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Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin, has announced that Simon McWilliams will succeed Giancarlo Devasini as chief financial officer as the firm once again commits to a “full audit.” Devasini will continue as its chairman.
Tether’s promise of an audit of its reserves dates back to the company’s launch, and the fact that it’s remained unaudited has been a common rallying cry for its detractors.
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Tether apparently believes an audit is ‘crucial’
On March 9, 2015, Tether announced that it had partnered with Factom “to innovate our transparency and audit strategy.” Despite this announcement, the partnership didn’t result in any visible changes to its transparency strategy.
By May 16, 2015, Tether’s website promised that its reserve holdings were “subject to frequent professional audits.”
In Tether’s original whitepaper, with the archive dating to September 21, 2015, it asserted that Tether would prove its reserves “by publishing the bank balance and undergoing periodic audits by professionals.”
In 2017, Tether announced it had retained Friedman LLP to complete an audit; this came several months after sister firm Bitfinex had also announced that it had retained Friedman for its audit.
However, neither firm was able to get audited by Friedman, with a Tether spokesperson eventually telling CoinDesk that the relationship dissolved in part because of the “excruciatingly detailed procedures” that the auditor intended to use.
Several years later, in June of 2021, Tether’s then-General Counsel Stuart Hoegner took to X (then Twitter) to assert that the audit was in progress and would begin with the 2018 fiscal year. This was a surprising year to focus on, considering the well-known issues with Tether’s reserves in this period that were revealed by regulators.
Read more: CHART: Tether has attracted US government action 19 times
This was followed the next month by Hoegner sharing in an interview that Tether’s audit was likely “months away, not years.”
Years, not months, later, it was announced that Tether once again believes that a full audit is “a crucial step in raising industry standards and strengthening regulatory engagement.”
Protos reached out to Tether to determine if these audits will also date back to the 2018 fiscal year as Hoegner previously claimed, but the firm didn’t immediately respond.
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