Tether published an audit a month ago.
Exchanges could publish a daily report of their bank account balances for each currency along with a daily message signed by each cold-storage key.
And the transparent bank would publish a daily record of balances for each account, which ties out to the bank's balance sheet.
We wouldn't need to rely on historical audits, because we could do our own automated audit every day.
Transparent exchanges with transparent bank accounts would attract funds away from secretive exchanges with secret bank accounts.
My guess is that the costs of doing this (security is quite hard: anything that can sign messages using cold storage keys can obviously also empty the cold storage, since transactions are simply signed messages) does not outweigh the demand for this. Most traders don't care (and subsequently get burned).
> And the transparent bank would publish a daily record of balances for each account
I think this is a terrible idea though. Even if done anonymous it gives way too much information about a market and its participants. IMO just use a merkle tree so everyone can check their own balance.
Also draws a nice crosshair on your exchange, so that hackers can exactly calculate cost/benefits as well as learn from your systems (how you divide your cold storage over different addresses, how that changes over time, how money from different dummy accounts effects cold storage in what way).
https://tether.to/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Final-Tether-Co...
What an amazing coincidence!
It is almost as if people predicted literally this exact scenario.
