- Deribit is taking down the public proof-of-reserves page it launched voluntarily in 2022, ending a check any customer could run daily.
- The exchange says roughly 90% of client assets have moved into Coinbase custody since Coinbase completed its acquisition in August 2025.
- Independent proof-of-reserves audits continue twice a year, according to the company. Twice a year is not daily, and a customer cannot run one.
Customers of Deribit have been able to do something most exchange customers cannot: confirm, every single day, that their own balance appeared in the list of what the exchange says it owes. From 1 September that page comes down, and the announcement explaining why is the exchange’s own.
Nothing here says money has gone missing. What it says is that one of the few ways to check a company’s word about your money, without simply taking its word for it, is being withdrawn. That is happening at the same time as most of those assets, by the company’s own account, moved into somebody else’s hands.
Whether that bothers you depends on how much weight you put on being able to verify something yourself, rather than being told that somebody else verified it twice last year.
What the page actually did
Proof of reserves sounds technical and mostly isn’t. Once a day, Deribit took a snapshot of every client balance, ran each one through a hashing process so nobody could read anybody else’s numbers, and stacked the results into a structure called a Merkle tree. That produces one short fingerprint at the top that depends on every entry underneath it.
Each client got a unique identifier they could use to find their own hashed entry in the published file. If it was there, their balance had been counted in the total. Separately, anyone at all, customer or not, could add up the liabilities in that file and compare the sum against the wallet balances Deribit published .
So the check answered two narrow questions. Was my money included in what they say they owe, and do the coins they claim to hold roughly cover it.
What it never proved
Plenty. A snapshot shows a moment, and coins can be borrowed for a morning and returned in the afternoon. The liabilities side is whatever the exchange chose to put in the file, so debts sitting off that list, loans, obligations to affiliated companies, anything owed elsewhere, never appeared. Proof of reserves has never been a solvency test, and the better implementations, including this one, have always said so.
It was still worth having, because the alternative is a monthly assurance that everything is fine.
Why exchanges started publishing this at all
Almost every proof-of-reserves page in crypto dates from the same few weeks. FTX collapsed in November 2022 with customer money that had been lent to an affiliated trading firm, and the industry’s answer was a wave of voluntary transparency pages. Deribit’s arrived in 2022 alongside the rest.
Voluntary is the word that matters. No regulator required these pages, which is why taking one down is entirely legal and still tells you something. A firm that publishes a daily check is choosing to be checkable. A firm that stops has made a different choice, whatever the reason behind it.
What the announcement shows, and what it doesn’t
Deribit’s blog post states it plainly: “From 1 September 2026, Deribit will discontinue its Proof of Reserves page.” On the reason, it says: “This decision reflects changes to our wallet infrastructure as part of our ongoing integration with Coinbase.” The post also says “approximately 90% of client assets have been migrated to Coinbase, which acts as a custodian for Deribit”.
Worth being clear that all three of those are the company describing itself. Deribit also says client assets stay fully segregated at a 1:1 reserve ratio and that independent audits will continue twice a year. Those are assertions of controls existing, not evidence of them working, and the post as reported does not name the auditor or set out the scope of those audits. CryptoSlate, covering the same announcement, notes the disclosures identify Coinbase at brand level without saying which Coinbase legal entity holds the migrated assets, which is the detail that determines what custody and regulatory protections actually apply. We reviewed the primary post via a search snippet rather than the full page, and the date carries a discrepancy worth flagging: Deribit’s own wording says 1 September 2026, while CryptoSlate’s write-up says Sept. 1 with no year.
Our reading, offered as inference rather than fact: running a bespoke daily snapshot is awkward when the coins now sit inside a large custodian’s wallet structure that you do not control. That would make the page a casualty of the migration rather than a statement about transparency. It is still a reduction in what an outsider can independently verify, and framing it as an infrastructure consequence does not change that.
Where that leaves a UK reader
Fairly exposed, though probably not for the reason you’d expect. UK retail customers are not supposed to be trading crypto derivatives in the first place: the FCA banned their sale to retail consumers from January 2021, so there is no domestic compensation scheme sitting behind a position on a venue like this, with or without a reserves page.
The custody move is also easy to misread. Coinbase holding the coins changes who physically controls them. It does not change who owes them to you. Your claim is against Deribit, and if that claim ever needs testing, it gets tested under Deribit’s terms and whichever jurisdiction its custody arrangements sit in. If you want to know what taking the other route involves, our guide to self-custody covers what you gain and what you take on. Coinbase’s own retail service is a separate business, and we cover it in our Coinbase review.
What to watch
Whether the twice-yearly audits are published in full, with the auditor named and the scope spelled out. An attestation nobody can read is a press line. Also watch whether Deribit or Coinbase names the specific custodial entity holding the migrated assets, because that single detail decides which rules apply to the 90%.
And watch whether other venues follow. Post-FTX transparency pages were voluntary, and voluntary things tend to disappear quietly once one large name has shown it can be done without much fuss.