OKX Proof of Reserves: What a 103% Ratio Actually Shows
Proof of reserves is one of the few claims in this industry that can be checked twice: by the auditor and, in principle, by the customer. The parts worth checking are the date, the per-asset lines and the custody split. OKX publishes all three, and reading them together produces a more useful picture than the headline percentage.
Cover artwork: CoinSoso · AI-generated, not a photograph of a real venue, product or market capture.
Key takeaways
- OKX's marketing page states a 103% reserve ratio with 46 monthly audits; its proof-of-reserves page states a 48th report holding $29.4B in primary assets. The two pages disagree.
- The per-asset table is the real claim: on the 48th report, BTC is shown at 110%, USDT and SOL at 105%, and ETH and OKB at 100%.
- Those 100% figures are rounded up from about 100.2%, which is a surplus of a fifth of one percent rather than of nothing.
- Each asset's wallet total is the sum of exchange-held coins and coins at third-party custodians, and OKX's own disclaimer points readers to those custodians for verification.
- The proof is a snapshot with three stated constraints; OKX itself says tokens outside the scope and transactions after the capture are not included.
Two pages, two sets of numbers
OKX maintains a page about trust and a page about proof of reserves. Read on the same day, 2026-10-18, they do not agree.
| Where | What it says |
|---|---|
/trusted-exchange |
103% reserves ratio · 46 monthly audits · $25.7B in primary assets · data described as of August 2026 |
/proof-of-reserves |
48th Proof of Reserves · $29.4B in primary assets · Oct 2026 |
That is not a scandal, and it is not evidence of anything being hidden. It is the ordinary lag of a marketing page behind a reporting page, and it is the first practical lesson in reading this material: the dated report is the document, and the summary page is a summary. A reader who quotes 103% is quoting last month’s aggregate; a reader who opens the 48th report is reading the most recent one.
What follows works from the per-asset table on the report page, because that table is where a reserve claim becomes falsifiable.
The per-asset table, as published
The 48th report lists eight assets. Each line gives the asset, a displayed ratio, and then four quantities: the account assets (liabilities), the wallet assets (the backing), and the same wallet total split between exchange-held coins and third-party custody.
| Asset | Displayed | Account assets | Wallet assets | of which exchange | of which third-party |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BTC | 110% | 142,809 | 156,475 | 150,263 | 6,212 |
| ETH | 100% | 1,862,025 | 1,866,714 | 1,790,279 | 76,435 |
| USDT | 105% | 8,742,310,509 | 9,213,216,367 | 9,072,760,887 | 140,455,480 |
| USDC | 101% | 1,848,845,671 | 1,875,436,302 | 1,704,487,774 | 170,948,528 |
| XRP | 107% | 251,556,622 | 268,788,285 | 258,800,899 | 9,987,386 |
| DOGE | 101% | 6,110,782,272 | 6,178,850,307 | 6,107,390,357 | 71,459,950 |
| SOL | 105% | 7,502,130 | 7,870,424 | 7,786,511 | 83,913 |
| OKB | 100% | 19,692,972 | 19,731,888 | 19,718,988 | 12,900 |
Three things about this table are more informative than the headline.
The split adds up exactly. For every asset, exchange plus third-party custody equals the wallet total: 150,263 + 6,212 = 156,475 for BTC, and 1,790,279 + 76,435 = 1,866,714 for ETH. The arithmetic is internally consistent, which is what an audited table should be, and it also means the backing figure is not all held in wallets OKX operates.
Two of the eight ratios are rounded up from just above par. Dividing the published wallet figure by the published account figure gives 100.25% for ETH and 100.20% for OKB. Both are displayed as 100%. Bitcoin’s 109.57% is displayed as 110%, which is rounding in the other direction. The displayed percentages are therefore labels rounded to the nearest whole number, not exact values, and the exact values are available to anyone willing to divide.
The tighter the ratio, the more the split matters. ETH’s cushion is 4,689 coins, of which 76,435 are held at third-party custodians. In other words the third-party component of ETH backing is about sixteen times the size of the surplus. That is not a problem — the custody balances are part of the backing by construction — but it does mean the surplus is not a separate pile of coins sitting somewhere; it is a net position across two kinds of holding, and OKX’s disclaimer sends readers to the custodians themselves for verification of the second.
What the cryptography proves
OKX describes the construction in more detail than most venues publish. Three points are worth taking from its own description.
The tree is not a plain Merkle tree any more. OKX documents a Merkle tree upgrade in March 2023 followed by a zk-STARK upgrade in the same month, and says the proof does not disclose specific amounts, values or addresses. A zero-knowledge proof can establish a statement about the balances without revealing the balances, which changes what a customer can verify but not what the statement is about.
There are three stated constraints. OKX lists them: a sum rule, that the total of every account’s balance equals the claim; a non-negative rule, that each account’s balance is above zero and accounted for; and an inclusion rule, that every account’s balance is included in the computation. These are the properties a proof of reserves is supposed to establish, and stating them explicitly is what lets a reader see the shape of the claim.
The report is a snapshot, and OKX says so. Its own note reads that the report “is a snapshot of our OKX account asset balances at the time of the data capture”, and that “any tokens outside of the scope or subsequent transactions made after the snapshot are not included”. That is the correct caveat, published by the issuer rather than discovered by a critic.
The gap that remains is the one no Merkle construction closes on its own: the liability set is compiled by the exchange, and the proof demonstrates that the compiled set is fully backed. Whether the set is complete is a different question, and the honest answer is that an outside observer cannot answer it from the proof.
The licence is the other half of the argument
A reserve report answers “are the disclosed assets there”. It does not answer “who is answerable”. OKX answers the second question on a different page and in a different vocabulary: the trust page describes OKX Europe Limited as licensed and regulated by the MFSA as a financial institution under the Financial Institutions Act, Chapter 376, and lists the crypto-asset services that entity is authorised to provide.
Those are two different kinds of evidence and they fail in different ways. A reserve report can be complete and the venue can still be in a jurisdiction where the customer has no practical route to their assets. A licence can be genuine and the balance sheet behind it can be under-backed. Reading one without the other is how a reader ends up confident about the wrong thing. The method for checking a licence — which entity, which register, which permissions — is set out in how to check an exchange’s regulatory claims.
A reading order that works
- Open the report page, not the summary page. Find the ordinal and the date. On 2026-10-18 that was the 48th report and Oct 2026.
- Divide the per-asset figures yourself. The displayed percentage is rounded; the quantities are not.
- Read the custody split. It changes how much of the backing is under the venue’s own control.
- Find the stated constraints. A report that names what it proves is easier to evaluate than one that only asserts a percentage.
- Read the snapshot caveat. The issuer’s own wording about scope is the most reliable statement about scope.
- Then check the licence, separately.
- Come back next month. The value of 48 reports is that the series exists; a single month is not the evidence.
For the difference between a reserve attestation and a full audit as those words are used around stablecoins, see what a reserve attestation does and does not prove. For the trading side of the same platform, the OKX fee guide and the funding-rate guide work through the numbers that move on OKX markets, and the OKX profile collects the venue-level facts.
Risk note. Every OKX figure in this article was read from OKX’s own pages on 2026-10-18, and the percentage calculations are divisions of the quantities OKX published, shown here so that they can be repeated. Reports are superseded monthly and marketing pages lag behind them; the current report, not this article, is the source. A proof of reserves addresses one kind of uncertainty and leaves market risk, counterparty risk and the risk of an incomplete liability set untouched. Nothing here is investment advice or a recommendation to hold assets on any platform.
Sources
How this was researched. Written from primary documentation and the exchange or protocol's own published material, with sources listed at the end of the article.
Primary sources for the factual claims on this page. A date appears only where a human has actually read the source; where it is missing, the check is still outstanding.
- OKX — Proof of Reserves (48th report, per-asset table, zk-STARK method)(read 2026-10-18)
- OKX — Trusted Globally (103% reserve ratio, 46 monthly audits)(read 2026-10-18)
Frequently asked questions
Does a 103% ratio mean I would get 103% of my balance back?
No. The ratio compares total assets with total customer liabilities at a point in time. It is an aggregate, so a surplus in one asset offsets a shortfall in another, and it says nothing about the order in which claims would be met if the venue failed. It is evidence that the disclosed backing covered the disclosed liabilities on the reporting date, not a promise of a payout ratio.
Why do two OKX pages give different numbers?
They were published at different times. The /trusted-exchange page read on 2026-10-18 states a 103% reserve ratio, 46 monthly audits and $25.7B in primary assets. The /proof-of-reserves page read on the same day announces a 48th report with $29.4B in primary assets. The report page is the more specific document; the marketing page appears not to have been updated to match it.
Who performs the OKX audits?
The /trusted-exchange page names Hacken and SlowMist and states 46 consecutive monthly audits. The proof-of-reserves page describes the construction — snapshots, an encrypted Merkle tree, zk-STARK proofs and three constraints it says the account balances must satisfy — and states that the system is open source. What each firm's engagement covered is not stated on either page; the underlying reports are where that would appear.
Is part of OKX's backing held somewhere else?
Yes, and the report shows it line by line. Every asset total is split into an exchange component and a third-party custody component, and the two add to the wallet figure used in the ratio. For ETH on the 48th report, 1,790,279 of 1,866,714 coins were exchange-held and 76,435 were at third-party custodians. OKX's disclaimer tells readers they may contact those custodians to verify the balances.
What would make a proof of reserves stronger?
Three things: independent confirmation of the liability set rather than only of its internal consistency; attestation across a period rather than a single capture; and a published statement of what the auditor's engagement covered. A monthly habit over 48 reports is genuinely harder to fake than one snapshot, but it does not answer those three on its own.
Where to go next
Independent research. Each card shows the platform’s invite code, and its Create Account button is a referral link that may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. Whether an account can be opened is decided by the platform at sign-up.
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