What teams should retain every close

The rules are mostly written.

Now comes the part that matters: proving the numbers.

In 2026, the gap between “we can explain it” and “we can evidence it” will determine who closes smoothly and who lives with follow-up requests.

The goal is simple: every close should produce an evidence pack that a third party can reperform without guessing what happened on chain.

Here is what to retain, every time.

1) Holdings, rights, and address hygiene

  • Wallet and custodian holdings at your close cutoff
  • Address inventory (what is in scope) plus a change log (what changed, when, why)
  • Evidence of authorization and control boundaries (who can move assets, how approvals happen)
  • Restrictions and lockups tied to source documentation

2) Completeness and the activity trail

  • Full period activity ledger, including internal transfers and fee movements
  • Explicit cutoff policy and timestamps used
  • Exception log: failed transfers, reversals, chain anomalies, and manual adjustments
  • A closed-loop tie out from source activity to reporting outputs to the general ledger

3) Valuation lineage you can reperform

  • Pricing sources used, timestamp conventions, and why they are appropriate
  • Outlier and stale-price handling, including overrides and approvals
  • Retained snapshots so the same valuation can be recreated later, not approximated
  • A short memo for abnormal periods: venue outages, liquidity events, extreme volatility

4) Classification that maps to reality

  • A consistent taxonomy that maps activity types to accounting treatment
  • Support for judgment calls: wrapped or receipt tokens, token migrations, LP positions
  • Policy updates when something new shows up, plus the approval trail
  • Disclosure support tied to concentrations, restrictions, and material risks

5) Staking, rewards, and protocol-native income

This is where “close enough” breaks.

  • Reward accrual and payouts reconciled to protocol-derived events
  • Validator performance, commission rates, and changes over time
  • Deterministic categorization of rewards versus fees versus rebates
  • Slashing or burn events, if any, documented with impact and remediation notes

6) Stablecoins and cash-like activity

  • What the stablecoin was used for (payments, collateral, treasury management)
  • Evidence of liquidity and redemption mechanics where relevant
  • Counterparty and platform exposure summaries
  • A documented classification position applied consistently over time

7) Change control and sign-offs

  • Reporting methodology and configuration changes (what changed, when, who approved)
  • Pricing source changes and benchmark swaps with rationale
  • Evidence of review: who signed off, what they reviewed, and when
  • A record of open items and how they were resolved

The operating standard for 2026

If you cannot recreate the close from retained evidence, you do not have an audit-ready position. You have a story.

NODE40 is built for this. We turn messy on-chain reality into a clean, reperformable evidence chain: holdings, activity, classification, and reconciliations that auditors and internal teams can rely on.

If you want a template for an “audit evidence pack” you can run every month, reply or book time, and we will share what we use.