The Monerun - After Action Report

First of all, I'd like to thank r/cc for being so supportive, and especially to those who participated. Our suspicions are confirmed - most exchanges are fractionally reserved on XMR.

The lead up to Apr 18th and the weeks that followed, we saw the the state of XMR withdraws vacillate between: officially open; officially suspended; allegedly open but with failures of withdraw attempts; and withdraw delays with user funds stuck in limbo.

The worst offenders were Poloniex, Waves, Huobi, and OKEx.
- Polo is refusing to pay one poor soul 2110 XMR (nearly half a million dollars)
- Waves is refusing to pay customers trying to withdraw for many weeks now
- Huobi froze withdraws for the entire run, briefly opened, and is down again now. - OKEx spent most of last year suspended. Intermittent suspensions since the run.

Kucoin and Bitfinex appear to have avoided any real problems. And as usual, Kraken seems to just shrug these things off, as they appear to be consistently among the most trustworthy exchanges regarding their reserves of all coins, not just Monero.

Finally, Binance. They maintained a tenuous state of on-again/off-again withdraws over the course of those few weeks, with things appearing to have stabilized for now. On the one hand, you might think "Well good, they mostly met their obligations, eventually." The problem is that they allege to have an orderbook in the range of 50k to 70k XMR deep. Yet they can barely keep withdraws flowing when a few of us get together to live-test their reserves? And when CZ did an AMA just a few days ago, he totally ignored a highly upvoted question regarding fractional reserve and the Monerun.

If I had to guess, it appears that Binance has sold tens of thousands of XMR claims to unsuspecting customers victims, but without ever purchasing those coins on the open market. That would represent a fairly significant market distortion.

The good news is that the Monerun did in fact confirm what we've long suspected. And even though the aforementioned offenders might be able to maintain their current fractional reserve ratios, the liquidity we pulled from their coffers should prevent them from pushing these distortions any further. It appears this is already having effects on the relative strength of Monero in the market, having gone from about #50 at the start of the year, to about #25 now.

Again, thanks to everyone who participated. Reminder to use XMR transationally when you're able, since that's what it was designed to do best!