Nov 16, 2022 at 05:54The collapse of FTX made investors nervous and look for new places to store their money. Some began to actively buy up cold wallets, and there are many of them now, but probably there are those who are more habitual to keeping money on exchanges. About which of them are still alive and how much you can trust them, read below.
Panic in the crypto crowd
As a reminder, Sam Bankman-Fried’s popular crypto exchange FTX collapsed after losing liquidity. About $5.8B of the $14.6B in assets at Alameda Research, also owned by SBF, were tied to the FTT exchange token, which went down after the problems began. FTX tried for a long time to fix the problem, looking for ways to cover the losses, but failed. Eventually, the platform was forced to file for bankruptcy.
The incident has made many investors wary. Thus, according to Glassnode research, big Bitcoin holders withdrew from exchanges about 73K BTC during the week. The same applies to Ethereum wallets: there in the last seven days, investors have withdrawn about 1.1M ETH in total from various exchanges.
Observing this outflow of funds, the owners of major platforms such as Binance and Kraken offered users Proof-of-Reserves which are independent audits by third parties that aim to provide transparency and evidence that a custodian holds the assets it claims to own on behalf of its clients. However, the collapse of FTX scared investors too much and they probably don’t plan to trust the new procedure right away.
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As for Stablecoins, fiat-linked coins, on the other hand, are feeling fine. We reported more about how the FTX crisis has affected Stablecoins here.
No matter what cryptocurrency you store your funds in, the most important thing is to have a place where they will be safe. Many users trusted the FTX exchange, but their hopes were crushed and their money was lost without the possibility of return. Where to move the savings is up to each person individually but we for our part can only show you the possible options. Let’s look at them in detail.
Where to store your crypto now: a new list of the largest crypto exchanges in the world
After FTX’s collapse, Nansen analysts compiled an updated ranking of the world’s largest crypto exchanges by the number of liquid assets. This metric is very important because, amid the massive outflow of funds due to the FTT token crash, FTX began having a liquidity crisis [a financial situation characterized by a lack of cash or assets easily convertible into cash, which can lead to widespread defaults and bankruptcy].
2/ 📌 Assets/Net Worth shown is the value of the holdings in the wallet addresses provided by the exchanges, on blockchains that we support.
It is not meant to be an exhaustive or complete statement of the actual assets/reserves held by the exchange on behalf of its users.
— Nansen 🧭 (@nansen_ai) November 15, 2022
Thus, according to Bloomberg analysts, FTX had nearly $9B in liabilities and only $900M in liquid assets, $5.5B in less liquid assets and $3.2B in illiquid assets. But what about the liquidity in the other crypto exchanges?
- Binance holds about $64.3 billion in assets in BTC, ETH, TRX, and Binance Coin (BNB).
- The place of the bankrupt FTX was taken by the Bitfinex exchange with the second-largest stock of assets worth $8.23 billion.
- OKX holds $5.84 billion in cryptocurrencies.
- Cryptocurrency exchange Huobi has $3.3 billion in assets in eight different digital assets.
- The KuCoin exchange holds $2.65 billion in assets.
- Crypto․com holds about $2.36 billion in assets in seven digital assets.
- The Deribit trading floor holds $1.46 billion in assets.
How can I make money on this?
By following the links above, you will find cryptocurrency exchange statements that show how much and in what cryptocurrencies are stored on the platform. It seems that the more the better, but this is not always the case, also pay attention to the conditions that the exchange offers for storing assets.
The main question of the article is not how to make money, but how to keep your funds. Presented crypto exchanges are still alive, but as we know, things can change at any moment. Recently we reported on Crypto.com, which, according to many users, may next experience a crisis and go to the bottom after FTX. This is also indicated by the liquidity of the platform, which is in the penultimate place according to this indicator. The data is official, but it may be different from what it really is, so you should be careful.
As for #1 on the list, all is not always well here either. It may seem that Binance is becoming an island of hope and peace of mind for investors who are already tired of losing their money, but by eliminating all competitors, Binance may become a monopolist in the market, and it also has problems. The platform has been attacked by hackers more than once, accused of insider trading and blocking a $1M corporate account. Many people use Binance despite this. You may like it too, or already use it, but wherever you store your funds, try to keep an eye on the situation and be able to withdraw them immediately if anything happens.
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