🌱 Wealth can be transparent in the accounts, but should it be exposed in reality? Binance's 'dominance' and Coinbase's 'absence' reflect another cultural contrast in the crypto industry: on-chain transparency vs compliance transparency, which one is the future language of trust?
Binance's 'dominance'
The most striking conclusion from the list is that Binance has total assets of 158.4 billion USD, far ahead of other exchanges.
Image: Comparison of total assets of major exchanges (Source: CoinMarketCap, statistics cover exchanges with total assets ≥ 1 billion USD)
Following closely are Bitfinex (26.7 billion), OKX (21.2 billion), and Bybit (13.6 billion), with a very obvious gap. The top ten also includes Gemini, Gate, Bitget, HTX, KuCoin, Deribit, and others.
This gap is not only a difference in scale but also a difference in industry discourse power. Whoever controls the funding entrance can influence the industry's pace.
Binance's advantage comes from its large global user base and its proactive disclosure of Proof-of-Reserve. By publicly displaying assets through on-chain addresses, Binance essentially puts its 'home base' in the sunlight, exchanging transparency for market trust.
🪶 In the crypto world, scale is power, and transparency is leverage.
｜Coinbase's 'absence'
However, a heavyweight player is missing from the list: Coinbase. This is not due to insufficient scale. As the largest compliant exchange in the United States, it has disclosed custody assets exceeding 1.9 trillion USD in its financial reports.
But its funds are more in Custody business and institutional client accounts, which do not directly reflect in the exchange's hot/cold wallets, hence Coinbase's absence in CoinMarketCap's on-chain statistics.
This illustrates the difference in transparency methods:
Binance represents on-chain transparency: immediate, verifiable, but mainly covers publicly disclosed on-chain addresses of exchanges.
Coinbase represents compliance transparency: disclosures through SEC reports and financial audits, more authoritative, but data is often delayed.
One relies on on-chain 'showing assets', while the other relies on regulatory 'writing financial reports'. These two transparency methods reflect two different logics in the industry.
🪶 There is more than one type of transparency; on-chain transparency is technology, while compliance transparency is a system.
