Binance releases zk-SNARK proof of reserves after $6.3B hack
Four days after attackers drained roughly $6.3 billion from its hot wallets, Binance has published a zk-SNARK proof for its October 31 Proof of Reserves snapshot, so users can verify the 00:00 UTC data on their own. The proof arrived a day ahead of the November 3 target the exchange had set.
The setup has two parts. A Merkle tree lets each user check that their own account balance is included in the snapshot, while the zk-SNARK proves reserves are at least 1:1 backed without revealing any individual balance.
BTC, ETH, USDT, BNB, SOL, USDC, XRP, USD1, RLUSD and ZEC are all backed at 100% or more, with BTC at 100.04% and BNB at 101.30%.
Binance set aside more than $6.34 billion of company funds to replenish the hacked assets and began resuming withdrawals in phases on November 1. A detailed technical post-mortem of the breach, which the exchange tied to a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop, is still pending.