Europe’s largest digital asset manager pioneers innovative approach in bringing trust and transparency to digital asset investors
CoinShares, Europe’s largest digital asset investment firm, today announced it is the first asset manager to offer real-time audit capacity on its crypto asset exchange-traded products (ETPs) via Armanino’s Real Time Assurance application. This blockchain-enabled solution allows investors to view and download attest reports that are generated forty eight times a day, for the ETPs issued by CoinShares’ subsidiary, XBT Provider.
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With this offering, CoinShares provides all its investors, unparalleled visibility to the digital assets that underlie the XBT Provider notes. CoinShares will now provide investors with on-demand, real-time reports on collateral holdings that follow top industry standards backed by an independent public accounting firm. The combination of public visibility to the collateral hedge, as well as industry-standard reporting solidifies a new paradigm of trust and transparency for the digital assets and ETP industries.
CoinShares’ Chief Operating Officer, Richard Nash, commented, “In the current environment, investors are beginning to question how connected underlying assets are to passive investment vehicles. Anticipating a similar reaction to our own products, we have opened our books to one of the top US accounting firms specialising in digital assets, in order to demonstrate as much transparency as possible. By allowing for real time audit of our various digital asset exposures using a blockchain enabled solution, the entirety of CoinShares’ digital assets will now be independently verified forty-eight times a day, providing a level of transparency to our stakeholders at the other end of the spectrum to the usual end of day reconciliation.”
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To ensure total transparency and trust, CoinShares engaged with Armanino, an independent accounting firm specialising in digital assets. The reports from Armanino demonstrate that there are digital assets with a US dollar equivalent value greater than or equal to the value of total XBT Provider ETPs issued and outstanding. The methodology and procedures are located on XBT Provider’s Investor Resources page and can be tracked in real-time here.
Noah Buxton, Director and Blockchain & Digital Asset Practice Leader at Armanino LLP added, “With better financial products fueled by digital assets, the assurance mechanisms investors rely on simply must keep pace with those changes. Investors and regulators typically rely on yearly audit and compliance filings to support counterparty due diligence efforts. However, due in large part to the characteristics of digital assets themselves, we can now offer assurance windows down from 365 days, to 30 minutes or 30 seconds, with the formal independent accountant’s report just a click away.”
The CoinShares Group has been working to incorporate the unique attributes of digital assets to innovative how it delivers financial products and services. It was important to CoinShares to provide public attestations to match asset reserves to certificate balances. No other asset manager currently provides publicly verifiable, real-time proof of solvency for crypto ETPs. CoinShares hopes this will encourage other asset managers and custodial service providers to offer a similar level of trust and transparency to investors and regulators alike.
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