The First Proof of Funds CERtified Crypto Exchanges

Transparency

As the price of Bitcoin rises and the crypto world continues to evolve, the crypto exchange industry still lacks maturity and transparency. Striving to add valuable contributions to the development of the exchange industry, the Crypto Exchange Ranks (CER) team has been continuously analyzing, investigating, and reporting on malpractices and manipulation cases for over a year. Furthermore, there are numerous reports from other CER colleagues suggesting the massive problem of volume manipulation by crypto trading platforms. In an effort to disrupt “trade volume” as the defining metric of crypto exchange rankings, CER introduced the Blockchain Balance Rating where platforms are ranked by the total balance of their Bitcoin and Ethereum cold and hot wallets. 

Certified

With each fresh volume manipulation report, it becomes more clear that trade volume can be easily inflated. As such, even a small exchange with only a handful of real users can spoof its orderbooks, fake trading activity, and report millions of dollars of trade volume. In contrast, exchanges cannot fake their wallet balances as they are publicly available on the blockchain. The Blockchain Balance of an exchange, which is a measure of funds in an exchange’s possession, is the only credible metric to date indicating the real scale of each platform. In addition, the Blockchain Balance helps indicate the level of sustainability and credibility of a particular exchange which in turn raises user loyalty and confidence, especially in the case of voluntary disclosure of wallet addresses as it shows the exchange’s commitment to transparency.

In order to verify crypto exchange wallet balances, the CER team, in partnership with Etherscan and Crystal (by Bitfury), offers the Proof of Funds CERtification. Today, the CER team is pleased to present a list of the first CERtified crypto exchanges. Having analyzed the wallet balance data provided by our data partners, CER has concluded that the Blockchain Balance of several trading platforms is valid as of today, June 27th, 2019. In addition to the data provided by our data partners, the Codex One exchange has voluntarily provided the CER team with its wallet addresses that were validated by the CER team. The first exchanges that have passed the Proof of Funds CERtification are Coinbase, Huobi, Binance, Bittrex, Kraken, Bitfinex, Gemini and Codex One. These exchanges were granted the CERtified status on the CER platform and have advanced to the top of the Blockchain Balance Rating.