Exchange OKX published this Thursday (10) its third monthly Proof of Reservations (PoR) report. According to the document, the exchange has total reserves of $7.2 billion in Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and USDT stablecoin. The value corresponds to R$ 3.1 billion in current values. Another aspect of the report is that, according to OKX, these are their “clean” assets. That is, the exchange did not include its own tokens in the PoR balance sheet. Citing data from blockchain analytics firm CryptoQuant, which monitors PoR across the industry, OKX said this is the “largest pool of clean assets among major exchanges.”
“Clean” Assets
As explained by OKX, asset reserves are considered “clean” when a third-party review determines that the reserves do not include an exchange’s native token. In this sense, the PoR report shows only “traditional” and high market cap cryptocurrencies. In this case, the metric provided by CryptoQuant e encompasses the three largest cryptocurrencies on the market. The report also points out that OKX reserves are overcollateralized. That is, the company has more than 100% net assets in relation to its liabilities. The document points out that OKX’s BTC and ETH reserve rate is 105%, while USDT’s is 101%.
OKX total bookings. Source: PoR/Crypto Quant report. For example, CryptoQuant data shows that besides OKX, Deribit is the only other to have 100% clear asset reserves. However, the derivatives exchange has a reserve of US$ 1.4 billion (R$ 7.1 billion), a value much smaller than that of OKX.
Other reservations
Meanwhile, other exchanges have fees below 100%. Crypto.com, for example, has 95.51% of “clean” assets, followed by ByBit and Binance, with 91.2% and 87.6%, respectively. The remaining percentage of reserves corresponds to the exchanges’ own tokens. The PoR system refers to a method of verification in which a cryptocurrency trading platform actually has one-to-one support on the digital assets it holds in custody on behalf of its clients. The crypto community has been pushing for exchanges to provide attestations of their holdings following the FTX collapse last November. One way to perform an attestation is through a PoR protocol that uses a Merkle Tree system to integrate large amounts of data into a single hash and verify the integrity of the dataset. OKX was one of the first to use this method to prove its stability, as the exchange released two PoR reports in late December.
OKX Asset Breakdown
The data in the report covers the amount of cryptocurrencies held by OKX as of January 18th. In absolute numbers, the exchange owns 117,682 BTC, 1,178,993 ETH and 2,955,696,824 USDT that belong to its users. OKX said it has published more than 23,000 addresses for its Merkle Tree PoR program, allowing users to check exchange reserves and liabilities with trusted tools on the OKX website. Lennix Lai, director of financial markets at OKX, spoke at an event held on Tuesday in Hong Kong. The director said the exchange “has never misappropriated user assets before and never will.” With a trading volume of over $1.8 billion in the last 24 hours, OKX is currently the third largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, according to CoinGecko.
