Huobi Publishes Asset Transparency Report, Revealing $3.5B in Crypto Holdings

Huobi Global, once China's top crypto exchange, published an asset transparency report on Sunday to reassure users that their funds remain safe.

As of Nov. 12, the exchange held 191.84 million of its own native token HT ($900 million), 9.7 billion TRX, 820 million USDT, 274,000 ETH and 32,000 BTC, and 191.84 million HT tokens and several other coins, including ATOM, ADA, BCH, DOGE, DOT, MATIC, SHIB and ETC.

The total estimated value of reserves was $3.5 billion, the report said.

The revelation came days after FTX, formerly the third largest digital assets exchange by volume, exploded in response to a CoinDesk report that showed that the exchange's sister concern Alameda Research's balance sheet, was primarily made up of FTX's native token, FTT.

Since then, crypto exchanges worldwide have been scrambling to publish the so-called proof of reserves to assure users that their funds aren't being channelized into other investments. On Nov. 10, leading crypto exchange Binance released the list of its cold wallets and reserves, disclosing $69 billion in crypto reserve.

"Huobi is acting now to disclose the balance details of our hot and cold wallets and make this disclosure a routine going forward," the exchange said in the report, adding that it performed a Merkle Tree Proof of Reserves audit early last month when the exchange's founder Leon Li sold his controller stake to About Capital.

Huobi promised to publish another Merkle Tree Proof of Reserves audit conducted by a third party within 30 days to boost user confidence further.

Under the Merkel Tree audit, an independent entity takes an anonymized snapshot of all crypto balances held by the exchange and aggregates them into a Merkel tree, a structure normally used to check the integrity of block data.

Huobi's disclosure, however, failed to calm market nerves. The HT token traded at $4.8 at press time, down 8.9% on a 24-hour basis, according to CoinDesk data.

The exchange reportedly saw an outflow of 10,000 ETH after it published the asset reserve report. Data from South Korea-based blockchain analytics firm CryptoQuant shows a total of 12,000 ETH ($15.14 million) have left Huobi in the past six hours.