What is Attestation?
An attestation is a signed statement by a named party that a specific fact was true at a specific time — reserves held, a price observed, an identity verified. It carries the attester's name and a timestamp. It is not an audit: it confirms a point-in-time assertion under agreed procedures, not the completeness of a set of books.
Also called: attestation vs audit · reserve attestation · signed claim · agreed-upon procedures
What an attestation is worth
Its value equals the attester's accountability plus the freshness of the timestamp. A reserve figure signed by a named firm at a stated date is a real datapoint; the same number republished with no source and no as-of time is decoration. On-chain, an oracle's signed price is an attestation too — which is why a stale signed price is worse than no price at all: it still looks authoritative.
Attestation versus audit
An audit gives an opinion on financial statements as a whole, under a full standard, with the auditor's liability attached. An attestation reports on one assertion under narrower agreed-upon procedures. Both are useful; conflating them overstates what has actually been verified. It is the same reason every figure on this desk carries a source and an as-of time — provenance is the claim.
Frequently asked questions
Does an attestation prove a token is fully backed?
It evidences the reported reserve at the moment it was taken, by a named party. It does not continuously guarantee backing, and it does not remove issuer, custody or smart-contract risk.
Is proof of reserve an attestation?
Yes — an attestation published on-chain, which makes it machine-readable and checkable against circulating supply rather than filed as a PDF.
Where this shows up live
On the desk
Source, as-of time and provenance rules
Every figure on those pages carries its source and as-of time. Nothing is shown when the upstream is unavailable.
Related terms
- Proof of Reserve — Proof of reserve (PoR) is an independent, on-chain attestation that a tokenized asset is fully backed by the assets it claims to hold.
- ONCHAINID — ONCHAINID is the on-chain identity layer used by permissioned security-token standards such as T-REX (ERC-3643).
- Oracle Divergence — Oracle divergence is how far an individual price feed sits from the consensus of the feeds tracking the same asset, measured per source against the mean of the live feeds.
More in Compliance
Eligibility (US vs Non-US) · KYC / AML Gate · ONCHAINID · Proof of Reserve · T-REX (ERC-3643) · Transfer Agent
Informational only · not financial advice. See the live numbers on the data desk, the sourcing rules in the methodology, or the day's stories in the newsroom. · ← All glossary terms