No. Crypto.com’s proof-of-reserves disclosure and Coinbase’s audited financial statements are different kinds of evidence, checked by different people, covering different things. A proof-of-reserves report of the kind Crypto.com has published shows that specified wallets held specified assets at one point in time; it says nothing about what the company owes. Coinbase’s filings are audited by Deloitte and cover debt, related-party transactions and internal controls, not just crypto holdings — but even that does not certify the exchange could survive a bank-run-style withdrawal surge.
What Mazars actually checked, and when it stopped
Before December 2022, the accounting firm Mazars produced proof-of-reserves reports for Crypto.com, Binance and KuCoin, according to CoinDesk and TIME. On 16 December 2022, TIME reported that Mazars halted all such work for crypto clients globally. A Mazars spokesperson told the outlets the pause reflected “concerns regarding the way these reports are understood by the public,” a quote both CoinDesk and TIME carried. TIME reported that a Binance spokesperson, in a statement to Bloomberg News, said Mazars “has indicated that they will temporarily pause their work with all of their crypto clients globally,” adding that Binance would therefore not be able to work with Mazars for the moment. TIME also reported that both Crypto.com and KuCoin said in statements they would be open to engaging other audit firms.
Markets moved on the news. TIME reported Bitcoin fell as much as 2.8% and Binance’s BNB token fell as much as 4.8% in trading that Friday. The same article cited CryptoQuant data showing a net $554 million in stablecoins and more than $2 billion in Bitcoin and Ether had been withdrawn from centralized exchanges over the prior two weeks, though it noted withdrawals had largely stabilized compared with the mass exits seen when FTX collapsed weeks earlier.
What a Mazars-style report was never designed to show is the liabilities side of the ledger. CoinDesk quoted Joseph Collement, general counsel at Bitcoin.com, explaining the underlying principle: an exchange “should hold that asset 1:1 on behalf of the user” for it to be straightforwardly verifiable, but he added that “proof of reserves mean very little without proof of liabilities.” Francine McKenna, a lecturer in financial accounting at the Wharton School, told CoinDesk these reports amount to a matching exercise — mapping an exchange’s internal customer database against blockchain entries — and warned that firms taking on this work faced “very high risk” to their reputation and legal liability.
Where Crypto.com’s disclosure stands now
None of the four sources reviewed for this page names an accounting or audit firm that has reviewed Crypto.com’s reserves since Mazars’ withdrawal in December 2022. A piece published by CryptoSlate, republished via Cryptonews on 8 August 2026, describes Crypto.com as currently providing “a Merkle-based verification interface” — a system that lets a customer confirm their own balance was included in a dataset used to calculate the exchange’s reserve total, without confirming that every customer’s balance was included, or what the exchange owes. That CryptoSlate/Cryptonews piece is the only source here describing Crypto.com’s current mechanism, and it does not identify any outside accountant involved in producing it.
The same CryptoSlate/Cryptonews article lays out, in general terms rather than about Crypto.com specifically, why a reserves dashboard alone is limited: it uses the illustrative example of a dashboard showing $10 billion in crypto, noting this provides no account of whether the exchange behind it owes $8 billion, $10 billion or $15 billion to creditors, or whether another party holds a competing claim on the same assets. The article also cites warnings from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, which it says has flagged that proof-of-reserve reports vary widely and sit outside its audit oversight, and from the SEC’s chief accountant, who it says has separately warned that attestation-style engagements typically examine a narrower body of evidence than a full financial-statement audit. Neither warning is quoted directly or linked to a primary document in the version of the article reviewed here.
What Coinbase’s Deloitte audit covers instead
Coinbase is a publicly traded US company, and CoinDesk and TIME both report that it is audited by Deloitte, one of the large accounting firms sometimes called the Big Four. CoinDesk quoted McKenna noting that top-tier firms like Deloitte “prefer to work with large pre-IPO or public firms,” in contrast to firms like Mazars or BDO Milan — the latter being Tether’s auditor — that carved out a niche auditing crypto-native companies directly.
The CryptoSlate/Cryptonews piece frames the practical difference this way: Coinbase’s annual filing, as a listed company, covers debt, collateral, derivatives, commitments, subsidiaries and related-party transactions alongside its crypto holdings, and Deloitte’s audit report addresses both the financial statements and Coinbase’s internal control over financial reporting. That is a materially wider scope than an asset-only snapshot. But the same article is explicit that none of that guarantees Coinbase would avoid a withdrawal surge, a management failure or a technical failure — the audit tests whether the numbers and controls are fairly stated, not whether the business will survive a future shock.
The common misreading
Coverage across the industry, including some of the sourcing behind this page, has at times used “audit” loosely to describe proof-of-reserves reports. CoinDesk’s reporting makes the distinction explicit: these were “often misunderstood as actual audits” when in fact, per McKenna, they were a narrower matching exercise. An audit tests a company’s full financial statements against an accounting standard, with the auditor examining internal controls and forming an opinion the company could face legal exposure for getting wrong. A proof-of-reserves report, at least in the form Mazars produced, tested whether disclosed assets existed at a chosen moment, using a scope the exchange itself selected.
What this page does not tell you
This page cannot state Crypto.com’s current total reserves, reserve ratio or the date of its most recent Merkle-tree update — no source reviewed here provides a current, dated figure for Crypto.com. It also cannot confirm whether Crypto.com has engaged any outside accounting or audit firm since Mazars stopped in December 2022; the absence of a named successor across all four sources is a gap in the public record, not a confirmed fact that no such engagement exists. Coinbase’s Deloitte audit, as the sources themselves stress, tests financial statements and internal controls — it is not a guarantee against a withdrawal surge, a management failure or a technical failure, and this page is not describing an audited exchange as a safe one. Finally, none of the four sources behind this page is a primary document: there is no Mazars report, no Crypto.com reserves page and no Coinbase 10-K in the evidence used here, only newsroom reporting about them. A reader who wants the underlying documents should go to Crypto.com’s own disclosure page and to Coinbase’s SEC filings directly.
Sources
Every fact above is attributed to one of these reports. Where they disagree, the article says so.
