had the following assets on its addresses:

• HT: 191,84 million
• BTC: 32 000
• ETH: 274 000
• USDT: 820 million
• TRX: 9,7 billion

The disclosure of Huobi reserves had almost no effect on the exchange’s native token rate. Over the past 24 hours, HT has added 1%, with a price of $4,95 (CoinGecko data as of 14:10 UTC). In addition, after the publication of the report, the exchange faced an outflow of 10 000 ETH, analyst Colin Wu noted. Speaking to CoinDesk, the exchange’s representatives explained that these transfers were part of routine operations.

After Huobi released the asset snapshot of the asset reserve, 10,000 ETH was transferred from 0xca...c3fc (Huobi 34) to Binance and OKX deposit wallets. The Huobi 34, which had 14,858 ETH at the time of the snapshot, currently has only 4,044 ETH left. https://t.co/wrphZxadBM pic.twitter.com/B2lRXMF8su — Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) November 13, 2022

Earlier, in the wake of the FTX crypto exchange crash, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao urged other platforms to publish their balance sheet data to boost industry confidence. Binance itself reported $69 billion in reserves. Zhao also announced a collaboration with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin to launch a model of proof-of-reserves for crypto exchanges.

On November 15, analysts at Lookonchain, a tracking platform, pointed to the insolvency of the Gate exchange. They noted that the company concealed a $230 million hack in 2018 and received a transfer of 320 000 ETH from the Crypto.com exchange on the eve of the reserves report, on October 21, 2022. The latter launched a page to monitor reserves on November 11. The value of the exchange’s assets currently exceeds $2,44 billion.

For what is the proof of reserves, and which exchanges have confirmed their solvency after FTX’s collapse, read GetBlock Magazine’s special feature.