Stablecoin supply fell by roughly $15bn in mid-2026, the sharpest monthly contraction the sector has recorded, as GENIUS Act rules took hold and MiCA's transitional period ended. In a market moving that fast, the ability to check backing yourself is worth more than any rating. Here is the process we use, in order. It takes about twenty minutes per issuer.
Step 1: Find the primary document, not the dashboard
Dashboards are marketing surfaces maintained by the issuer. Go to the reserve report itself: a PDF signed by an accounting firm, with a firm name, an engagement type and a date. If the only artefact is a live counter, you have found a claim, not evidence.
Step 2: Read the engagement type on the first page
Look for the words examination, agreed-upon procedures, review or audit. Agreed-upon procedures is the weakest: the accountant only checks what the issuer asked them to check. An examination under attestation standards is stronger. A financial-statement audit is strongest. In our tracker, 6 of 9 issuers are attested, 2 are audited and 1 is self-reported.
Step 3: Check the as-of date against today
An attestation is a photograph of a single day. A report more than a month old tells you about a balance sheet that no longer exists. Note the as-of date and the publication lag separately, because a long lag is itself a governance signal.
Step 4: Break down the reserve composition line by line
Short-dated treasury bills and overnight reverse repo are the highest-quality lines. Commercial paper, secured loans, corporate bonds, precious metals and affiliate exposure are not equivalent, and should be sized individually. Any line described as other investments deserves a direct question to the issuer.
Step 5: Reconcile reserves against on-chain supply
Pull total supply from a block explorer across every chain the token is issued on, sum it, and compare to the attested reserve total on the same date. Multi-chain issuance is where reconciliations break: bridged supply is easy to double-count. If the numbers do not tie within a percent or so, ask why.
Step 6: Confirm the regulatory perimeter
Identify the issuing entity, its jurisdiction and its supervising authority. A MiCA-authorised e-money token issued from France sits under a named regulator with named capital requirements. A token issued from an offshore holding company may sit under none. Our tracked issuers span New York trust charters, French EMI authorisation, Singapore and EU dual regimes, and BVI structures, and the difference in enforceability is enormous.
Six of the nine stablecoins we grade publish an attestation rather than an audit. That is the single most useful number a holder can know, and almost nobody checks it.
A quick scoring rubric
Score each issuer out of six: one point each for a named accounting firm, an audit-grade engagement, an as-of date within 30 days, a fully itemised reserve composition, a supply reconciliation you can verify yourself, and a named prudential regulator. Anything scoring three or below should be treated as a credit exposure to the issuer rather than a cash equivalent.
Our data
Disclosure counts cited here are original CryptoxInsights figures from our RWA and Reserve Transparency Tracker, which grades 9 stablecoin issuers and 22 tokenised asset programmes on primary documentation. Researchers and journalists may cite these figures with attribution.