Mazars Group, well-known for its proof-of-reserve audit services for cryptocurrency businesses, apparently took PoR audits of its clients—including Binance—off its website.
The Mazars Veritas department, which handled audits of bitcoin exchanges, has been completely stopped, according to the company’s official website. The Silver Sixpence Merkle Tree Generating tool was created by Mazars to complement PoR reports and promote “confidence and transparency to the digital asset market.”
Mazars discontinued performing PoR for crypto companies, according to a December 16 Bloomberg story. Other auditing companies, including FTX’s auditor Armanino, are said to have ceased their collaboration with crypto exchanges including OKX and Gate.io.
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 of Binance’s PoR upgrades.
KuCoin and Crypto.com, two competing cryptocurrency exchanges, have followed Binance’s example by working with Mazars as part of their PoR audits. In the wake of this, CZ also tweeted a suggestion that blockchains are transparent by design.
Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, CEO of Binance, responded to the news on Twitter right away with a retweet from an arbitrary commenter. Making a claim about the reasons an auditing firm opted to stop working with cryptocurrency? Ask them, it says in the tweet.
The announcement follows Mazars’ confirmation on December 7 that Binance controlled 575,742 Bitcoin, valued at about $9.7 billion at the time of writing, belonging to its users. Since then, the report has also been taken down from Mazars’ website.
Certain financial experts noticed some warning signs right away in Binance’s PoR report. 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.