Kraken and Bitstamp answer the reserves question with two different tools. Kraken has, at points in its history, published a cryptographic proof of reserves — a technical check that on-chain holdings match a hashed set of claimed customer balances. Bitstamp instead points to a traditional financial audit by an outside accounting firm, a broader but less publicly visible kind of check. Based on the reporting available to us, neither exchange currently has a fresh, fully public, independently corroborated reserves figure on record.
Two different kinds of check
A proof of reserves, in the form Kraken has used, works by building a Merkle tree: a data structure that lets an auditor prove a specific customer balance was included in a total without revealing anyone else’s balance. A financial audit, the form Bitstamp cites, is an accountant’s opinion on financial statements — potentially covering more than crypto holdings, including liabilities, but normally disclosed only as a summary conclusion rather than as raw, independently checkable data. The two are not interchangeable, and an exchange doing one is not necessarily doing the other.
What Kraken’s proof of reserves showed, and when
The earliest Kraken proof-of-reserves exercise in our evidence was carried out by auditor Stefan Thomas on 11 and 22 March 2014, according to CoinDesk’s report from that period. Thomas compared a JSON file of Kraken’s addresses and balances against a copy of the blockchain and concluded, in CoinDesk’s account, that “the actual holdings were very slightly (< 0.5%) above the required holdings,” meaning Kraken held just over 100% of the reserves needed to cover the anonymised customer balances in scope. Thomas also said the process kept “absolute privacy” for customers, since each user could check their own balance against a published Merkle root without exposing anyone else’s.
That 2014 exercise is the clearest, most fully sourced Kraken proof-of-reserves event in our evidence. What happened in the years after is harder to pin down. DailyCoin’s survey of exchange proof-of-reserves practices, published 9 October 2023, reported that Kraken says “trusted auditors” conduct its PoR audit twice yearly, but that the only PoR reports DailyCoin could find on Kraken’s site were dated June 2022 and December 2021, both carried out by the same firm, Armanino LLP. DailyCoin reported that Kraken had not provided PoR information on its website since roughly summer 2023 at the time of its reporting, and said Kraken did not respond to its request for comment.
A later figure appears in a piece from ValueWalk, updated 27 May 2025, which reported that Kraken’s March 2025 proof-of-reserves showed Bitcoin reserves backed at 114.9%, and said Kraken planned to move to a quarterly PoR cadence. This is the only outlet in our evidence reporting that figure. The article carries a sponsored-content and affiliate-link disclosure rather than presenting itself as independent verification of a primary Kraken document, and no other newsroom in our evidence corroborates the 114.9% number, the March 2025 date, or the move to quarterly reporting. Read alongside DailyCoin’s 2023 finding of a gap since mid-2022, this leaves an open question our evidence cannot close: what, if anything, Kraken published in the interval, and under what methodology the March 2025 figure was produced.
What Bitstamp’s financial audit showed, and what it doesn’t show the public
Bitstamp’s approach in our evidence is the traditional audit, not the cryptographic proof. CoinDesk reported that, around the same time as Kraken’s 2014 Merkle-tree exercise, Bitstamp released the results of its own financial audit, which found it held 100% of its validated BTC balance and USD funds, with no issues raised by the auditors. CoinDesk quoted then-Bitstamp CEO Nejc Kodrič saying the company planned to run regular audits with quarterly results posted on its website.
DailyCoin’s October 2023 reporting placed that practice on a longer timeline, saying Bitstamp has been audited annually by an undisclosed Big Four accounting firm since 2016, and that at least one of those audits was conducted by Ernst & Young. DailyCoin also reported that Bitstamp does not disclose its financial audit reports publicly — meaning the audit’s existence is stated, but its contents, scope and findings are not available for a reader to check directly.
That gap shows up again in more recent reporting. CryptoSlate’s Bitstamp exchange review, updated 15 July 2026, lists “Proof of Reserves” as “No” in its overview table, and separately names “No public proof-of-reserves page confirmed” as a listed con. CryptoSlate separately reports that Bitstamp holds roughly 95% of assets in cold storage with custody partner BitGo, and notes Robinhood completed its roughly $200 million acquisition of Bitstamp in June 2025 — context for who now owns the exchange, though our evidence does not say whether that ownership change altered audit practice.
The common misreading
It is easy to read “audited” and “proof of reserves” as the same claim: that an exchange is solvent and that the claim has been checked from outside. The two mechanisms in this evidence check different things. Kraken’s 2014 exercise verified that on-chain assets matched a hashed set of claimed balances at one specific block height, using a named individual auditor. Bitstamp’s audits, per DailyCoin, are annual reviews by an outside accounting firm whose identity is only sometimes disclosed and whose reports are not published. Neither format, as described here, is a live or continuously updated statement of solvency — both are snapshots, dated to a specific check, and both can lapse without much public notice, which is exactly what DailyCoin found had happened to Kraken’s public PoR reporting by 2023.
What this page does not tell you
This page has not seen a primary audit report or proof-of-reserves attestation from either exchange. Every figure here traces to secondary reporting — CoinDesk, DailyCoin, CryptoSlate and ValueWalk — not to a Kraken or Bitstamp document reviewed directly. The most recent Kraken reserve figure, 114.9% as of March 2025 per ValueWalk, comes from an outlet whose article carries an affiliate disclosure, and no independent newsroom in our evidence has corroborated that figure, its date, or the claimed shift to quarterly reporting. This page cannot tell a reader what Bitstamp’s Big Four auditor’s report actually contains, because Bitstamp does not publish it, per DailyCoin. It cannot tell a reader whether Kraken’s 2014 Merkle-tree methodology is the same methodology, if any, behind the 2025 figure. It does not establish what happened to Kraken’s public PoR reporting between the December 2021 and June 2022 reports DailyCoin found and the March 2025 figure ValueWalk reported — that gap remains unresolved in the evidence available to us. And neither a proof of reserves nor a financial audit, as described in these sources, is an ongoing solvency guarantee; both are snapshots at a stated date, and this page cannot describe either exchange’s reserve position as of today.
Sources
Every fact above is attributed to one of these reports. Where they disagree, the article says so.
