CoinShares has become the first digital-asset investment manager to offer a real-time audit capability on its crypto-asset ETPs.
The service is being delivered through ‘TrustExplorer’, a real-time attest reporting application developed by US public accountants and auditors Armanino.
The blockchain-enabled solution allows investors to view and download assurance reports for the ETPs issued by CoinShares’ subsidiary, XBT Provider.
The facility is available across the entire $945m XBT product suite, providing visibility to the specific digital assets that underlie each of the ETPs. This includes CoinShares’ flagship ETPs Bitcoin Tracker One, Bitcoin Tracker Euro, and Ether Tracker Euro, which are listed on Nasdaq Stockholm.
The methodology and procedures of the application are publically disclosed on XBT Provider’s Investor Resources website.
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.”
Noah Buxton, Director and Blockchain & Digital Asset Practice Leader at Armanino, 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.”