CoinSwitch Holds Sufficient Reserves To Match Customer Investments: Independent Firm Confirms

CoinSwitch, India’s largest Crypto investing platform, today, announced an independent third-party report that confirms that its overall holdings of Crypto and INR balances are higher than those of customer’s holdings of Crypto and INR balances on CoinSwitch platform.

As part of its commitment to proactively strengthen compliance structures of the platform, CoinSwitch engaged a consulting firm INMACS in July-2022 to study process and procedure of the company and carry out Agreed-Upon Procedures (AUP) in November 2022. The Agreed Upon Procedures executed by INMACS are under Indian Standards on Related Services (SRS 4400) issued by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, compatible with International Standard (ISRS) 4400.

Key highlights and findings of the report:

* INMACS obtained a detailed listing of crypto custody services, counter-party sources including crypto exchanges, and wallet addresses from CoinSwitch; using a snapshot of web-logins on the web-portal of these sources provided by CoinSwitch.

* INMACS obtained individual Indian fiat currency (INR) balances with banks, payment gateways, and crypto exchanges using snapshot of web-logins on the web-portal of these sources or banks, payment gateways, and crypto exchanges statements of account provided by CoinSwitch.

* INMACS also obtained a detailed listing of customer holdings with CoinSwitch in Virtual Digital Assets (VDA) and cryptos directly from CoinSwitch’s database.

* It then compared the total CoinSwitch’s VDA and INR holdings with customers’ VDA and INR holdings to understand whether total CoinSwitch holdings were greater or less than customer holdings.

Findings

* INMACS successfully completed the agreed-upon procedures and found that total CoinSwitch holdings are greater than customer holdings. That is, the total INR and VDA holdings held by CoinSwitch are greater than the VDA and INR held by CoinSwitch on behalf of the users of its platform.

“Transparency and traceability are business imperatives for us. We are committed to building a multi-asset buy-sell platform that users can trust. There are several other ways to assure liquidity of a crypto platform, including proof of reserves. This report is our effort to affirm that our holdings are greater than what customers have purchased on CoinSwitch. INMACS’ independent report is a testament to our commitment and proactive approach to risk and compliance measures.  We will continue to evaluate other ways of establishing trust and transparency as we help India participate meaningfully in the global crypto revolution,” said Ashish Singhal, Co-founder and CEO, CoinSwitch.

INMACS is a 38-year-old public limited company registered in India, that specializes in assurance, taxation, regulatory advisory, and risk management, among other services. The firm was founded by Vinod Jain, an experienced Chartered Accountant with 42 years of rich industry experience, and has also been a Member of the High Powered Committee, appointed by the Finance Ministry to simplify Income Tax Law. He was also appointed by the Union Finance Minister as an Advisor to the GST Council for reviewing GST Law. He has been elected member of National Council of CII and a former National President of ANMI (Association of National Stock Exchanges members of India). Mr. Vinod Jain has been a member of the apex body, Central council of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India for 12 years. He served an independent director and was the Chairman of the audit committee of Coal India, and has also served on different committees of CBDT, MCA and SEBI.

CoinSwitch is Silicon Valley venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz’s first startup investment in India, and Tiger Global’s first crypto investment. The startup unicorn also counts blue chip firms including Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, Paradigm, and Coinbase Ventures among its investors.