Binance announced its auditor Mazars has suspended its services, including proof-of-reserves for other cryptocurrency exchanges.
According to the company’s official website, Mazars Veritas, a division devoted to auditing cryptocurrency exchanges, has been completely stopped. The tool was created by Mazars utilizing the Silver Sixpence Merkle Tree Generating tool to supplement proof-of-reserve reports in order to “bring trust and transparency to the digital asset market.”
Additionally, the audit firm ceased performing audits of proof-of-reserve for bitcoin companies, according to Bloomberg on December 16. Other auditing companies have apparently quit working with cryptocurrency exchanges including OKX and Gate.io, including FTX’s auditor Armanino.
The accounting firm of former US President Donald Trump’s business is known as Mazars. In late November, the auditing company was chosen to serve as the official auditor for Binance’s proof-of-reserve upgrades.
KuCoin and Crypto.com, two competing cryptocurrency exchanges, have followed Binance’s example and partnered with Mazars as part of their reserve reports. A spokesperson for Binance stated:
“Mazars has indicated that they will temporarily pause their work with all of their crypto clients globally, which include Crypto.com, KuCoin and Binance,”
“Unfortunately, this means that we will not be able to work with Mazars for the moment,” the representative added. Binance has also reached out to multiple large auditing firms, including Big Four auditors, which are “currently unwilling to conduct a PoR for a private crypto company,” the representative noted.
“We will still go forward with our plans to deliver to our users Merkle Tree PoR to demonstrate that customer assets exist on on-chain addresses that are under the control of Binance,” the firm said.
Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao was quick to react to the news on Twitter with a retweet from a random commenter. “Making a statement on why an auditing company decided to quit working with crypto? Ask them lol,” the tweet reads.
CZ also subsequently took to Twitter to hint that blockchains are transparent by default, stating:“Blockchains are public, permanent records. It’s the most auditable ledger.”
The information was released shortly after Mazars revealed on December 7 that Binance has control over 575,742 Bitcoin (BTC $16,904), which at the time of writing was worth around $9.7 billion.
Since then, the report has also been taken down from Mazars’ website. Certain financial experts noticed some warning signs in Binance’s reserve report right away. An ex-member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board claimed that the Mazars study, which was just made public, lacks information on the effectiveness of internal controls and how Binance’s systems dispose of assets to pay off margin loans.
