Foreign media accuses: HTX Huobi exchange misappropriated reserve assets, actual USDT reserves are only 12%.

Foreign media Protos found a batch of addresses belonging to HTX and the balance of various assets held by each address from a toolkit owned by huobiapi on GitHub. Protos accused that HTX not only has an ambiguous relationship with Sun Yuchen, but also has issues with the misappropriation of reserve assets. The reserve assets, which should have been properly safeguarded to ensure user peace of mind, were instead used for on-chain lending, with 1.78 billion USD worth of USDT, in reality, only 12% of the reserves were safe. Additionally, various assets were used to provide liquidity for Sun Yuchen's JustLend.

Protos questions the reserve of wrapped tokens on the Tron blockchain.

Protos stated that the amount of WBTC in TRC-20 does not exceed 100, but sometimes it is marked that the WBTC reserves have 18,000, raising concerns about reserve fraud. This WBTC comes from another exchange under Justin Sun, Poloniex, but Poloniex has never explained where the Bitcoin backing the wrapped tokens is stored. Protos previously inquired with Poloniex about how the Bitcoin corresponding to the tokenized products is stored and requested more information, but Poloniex refused to provide it.

The author adds: Upon verification, the TDToU…2ivA4 Address provided by HTX holds 10,290 BTC and 89 WBTC, but there is still a discrepancy with the claimed 10,825 Bitcoin.

Only 8% of the reserves are native Ether, most of which has been diverted for lending.

Protos pointed out that HTX holds very few native Ether (ETH). For several months, most of the ETH held by HTX was borrowed out to Aave. In other months, it was mostly kept in the form of staked ETH. In the reserve proof snapshot from December 2025, out of 118,675 Ether, only 10,421 were native ETH. HTX had a peak holding of 392,273 Ether in May 2025, but has decreased by 70% over the past six months.

Bloomberg: Sun Yuchen holds the vast majority of TRX

The balance of TRX on the exchange is more stable compared to ETH, but it has still decreased by 28.5% since the peak in May 2025. According to Bloomberg, Sun Yuchen owns the vast majority of TRX tokens, which indicates that if Sun Yuchen were to encounter a crisis, TRX could face liquidity issues.

Protos: HTX's USDT reserves are only 12% not misappropriated.

Regarding stablecoins, Protos pointed out that the USDT in HTX's asset reserves has mostly been used for lending. By December 2025, HTX's reserves held approximately $1.78 billion in USDT, of which about $1.44 billion was lent to Aave, and another approximately $96 million was lent to JustLend. Additionally, about $18 million was placed in Justin Sun's stUSDT; this product originally aimed to generate yields on RWA, but later also began lending through Aave. In fact, only 12% of the USDT has not been utilized.

This article reports that foreign media accuse HTX Huobi exchange of misappropriating reserve assets, with the true reserves of USDT being only 12%, first appearing in on-chain news ABMedia.