Binance's reserves suddenly "dropped" by 8 billion USD

According to the latest discovery, Binance has lost up to 8 billion USD out of 14 billion USD in asset reserves in just the past month

Updated on the evening of February 11, 2025:

In order to reassure public opinion after many conflicting opinions about the information that Binance sold a large amount of crypto assets of the exchange, the Binance Customer Support account on the evening of February 11 posted a tweet confirming that the information that the exchange sold crypto was not true. The reason for the difference in assets came from Binance "changing the accounting method".
However, the Binance representative did not provide any other specific evidence.

Original article:

The crypto community is buzzing about the "large" decline in Binance's assets. The reserve data announced in early 2025 is no longer correct!

Binance's Proof of Reserves (PoR) data provides two important pieces of information: the amount of crypto held by customers (Customer Net Balances) and the amount of crypto held by Binance (Binance Net Balances). The difference between these two figures can be understood as the exchange's own assets.
As of the end of January 2025, Binance announced its non-customer net asset balances as follows:

2,746 Bitcoin (BTC);

275,725,782 Tether (USDT);

174 Ethereum (ETH);

4,869,719 BNB;

4,179 Solana (SOL)
However, these numbers have dropped sharply compared to December 2024. At that time, the world's largest exchange held much larger amounts:

46,896 BTC;

2,989,902,855 USDT;

216,312 ETH;

5,839,372 BNB;

442,234 SOL.

The decline has pushed Binance’s total assets to their lowest level in nearly two years. Converted to USD, the loss is up to $8 billion, so where did all that money “go”?

Some industry insiders speculate that the decline may be related to the settlement with regulators or the recovery from FTX. Another theory is that Binance may have sold or reallocated assets to invest or expand its business.

At the time of writing, founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) and CEO Richard Teng have not yet commented on the matter.

Also at the time of the PoR announcement in late January, Binance affirmed that it maintains 100% of user assets in the form of 34 cryptocurrencies, with the collateral ratio always at 1:1 or higher compared to customer balances.

In the past, CZ has denied rumors that Binance will sell a large amount of assets in May 2023. Account holder X Googly discovered a sharp decline in Binance's reserve assets in public wallets, and suspected that the exchange had moved the reserve assets to new wallets or sold some of the crypto.

Crypto exchanges, including Binance, have begun providing proof of customer holdings since the collapse of FTX in November 2022. FTX has been facing a financial crisis due to a weak balance sheet and illiquid assets, leading to a "bank-run" situation, the exchange was unable to meet all customer withdrawal requests. The event rocked the market and sent Bitcoin prices plunging to a record low of $15,400. However, Bitcoin has since recovered strongly and is currently trading at around $97,659.