on-chain
Binance's SAFU fund now holds 15,000 BTC at $1.27B, ~$270M in the money
Binance's insurance reserve, converted from stablecoins in February, sits at roughly $1.27B against a $1B cost basis. The wallet is public and verifiable on-chain.
Binance's Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU), the exchange's user-protection reserve, holds 15,000 BTC worth roughly $1.27 billion at current prices, sitting on about $270 million in unrealised gains against the conversion cost basis. The fund address is public — 1BAuq7Vho2CEkVkUxbfU26LhwQjbCmWQkD — and the position is checkable in seconds against the Bitcoin ledger.
What happened
Binance completed the full stablecoin-to-BTC conversion of its SAFU reserve on February 12, 2026, with a final 4,545 BTC tranche settled onchain. The exchange published the final purchase hash — 5a600ed820d66d696b606aeadadb4b36b7c447d812f9edac8592d6aeac20d321 — alongside the fund's wallet address at the time, per The Block's coverage of the announcement. The total conversion put roughly $1 billion of SAFU stablecoin reserves into BTC at an effective entry near $67,000, as Crypto Briefing reported this week.
SAFU was created in July 2018 as an emergency insurance pool funded by a share of exchange trading fees. Until the February conversion, it was held in stablecoins. The move shifted the fund's denomination to BTC and left its mark-to-stablecoin value exposed to spot moves — which have run in its favour since.
The numbers
- Position: 15,000 BTC
- Cost basis: ~$1.0B (roughly $67,000 avg entry, conversion closed Feb 12 2026)
- Current USD value: ~$1.27B
- Unrealised gain: ~$270M (~27%)
- Wallet:
1BAuq7Vho2CEkVkUxbfU26LhwQjbCmWQkD - Final purchase tx:
5a600ed820d66d696b606aeadadb4b36b7c447d812f9edac8592d6aeac20d321
Why it matters
A publicly addressed reserve is auditable without a Binance disclosure. Any user, auditor, or regulator can watch the balance in real time, which raises the bar on both sides of the proof-of-reserves conversation: the fund's size is no longer a figure the exchange chooses to publish, and any outflow would be visible immediately. It also means SAFU's capacity to make users whole after an incident now co-moves with BTC rather than being pinned at face value — a design choice readers should factor into any exchange-risk assessment.
What to watch
- Movement from
1BAuq7Vho2CEkVkUxbfU26LhwQjbCmWQkD— any outbound tx is a direct signal, whether rebalancing, incident draw, or governance. - Whether other large exchanges publish fund addresses on the same footing. OKX has published cold-wallet attestations; a BTC-denominated, single-address SAFU-style reserve is a stricter commitment.
- Any accompanying attestation of the stablecoin side of SAFU — the fund was announced as a $1B conversion, not a wind-down, which implies additional reserves on the stable leg; those remain off a public address.
Context
The disclosure sits in a longer arc of exchange transparency following the FTX collapse in 2022: Merkle-tree proof-of-reserves (Binance, OKX, Kraken), independent audits of hot-and-cold wallet balances, and now named-address insurance funds. The pattern is a trade: operational privacy for depositor trust. SAFU's $270M unrealised gain is incidental to that trade — the significant fact is the address itself.