OKX customers stacked 13,800 BTC as Binance bled billions to hackers

OKX's 49th proof-of-reserves report just landed, and the Nov. 1 snapshot shows customer bitcoin balances up 9.66% from the Oct. 3 snapshot. That's a gain of 13,800 BTC, bringing the exchange's customer stack to 156,609 BTC. Users can check their own balances against the reserves on OKX's proof-of-reserves page, a monthly ritual the exchange promised after FTX blew up in late 2022.

With bitcoin trading around $76,800, those 13,800 fresh coins are worth more than $1 billion, and OKX's total customer bitcoin pile sits near $12.04 billion. Ether holdings climbed 2.95%, up 54,879 ETH, now at 1.92 million ETH. Stablecoins went the other way: USDT fell 9% to 7.96 billion tokens, roughly 787 million fewer than a month earlier, while OKX's own OKB slipped 0.08% to 19.68 million.

The backdrop is ugly. That same month ended with Binance losing $6.3 billion to hackers, and OKX's snapshot window doesn't break out how much of its bitcoin arrived after the attack. Binance has shed more than $16.5 billion in tracked assets since, sliding from about $144.9 billion on Oct. 29 to about $128.3 billion on Nov. 2, according to Bitcoin.com News. Some of that was the theft itself, some was simply falling prices.

Here's the twist worth chewing on: most of the cash fleeing Binance didn't park at rivals. Whale Factor data shows Binance lost roughly $4.5 billion over 24 hours while the next 10 exchanges combined absorbed only about $368 million. The rest went to self-custody wallets or never touched an exchange at all.

Binance is hustling to win trust back. CEO Yi He said the exchange has generated the full zero-knowledge proof for its Oct. 31 snapshot — a setup that proves reserves cover user balances without exposing individual account data. The proof spans 10 tokens: BTC, ETH, USDT, BNB, SOL, USDC, XRP, USD1, RLUSD and ZEC. Days earlier, Binance had already claimed BTC, ETH, XRP and seven other cryptocurrencies were fully backed after the attack. Tether also jumped in, freezing over $1.5 billion tied to the hack within 30 minutes.

More scorecards are coming fast. Binance plans fresh reserve snapshots on Nov. 4, and OKX's 50th report in early December will be the first to span a full month after the hack — the real test of whether those bitcoin gains stuck once the panic cooled. OKX has other fires burning too: its tokenized stock venture with Intercontinental Exchange has drawn objections from Nvidia, Costco, Nike and other listed companies.