TrueUSD, a stablecoin and competitor to industry leading Tether, has announced the results of a full audit that reveals the coins are fully backed by U.S. Dollars. Compared to Tether and the USDT token, TrustToken–the parent company behind TrueUSD–has taken the initiative in providing investors with an exact look at the value of their holdings.
The blog post, which was published on TrustToken’s official Medium page, reports that Cohen & Company was the group to conduct the audit on TrueUSD, and published their independent attestation of the bank account holding which provide collateral for the stablecoin. According to their report, the TrueUSD account holds a balance of $199,063,885 in escrow, which compares favorably to the amount of TUSD tokens issued and in circulation at 198,982,291. Interestingly, the report does not include–nor would have any easy way of concluding–the amount of TUSD that has been lost to wallet errors or forgotten accounts, which means that the dollar backing of TUSD likely exceeds the ~200 million in circulation by a fair margin.
TrustToken also shed some light on Cohen & Company, claiming that the audit was done as a part of TrustToken’s “commitment to compliance” and that their relationship with the audit firm is “an independent third-party U.S. certified public accounting (CPA) firm…Cohen & Company is not the parent company of, nor has any financial interest in, TrustToken, Inc.”
The blog post continues that the Cohen & Company attestation reports will be published on a monthly basis, therefore reflecting the updated amounts of TUSD issued as more funds arrive from users applying for the stablecoin. Compared to some of their competition, which has been notoriously difficult in getting exact information regarding 1:1 backing of coins, TrustToken claims that their goal since the beginning has been on offering transparency and piece of mind to investors,
TrueUSD is the first asset-backed token created on the TrustToken platform. We set out to build a fully collateralized USD-backed stablecoin that the community would use and trust. This attestation with Cohen & Company is another step towards that goal.
While Tether may hold a substantial market advantage over TrueUSD, with USDT constituting the ninth largest cryptocurrency by capitalization and over 2.195 billion coins in circulation, the company has been regularly criticized for a lack of transparency.
In March 2019, discerning cryptocurrency community members reported that Tether had changed its official website guidelines, removing the guarantee that USDT is backed 1:1 with U.S. dollars. Instead, the company claims that it is able to operate its stablecoin pegged valuation by putting up assets similar in wroth. However, these assets outside of U.S. dollars have yet to be verified, and may not offer the same price stability or low volatility as greenbacks.
Outside of TUSD and USDT, stablecoins continue to be a selling point for cryptocurrency and adoption. Given the massive price volatility experienced by the market throughout 2018, companies such as Facebook have turned to price-stable coins to develop for their services. While stablecoins may not offer the same investment potential as other digital assets, they do allow users the operability of cryptocurrency without having to fret over the frequent fluctuations in value.
