What happened
Traditional financial auditing — the process of verifying that a company owns what it claims to own and that those assets are real — breaks down completely with blockchain and cryptocurrency because the assets live in a different kind of system with different rules. This matters because publicly traded crypto companies have never had a reliable way to prove to investors and regulators that they actually possess the digital assets on their balance sheets.
Why it matters
For years, auditors have had no systematic way to verify crypto holdings, which means investors buying shares in crypto firms have no independent check on whether those companies are lying about their assets — this paper documents practical methods that could make that verification possible, addressing a core governance gap in a multi-trillion-dollar asset class.