Mazars Group Removes Binance’s PoR Report From Its Website
According to a recent Bloomberg report, the proof-of-reserve (PoR) audits of crypto exchange, Binance is no longer on its auditor’s website. The auditor, Mazars Group, previously published an audit report for Binance last week.
The auditor’s official website no longer has a Mazars Veritas section. This section housed all the company’s audits for crypto exchanges.
Mazars Discontinues Audit For Crypto Firms
On Friday, Bloomberg confirmed that Mazars had discontinued PoR audits for crypto firms. In addition, other auditing companies also stopped auditing services for crypto entities.
One of them is Armanino, FTX’s auditor. Armanino has allegedly halted auditing services for crypto exchanges like Gate.io and OKX.
Mazars Group is a renowned entity, having worked as the accounting company of Donald Trump’s firm. As a result, Binance appointed the company as its official auditor in late November.
Other crypto firms followed Binance’s footsteps, such as Crypto.com and KuCoin. These other crypto firms also published their PoR to increase users’ trust.
A Binance spokesperson said Mazars had paused its auditing services with all crypto firms. Hence, crypto firms would not be able to work with Mazars Group.
Furthermore, the spokesperson noted that Binance is in talks with other top auditing companies. But none is willing to conduct a PoR audit for the crypto firm.
Financial Analyst Raises Red Flag On Binance’s PoR Report
“We will continue to distribute Merkle Tree PoR to our customers in order to establish that client assets reside on on-chain addresses controlled by Binance.,” the company said.
Meanwhile, Changpeng Zhao, Binance CEO, reacted to the development. Zhao tweeted, “Making a statement about why an auditing firm opted to stop dealing with cryptocurrency? Just ask them.”
He added that Blockchains are usually transparent, permanent public records. The CEO argued that blockchain is the most auditable ledger.
In the now-removed report, Mazars disclosed that Binance’s reserve contains about 575,742 BTC belonging to users. This amount is worth over $9.7 billion, judging by the current price of BTC. Unfortunately, Mazars has removed this information from its website without citing any reason.
Meanwhile, some crypto analysts have raised red flags following the revelation of Binance’s proof-of-reserve report. For example, an ex-financial analyst with an international financial reporting firm argued that the report was inadequate.
The financial analyst further said the report did not have info about the quality of the exchange’s internal controls. Also, he cited the lack of information on how Binance liquidates crypto assets to make up for margin loans.
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