Following the collapse of FTX, in the last few weeks, Mazars South Africa has provided proof or reserves attestations to several cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, Crypto.com and KuCoin. As of today, those attestations are no longer available on its website, as first reported by Bloomberg. The press has widely misrepresented attestations as audits and they are far from it. There’s a real risk that they provide a false sense of security.
So far, Mazars has not commented on why the attestations were withdrawn from its website (we have copies of the Binance and Crypto.com ones). However, Binance released a statement saying, “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.”
With the collapse of FTX there have been question marks over its audits, including by Armanino, which was one of the first to provide proof of reserve attestations. According to an unconfirmed report by Forbes, Armanino is closing its crypto practice over reputational concerns. If one high profile audit is called into question, that can reflect on all the other firms the company audits, which could encourage clients to head for the exits.
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