A third-party forensic review of the long-running Cardano (ADA) voucher redemption program is finally in motion after Input Output Global (IOG) confirmed that the global law firm McDermott Will & Emery (MW&E) and the audit heavyweight BDO have been retained to “audit and prepare a public report of the ADA redemption,” according to IOG’s chief legal and policy officer Joel Telpner.
The involvement attempted to eliminate weeks of controversy, the allegation was to quietly shift thousands of unclaimed ADAs during the 2021 ledger activity and provide an exact historical ledger for each pre-sale token, its status and current location.
Cardano hires companies to review unclaimed ADA vouchers
Emurgo, one of Cardano’s three founding entities, welcomed the move and urged the community to “wait for independent audit results” and insisted that only a small percentage of pre-sale vouchers remained excellent after door-to-door visits in Japan over the seven years of search.
Telpner wrote in a post about X: “A global law firm with more than 1,400 lawyers and 24 locations” and BDO, “a global accounting and audit firm with global accounting and audit firms” will begin work immediately and have been instructed to “delivery reports as soon as possible.” MW&E’s fintech and blockchain group ranked in Chambers FinTech for two consecutive years, reflecting the deep regulatory and transaction expertise of digital assets.
As far as BDO is concerned, BDO promotes a dedicated digital asset forensic practice that combines on-chain analytics with open source intelligence to track complex token flows. Telpner added that once the conflict check is completed, a professional blockchain analytics company will be added.
Emurgo’s thread, less than 24 hours before Telpner announced the announcement, stressed that “the vast majority of pre-sale ADA vouchers have been successfully redeemed” and that the remaining unredeemed Slice became technically difficult to cash in after Shelley’s hard fork, which was necessary to make a fixed move on the chain to protect the redemption rights. The company acknowledges the frustration of the community but warns that some criticisms have fallen into “excessive, unreasonable FUD” that ignore the full context of the hard redemption efforts.
The Cardano Foundation, which is not directly involved in the post-2021 voucher business, issued its own statement on May 19, noting that “the IO team has led and supported the efforts of the remaining voucher holders over the past four years” and welcomed the upcoming audit.
Pressure for a comprehensive report intensified after NFT artist Masato Alexander published a thread on May 7 accusing IOG founder Charles Hoskinson of using “genesis keys” during the Allegra hard fork to reassign about 318 million ADA—worth roughly US $619 million at the time—from unredeemed presale wallets to treasure accounts via a Move Instantaneous Rewards (MIR) transaction in October 2021.
Hoskinson called the allegation “false and misleading”, asserting that “IOG never gave itself 350 million unclaimed ADAs. It’s a lie”, and said that the unredeemed surplus (less than 0.2% of the crowdsourced) ended up donating to Intersect, the ruling institution of Cardano. He also threatened to take legal action against those who repeated the charges.
A target publication date has not been set; Telpner acknowledged that “honestly, I don’t know” when the final report was ready, but stressed that both companies were asked to “complete the review and prepare and make the report available as soon as possible”.
At press time, the ADA traded at $0.727.
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