Mazars was recently hired by several cryptocurrency exchanges worldwide to verify their Proof-of-Reserve (PoR). Now they remove the audits of Binance, among others, from their website.
Mazars Veritas has been discontinued
It now appears that the entire section dedicated to auditing Mazars cryptocurrency exchanges, called Mazars Veritas, has been discontinued.
This tool was initially developed to “bring trust and transparency to the digital asset industry”. This using the Silver Sixpence Merkle Tree Generating tool in addition to reports on PoR.
Mazars is reportedly not the only accounting firm to have stopped working with crypto exchanges. The auditor Armanino, who also worked with OKX and Gate.io, among others, would have taken the same step.
Big Four does not want to conduct crypto audits
Mazars actually also conducted the audits for Crypto.com and KuCoin. However, they have now indicated that they will temporarily suspend their work for all their crypto clients.
In an attempt to get their PoR audited anyway, Binance went to the Big Four accounting firms, but unfortunately without success. None of the Big Four are currently willing to conduct such an audit. Binance adds the following:
We are continuing our plans to provide our users with Merkle Tree PoR to demonstrate that customer assets exist on on-chain addresses controlled by Binance.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) hinted via Twitter that blockchains are transparent by default. CZ thought he was He concluded the following:
Blockchains are public, permanent records. It is the best auditable ledger.