Topic: Where do exchanges store the coins? Private per customer or combined? (Read 156 times)

I think it depends on exchange policy. Also, there is no guarantee that this specific address is yours and yours alone .
An exchange may decide just to use an old address to you, which belonged to some other account before , or even some other transaction from cold -hot storage.

You can trace your BTC if you send it to the wallet you have in the exchange and then look it up to the explorer, if your coin is there inside your wallet then its not more to their cold wallet. Centralize exchange often send it to their cold wallet and this is for the security since we don't own the wallet itself that is why we don't have the privatekey when our BTC is in the exchange. I have been in Kraken for a long time as well and I know its on their cold wallet.

I'd fully expect the exchange to sweep that to a central wallet at some point, but it could well be that they are simply waiting until they have the maximum number of inputs which will fit in a single transaction to maximize their savings on fees, or even waiting until the mempool is empty and fees will be low. It's highly unlikely they are going to pay someone else's withdrawal from an input so small, especially considering that's probably approaching the minimum withdrawal limit for many exchanges, and the change would need consolidated anyway.

For reasons of not mixing up different customers' deposits as well as privacy they shouldn't, but that's not to say some exchanges don't do it.

@bitmover @o_e_l_e_o What you both are saying are very much true I guess. There might be different policies for various exchanges, but for majority of the time I have seen small bitcoin/crypto holdings don't move up to the cold wallet. Well I might even be wrong with this, but last week I deposited a minor amount of 0.005BTC for exchanging them with USDT in one of the popular exchanges and further sold them in the process. I have the holdings now in USDT, but after exploring the balance of the deposit address in an explorer the BTC didn't move out of the address but the balance of my account should have been changed in the exchange database!

A exchange can have one single wallet but multiple different addresses assigned to various exchange users. So probably there should be a threshold of the btc amount which gets moved out of the hot wallet.

P.S I am little confused on the deposit address allocation by the exchanges to users. Does 2 different users at 2 different time frames (3-4 months interval) gets allocated the same deposit address? I firmly believed this was the true and a made a post regarding the same, but many forum members disagreed with me! But after recently checking my exchange deposit address, I was allocated a deposit address which was used for a 1+ BTC transaction 3 months back.

I am not enterily sure about this
Maybe if the transaction is considered small value according to their internal policy, your funds may remain in that same address you transferred for a long time.