The collapse of FTX increasing interest of transparency.

Newsnomics AJAY ANGELINA reporter | On Nov 11, the collapse of FTX, one of the world’s largest crypto

exchanges is expected to put the spotlight on centralized exchanges, with investors seeking more information from these exchanges about their reserves and liabilities.

Giottus, a lesser-known Indian cryptocurrency exchange but still among the top 10 in the country says it will

provide customers with proof of reserves.

“We are working on it. As a matter of fact, it's high time, we all did,” Vikram Subburaj, Giottus' co-founder and CEO, said. “We should have something within the next three months. This is also an ideal point for regulators

to start looking at providing proof of reserves from exchanges as part of their filings.”

Co-founder and CEO Summit Gupta of CoinDCX one of India’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges wrote in his blog post “we are planning to periodically publish its reserves-to-liability (R2L) ratio. “In our opinion, the much advocated ‘proof of reserves’ only showcases one side. There’s no visibility of liabilities. Proof of reserves

without proof of liabilities is only half the picture.” He spoke

However, the ‘Merkle tree proof’ is a cryptographic data structure that maintains privacy but allows users to

verify the stability of their holdings on exchanges, thereby creating trust. It has become central to the crypto

eco system’s conversation in the wake of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao’s tweet to provide “proof of

reserves” after his exchange agreed to acquire the beleaguered FTX but reversed course after looking at FTX's books.

Shortly after Zhao's tweet, nine exchanges – Binance, Gate.io, KuCoin, Poloniex, Bitget, Huobi, OKX, Deribit and Bybit– separately issued statements that they will publish their Merkle tree reserve certificates to increase

transparency.

Binance released a list of its cold wallet and reserves amounting to around $69 billion, based on current

market prices, on Thursday. The company also said it will share its Merkle tree proof of funds in the coming

weeks. Whereas India's most prominent crypto trading platforms either declined to comment or didn't respond to requests for comments when asked if they would publicly publish their fund reserves or do a "Merkle

tree" proof of reserves.

The most prominent of them are CoinSwitch Kuber, WazirX, ZebPay, BitBNS and BuyUCoin mentioned by

CoinDesk. The Bharat Web3 Association, the Indian industry’s newly formed advocacy body, declined to

comment.