According to a recent Forbes report, Binance has experienced a significant exodus of assets over the past two months.
A Forbes analyst took a closer look at Binance wallets and found that around $12 billion has been expelled from Binance since November.
Massive outflows aside, the report found discrepancies between reports regarding Binance’s holdings to be troubling. The lack of consensus among analytics platforms has made Forbes worried about fraud within the exchange. Some reports have indicated that Binance’s wallet has a gap of billions of dollars.
However, this report only briefly touches on the broader cryptocurrency market situation and underestimates its impact on Binance’s holdings.
Binance Asset Report Discrepancies
Earlier in December, Binance released news that on-chain data showed the exchange had lost $3 billion in assets in one week. The exchange withdrew 4% of his total assets, and the market went wild. At the time, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao assured customers that the withdrawal amount was not among his five maximums on the exchange and that there was nothing to worry about.
According to a Forbes report, the exchange has lost 15% of its assets since then. The exchange balance of its native token, BNB, has been cut in half since November. The number of his BUSD stablecoins on exchanges has also decreased by 40%. Forbes noted that his MATIC, APE, and GALA balances on the exchange also fell between 40% and 50%.
Aggregating data from various crypto data companies, we find that almost a quarter of Binance’s assets have been expelled from exchanges since the beginning of November.
About 31% of Binance’s total assets were placed in BNB on January 4, according to CoinMarketCap. This is significantly higher than the amount disclosed by Binance in his November transparency report. However, Forbes considers his 57 million BNB tokens reported by CoinMarketCap to be “suspicious.”
In other words, this number contrasts with the number of BNBs identified by Nansen, DefiLlama, and Arkham, which ranges from 22 million to 40 million tokens. Forbes’ own analysis of his Etherscan found him only 16 million BNB on the exchange.
Around 40% of BUSD balances on Binance have also left the exchange since November. Discrepancies between data provided by analytics firms have led Forbes to believe that Binance itself reported billions of BUSD less than figures provided by Nansen and DefiLlama.
The report also found discrepancies in BTC holdings on Binance. The number of tokens held by the exchange varies from 287,000 BTC to 577,000 BTC. Analytics firm CER.LIVE reportedly identified $9.6 billion of his BTC in his Binance wallet. This is more than double his amount that both Glassnode and CoinMarketCap have indicated.
Forbes’ own estimate that Binance holds 4.49 million ETH is much higher than figures shown by other platforms — CoinMarketCap estimates that the exchange only holds about 2.58 million ETH. ing.
Some win, some lose
However, it’s important to note that Binance isn’t just losing assets since November.
The exchange lost a significant amount of BUSD, but doubled its USDT and USDC balances in the same period. The exchange currently holds a combined $6.27 billion worth of the two stablecoins.
Forbes has ruled out the possibility that Binance’s outflow is the result of wider market turmoil. The analysis looked at exchanges with publicly available evidence and found that Binance experienced the most money outflows in the last 30 days. Other large market players such as Crypto.com, Bitfinex, Huobi, Bitmex and OKEX saw only his single-digit changes in assets.
“This situation shows that there are trust issues with Binance, and its status as the largest crypto market increases the potential for contagion if they prove to be well-funded. ,” Forbes pointed out.
The publication concluded that the exchange was undergoing a “banking soft run” and that the run could intensify.
Binance could certainly see a devastating bank crackdown. However, the Forbes report does not mention the size of his Binance, nor does it contribute to the scale of the exodus relative to the number of users he serves. It also doesn’t take into account how much Binance handles. If the same percentage of users withdraw assets from smaller exchanges, the total outflow would be much less.
There are also cases where USDT and USDC balances increase. The decline in BUSD and BNB holdings may be a result of users exchanging the exchange’s own tokens for larger, less volatile stablecoins.
