Cardano Foundation becomes first crypto org to get blockchain-attested audit from Grant Thornton

Blockchain organizations have promised transparency for years. The Cardano Foundation just put an auditor’s signature on-chain to prove it.

Grant Thornton Switzerland has attested the Cardano Foundation’s 2025 financial statements directly on the Cardano blockchain, making this the first time an independent auditor has placed a formal attestation on-chain for a major crypto organization. The audit opinion is dated March 25, 2026, and the accompanying Activity and Financial Insights Report was published publicly on April 2, 2026.

What actually happened here

The mechanism behind this is a platform called Reeve, a financial data integrity system built to bridge conventional accounting workflows with public blockchain infrastructure. Reeve was first used by the Cardano Foundation for its 2024 report, but that version did not include a third-party auditor’s attestation. The 2025 cycle adds that layer: Grant Thornton’s sign-off now lives on Cardano’s ledger, meaning the connection between the audit opinion and the published financial data is verifiable without trusting any single party’s word for it.

The Foundation’s CEO, Frederik Gregaard, described the initiative as a demonstration of “the highest standards of transparency,” combining statutory accounting requirements with on-chain verification.

As of December 31, 2025, the Foundation held total assets of CHF 287.5 million, or roughly $361 million. The allocation breaks down as 51.6% in ADA, 25.5% in Bitcoin, and 22.9% in cash equivalents and other financial assets. Total expenditures for the year came to CHF 23.6 million, spread across adoption programs, technology development, and governance work.

Why putting an audit on a blockchain is harder than it sounds

Traditional audits produce a PDF and a letter. Those documents can be updated, taken down, or quietly replaced. On-chain attestation turns the audit record into something closer to a permanent entry in a public ledger: the cryptographic fingerprint of the financial data is recorded at a specific point in time, and any change to the underlying numbers would produce a different fingerprint, making tampering immediately detectable.

What this means for the broader landscape

The Cardano Foundation is a non-profit steward of the Cardano ecosystem. Non-profit foundations are accountable to their communities rather than shareholders, and community members rarely have the tools to verify whether a foundation is managing resources responsibly. On-chain audit attestation gives them one.

Holding 51.6% of reserves in ADA and 25.5% in Bitcoin means the Foundation’s balance sheet is meaningfully exposed to crypto market volatility. CHF 287.5 million in total assets is a substantial treasury, and the decision to hold the majority in native crypto assets rather than retreating to cash reflects a deliberate strategic posture.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.