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.