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Every Bitcoin exchange should have Public Financials and Proof of Reserves.
We’re publishing @River’s 2025 financials to further our mission of building the world’s most trusted financial institution. We will continue to publish our financials annually.
We just published the November 2026 @River Proof of Reserves. Don't trust, verify.
At River a culture of security and paranoia has been in our DNA since day 1. Often that meant doing things the hard way instead of moving fast.
For example, we have always operated our own custody system. This meant doing the work to be a regulated financial institution in our infancy instead of delegating the backend to companies like Prime Trust.
We have always worked to minimize reliance on third parties where possible, and as our ability to build software systems accelerates we continue to delete both software and corporate dependencies.
We budget a substantial % of our engineering resources every year to tackle tech debt and invest in security hardening. This means moving slower, but having confidence in our foundation and doing right by our clients.
I personally give the company security training to every new employee who joins River and we constantly drive a culture of vigilance at the company. We tell every employee at River that their job is to be a security professional.
Security isn't a team or a "thing" you do. It's a culture of extreme paranoia and humility - never feeling like you're secure enough and always trying to do better.
Any asset on chain that has a peg to the real world: stablecoins, real world assets, tokenized securities, etc. are a systemic risk to DeFi because a large asset freeze can blow up an entire protocol.
If you keep your Bitcoin on an exchange there are two doors that need to be guarded to keep your funds safe: your account login and the exchange custody system.
Multi-factor authentication, device verification, withdrawal restrictions like ForceField, etc. are great features to prevent an attacker from compromising your account.
However, none of these protections help you if the custody system backing the exchange is compromised, which is what just happened at Binance.
Here is how River manages securing your coins internally:
Hot wallet:
Coins in a hot wallet are the most at risk. These coins are on systems connected to the public internet to process demand withdrawals for clients. The strategy is to keep enough coins in here to allow everyone to withdraw on-demand, but never too much that a hack could be financially devastating. River maintains a very low hot wallet balance, and on top of this we have strict internal manual approval policies if withdrawals exceed certain rate limits. Even if an attacker got through every single line of network defense and completely compromised our systems, they wouldn't be able to walk away with much BTC before being shut out.
In order to ensure we always have sufficient coins hot, we have a staging "warm" wallet that is not accessible to process demand withdrawals, but can send funds to top up the hot wallet with sufficient internal approvals.
However, the ultimate layer of defense is cold storage:
Cold storage is a custody system where the signing keys are held offline, such that a full compromise of all computer systems could still not lead to a theft of funds.
At River, we prove every month that we have more coins cold than we have in client BTC liabilities. You can verify this yourself at river.com/reserves. Our multi-sig cold storage system is designed for Bitcoin and Bitcoin alone. We are not exposed to any of the smart contract complexity that was exploited in the Binance hack. We will be sharing more in depth about our cold storage in the coming months.
Some exchanges outsource custody, which effectively removes their ability to make any direct claim to you about the integrity and security of their systems. Choose your exchanges carefully. Ask yourself: “are the people running my exchange the most qualified to build a highly secure custody system?”
Alexander Leishman 🇺🇸 retweeted
In light of the recent security events on other exchanges, we want to reassure clients that River is unaffected and all bitcoin remains secure.
All client bitcoin is held in multisig cold storage, never lent out, and accounted for through our monthly Proof of Reserves. Our hot wallet maintains a minimal balance, has strict internal controls, and no individual at River has unilateral access.
Every client deserves to know how their bitcoin is protected. Safeguarding your savings and maintaining transparency are our top priorities.
If you have any questions about our security practices, our team is always here to help.
Do not hesitate to reach out.
If withdrawals are suspended on Binance, the sell pressure we’re seeing could potentially be coming from Binance users dumping their coins to get their funds out via fiat rails.
It looks like a number of offshore exchanges are being targeted in this attack. @River is safe and will do what we can to support the industry.
Today we launched a new @River web app, rebuilt from the ground up.
Beyond a sleeker, easier experience, it includes a major technical overhaul:
- Faster, smoother flows across the product
- A new frontend component system that speeds up development
- A more performant, observable, and ergonomic shared API for web and mobile
- Backend upgrades for reliability, speed, and security.
Building the world’s most trusted financial institution means investing in the systems underneath.
Try it out yourself at river.com on web or mobile. We'd love your feedback!
Alexander Leishman 🇺🇸 retweeted
Bitcoin is the only major asset class primarily held by individuals.
Bonds, stocks, and gold have existed for centuries. So naturally they are more institutionalized.
As bitcoin matures, we expect ownership to shift towards institutions. Its ownership distribution will look more similar to gold.
This is not necessarily a good or bad thing. It is simply the inevitable consequence of global adoption.
