Bybit, a rising cryptocurrency exchange, has pledged to boost its transparency in a bid to retain customers following the FTX collapse, it was reported on Monday.
In a 10 December announcement, it said it had opened a Merkle Tree Proof of Reserve (PoF) system to verify its holdings as well as personal assets on the exchange.
It will also verify wallet ownership on a 1:1 ratio via the crypto platform. Clients with funding and trading accounts, as well as Bybit Earn holdings, can use the feature.
Ben Zhou, Bybit co-founder and chief executive, said at the time:
“The cryptographic solution brings forth a crypto-native, trustless model of providing verifiable evidence of our on-chain holdings and liabilities.”
The company statement continued, stating it would “spare no effort to ensure next-level reliability,” citing recently published wallet addresses and a Nansen dashboard.
The exchange will also back withdrawals and prevent risks with its additional steps, while also publishing Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) wallet information. The news comes after the company published reserve wallet addresses in mid-November following the FTX crisis.
Additional companies, including Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, as well as Crypto.com and Kraken, have launched similar transparency initiatives to ensure liquidity of their respective exchanges.
The news comes after Jesse Powell, Kraken’s chief executive and co-founder, slammed crypto exchanges for using Merkle Tree figures to prove their crypto reserves, stating such efforts were “pointless.”
He urged enterprises to publicly disclose liabilities in PoR reports to avoid hiding crypto balances with negative reserves, among others.
