Proof of Reserves

Reserves are deposits that financial institutions hold on hand. While banks hold only a fraction of their deposits in reserve, River holds a full reserve of all the Bitcoin in our custody. This means that River could service every client withdrawing all of their Bitcoin at the same time.

Proof of Reserves is a way for clients to verify that a company has all of the assets that clients own on their platform, making sure they can pay everyone who has trusted them with their money.

Proof of Reserves helps ensure that an institution maintains a full reserve, and can cover all of its clients' withdrawals. When you buy Bitcoin on River, you can trust that when you want to withdraw it, you will be able to do so.

For River to maintain full reserve status, River must have at least as much Bitcoin as it has in outstanding client balances. Thus, Proof of Reserves consists of two parts: Proof of Assets and Proof of Liabilities. Assets are the Bitcoin that River controls onchain. Liabilities are the cumulative Bitcoin owned by River clients.

Clients verify River's assets by viewing River's cold storage address onchain using a 3rd-party block explorer such as mempool.space. This will display how much Bitcoin River holds in cold storage. To prove that the Bitcoin in cold storage is controlled by River, we broadcast a transaction spending a small amount of the Bitcoin in this address to accompany each Proof of Reserves.

River also publishes a Proof of Liabilities. This comes in the form of an anonymized list of all River client liabilities. Clients verify that their balances are included in River's list of all client liabilities. They also verify that the sum of this list of liabilities is less than River's assets.

River proves wallet ownership by sending a transaction with a predetermined amount on the Bitcoin network.

The amount of the transaction is determined by taking the smallest seven digits from the largest output of the coinbase transaction (the first transaction) from the block selected for the monthly Proof of Reserves report.

You can verify your balance by accessing a proof, where you can use your account ID to confirm that your balance is included and backed by our reserves.

Your balance might not match the proof of balance due to the timing difference between when the proof was generated and your most recent transactions. The proof reflects your balance at a specific moment, so recent activity may not be included.