Crypto markets are seeing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of liquidations as the industry reacts to a prominent auditing firm announcing a halt of all work for crypto clients.
According to a new report from Reuters, Mazars, a French auditing firm that was hired by the world’s largest crypto exchange Binance last month, is pausing its services over concerns that the public may not fully understand the reports they curate.
Mazars was conducting proof-of-reserve checks, which aim to confirm that a crypto exchange’s reserves match its clients’ assets.
As stated by the firm,
“Mazars has paused its activity relating to the provision of ‘Proof of Reserves Reports’ for entities in the cryptocurrency sector due to concerns regarding the way these reports are understood by the public.”
Before pausing its work, Mazars reported to have found that Binance had overcollateralized their assets, though some in the industry, such as Kraken founder Jesse Powell, said there were some “big red flags” within the report.
According to data from crypto analytics platform Coinglass, over $135 million worth of positions have been liquidated from the crypto markets, the largest single liquidation event coming from Binance where an investor was forced to sell $5.52 million worth of leading smart contract platform Ethereum (ETH) and stablecoin Tether (USDT).
The five most liquidated cryptos over the last 24 hours are ETH, the top crypto asset by market cap Bitcoin (BTC), popular meme asset Dogecoin (DOGE), Binance’s native asset Binance Coin (BNB), peer-to-peer decentralized network Litecoin (LTC).
Other notable assets involved in liquidations include smart contract platform Cardano (ADA), XRP, the asset used to operate Ripple Labs’ payments platform, and ApeCoin (APE), the digital asset of the Bored Ape Yacht Club non-fungible token (NFT) community.
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