Top cryptocurrency news: Tether reserve attestations will be carried out by a major European accounting firm

18-Aug-2022 By: Anirudh Trivedi

Tether Holdings Limited has appointed BDO Italia to undertake periodical assessments and attestations of its dollar reserves in order to increase transparency and better line with international accounting standards.

Tether, the firm behind the USDT stablecoin, said on Thursday that it began collaborating with BDO Italia in July. BDO Italia will be in charge of performing an impartial evaluation of Tether's stablecoin reserves in order to guarantee that each USDT unit is backed by cash or cash equivalents. Through BDO’s reviews, Tether intends to disclose public attestation reports weekly rather than quarterly. The attestations will contain information on the quantity of USDT tokens issued and the company's reserves.

BDO Italia is the Italian arm of BDO Global, a global network of public accounting companies headquartered in Zaventem, Belgium. BDO Global is one of Europe's top five accounting companies in terms of total revenue. The firm has offices in North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and Asia-Pacific.

Tether's chief technical officer, Paolo Ardoino, stated that his company's pledge to provide more transparency reflects its expanding role beyond simply providing liquidity to crypto traders:

“Tether's value has expanded beyond just being a tool for swiftly moving in and out of trading positions, thus scaling alongside the peer-to-peer and payments markets is crucial.”

Tether began posting quarterly attestations of its stablecoin reserves in May 2021 as part of a February 2021 deal with the New York Attorney General's Office. Tether has previously passed various assurance tests done by Moore Cayman, indicating that its reserves exceeded liabilities.

Tether's early attestations revealed that commercial paper underpinned a large percentage of its reserves. Later, the company revealed plans to cut its commercial paper exposure to zero. Tether's commercial paper assets were projected to be worth $3.5 billion at the end of July, down from $20.1 billion in March.

As per CoinGabbar statistics, USDT is the single largest stablecoin by market capitalization, at $67.6 billion. Following a three-month downturn, USDT supply began to steadily increase in August, bringing cautious optimism that the cryptocurrency market was turning a corner.

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