A stablecoin is a promise that a token can be exchanged for a dollar. Whether that promise holds depends on what is held against it, who verifies the holding, and what legal claim a holder actually has. Those three things vary enormously between issuers that present themselves near-identically, and the differences only surface under stress.
Reserve composition is the first question and it is more than a total. Cash, Treasury bills, repo, commercial paper and secured loans behave differently in a redemption run. The second question is verification: an attestation from an accounting firm is not an audit, and both are weaker than a regulated issuer’s reporting obligations. The third is legal, and it is the one most often skipped — a token holder is not automatically a creditor with a claim on the reserve.
Legislation is now changing the answers, which makes it more important to date every claim. We report what an issuer has disclosed, when, under which standard, and what the emerging rules would require of it — and we keep those separate rather than blending current practice with proposed law.
An attestation, a full audit and an on-chain proof-of-reserves feed each verify something different about a stablecoin's backing.
Both stablecoins publish reserve disclosures, but attestation and audit are not the same check. Here is what each issuer has actually shown, and where the sourcing…
The 2025 GENIUS Act stops stablecoin issuers from paying yield directly. It says far less about exchanges and affiliates — and that gap is the whole…
We do not tell readers which stablecoin is safe to hold. Reserve quality changes between disclosures and no external party sees the position in real time. We report what has been published and what it establishes, with the date attached.