Bybit Crypto Exchange CEO Ben Zhou has strongly denied rumors about the exchange’s alleged insolvency circulating on social media.
This week, obscure social media accounts started spreading it rumorswith one user suggestive that a bug in an Arkham Intelligence proof-of-reserves chart could have led to the speculation.
Zhou immediately dismissed these claims, stating that they were baseless. He said:
“None of the rumors I have seen so far have any real facts to back this up, please be aware.”
The CEO reinforced his point by sharing the exchange’s Proof of Reserves, which showed Bybit’s assets in various wallets.
Stock Exchange Certificate of Reserves website confirms that all assets are fully collateralized, with reserves exceeding 100%. Specifically, the reserve ratios for Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT, and USDC are 116%, 106%, 107%, and 129%, respectively.
Furthermore, Nansen’s facts shows that Bybit owns more than $11.3 billion in assets. However, the dashboard included a disclaimer noting that it was not intended as a comprehensive overview of Bybit’s actual reserves.
0xngmi, the pseudonymous co-founder of DeFillama, does too downplayed community concerns, noting that outflows from the platform as of May 22 were small compared to the asset balance.
Nevertheless, DeFillama’s CEX transparency dashboard showed that Bybit users had withdrawn $115 million in digital assets from the platform as of May 23. This was the second highest number of withdrawals during the reporting period among the centralized trading platforms monitored by the crypto analytics platform.
Meanwhile, some community concerns are not surprising as Bybit faces a regulatory challenge in France. French authorities have warned crypto investors that Bybit is not registered as a digital asset provider in the country, adding that access to the platform’s website may be blocked.
Additionally, the crypto community’s distrust of centralized exchanges has increased following the high-profile collapse of FTX in 2022. FTX, once one of the largest crypto platforms, went bankrupt after its leadership team was found to have misused customer funds. Its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was criminally convicted in November 2023 and sentenced to 24 years in prison in March.