Proof of reserves has become a league table. Exchanges are compared on how often they publish, with monthly treated as better than quarterly and quarterly better than occasional.
Cadence is the least useful thing to measure. What decides whether a report means anything is who verified it, what it covers, and what it cannot show at all.
What a Proof of Reserves Actually Shows
A proof of reserves is a snapshot. It demonstrates that on a given date, an exchange controlled wallets holding at least as much of certain assets as the customer balances included in the calculation.
The Merkle tree approach lets an individual customer confirm their own balance was counted, which is genuinely useful and is the part that works.
What it does not show is everything else on the balance sheet. It says nothing about money the exchange owes elsewhere, nothing about off-chain liabilities, and nothing about whether the assets were borrowed shortly before the snapshot and returned after. It covers the assets in scope and no others.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of the Chief Accountant made this point publicly in December 2022, warning that proof of reserves reports are not audits and that investors should not treat them as equivalent. That guidance has not been superseded.
Frequency Is Not the Same as Assurance
Twelve self-published snapshots a year are not more reassuring than two verified by an accountant who is liable for the opinion.
Kraken’s most recent review is dated 30 June 2026, covering Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, USDC, USDT and XRP, conducted by an independent third-party accountant using a Merkle tree, with verification code published so customers can check the work themselves. That is less frequent than several competitors and carries more weight than any of them, because someone outside the exchange signed it.
Bybit’s reports carry verification from Hacken, a third-party firm. Binance and OKX publish monthly using Merkle tree and zero-knowledge methods. Bitget says it has published monthly since December 2022, reaching its 46th update this month across 19 assets at a 135% reserve ratio, self-verified through an open-source tool.
CNR verified the Kraken figures against Kraken’s own disclosure. The others are as the exchanges state them and have not been independently checked here.
The Biggest Exchange Publishes None
Coinbase does not do proof of reserves, and declines on principle.
Its position, stated publicly by chief executive Brian Armstrong, is that a listed company filing audited financial statements with the SEC provides stronger assurance than a self-published cryptographic snapshot. Coinbase is audited by Deloitte and files quarterly.
Reasonable people disagree about that, and a customer cannot verify their individual balance in a 10-K the way they can in a Merkle tree. But a ranking that places Coinbase below a monthly self-attestation because it publishes less often has inverted the thing it claims to measure.
The useful question is not how recently an exchange published. It is whether anyone independent put their name to it, what share of liabilities it covers, and what the exchange is not showing you.
