FDUSD reserves consist of short-dated US Treasury bills, overnight repurchase agreements backed by Treasuries, and cash held at banks, all custodied by First Digital Trust Limited in Hong Kong and reported in monthly attestations from the audit firm Prescient Assurance. Each token is structured as a redeemable claim on one US dollar of those segregated reserves. The April 2025 depeg, when FDUSD briefly traded near $0.87, turned the spotlight onto exactly what sits behind the token.
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This article breaks down the reserve composition line by line, who holds the assets, how often they are attested, and what the 2025 episode did and did not reveal about the backing. It describes the reserve structure and the risks factually and renders no judgment on the token. For the broader overview of the issuer and the token, see what is FDUSD. To move or acquire the token, see how to buy FDUSD. Reserve figures here come from First Digital's published attestations and the First Digital transparency page.
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FDUSD is a fiat-collateralized stablecoin, meaning every token in circulation is meant to be matched one-for-one by reserve assets denominated in US dollars. First Digital does not back the token with crypto collateral, algorithms, or a basket of other currencies. The reserve is a pool of dollar-denominated instruments chosen for liquidity and short duration: US Treasury bills, overnight repos secured by Treasuries, and cash deposits.
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According to First Digital's attestation disclosures, the reserve breakdown sits at roughly 85% US Treasury bills, 10 to 12% overnight reverse repurchase agreements collateralized by Treasuries, and 3 to 5% cash held at banks. The Treasury bills are very short-dated, which limits interest-rate sensitivity and keeps the assets close to par. This is the same structural shape used by Circle for USDC and, in broad terms, by Tether for USDT: cash, short Treasuries, and repos as the core.
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The January 2026 reserve report, published on February 19, 2026, listed tokens outstanding of $456,143,819.06 against total net reserve assets of $457,884,345.60. That puts reserves slightly above the circulating token balance, the over-collateralization buffer issuers point to as a redemption cushion. First Digital publishes the specific ISIN identifiers of the Treasury holdings in its reports, which lets third parties trace the instruments rather than take the totals on trust.
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The reserve assets are held by First Digital Trust Limited, a Hong Kong company licensed as a Trust or Company Service Provider under the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing Ordinance and registered as a trust company under the Trustee Ordinance, Chapter 29 of the laws of Hong Kong. Under that structure, the reserve assets are held in trust and segregated from First Digital Trust's own corporate assets. Segregation is the mechanism intended to isolate token holders from the trust company's own bankruptcy.
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The reserves are attested monthly by Prescient Assurance, a New York-based audit firm founded in 2021. An attestation is a point-in-time verification: the auditor confirms that on a specific date the reserve assets met or exceeded the outstanding token balance and reports the instrument breakdown by category. This is the prevailing model across the major fiat-backed stablecoins in 2026. USDC carries monthly attestations, USDT carries quarterly ones, and none of the three publishes a continuous full financial audit of the issuing entity.
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The distinction between an attestation and a full audit matters and is worth stating plainly. An attestation checks reserve adequacy on the snapshot date against agreed-upon procedures. It does not opine on the issuer's complete financial statements, internal controls over the full year, or activity between snapshots. Critics of the stablecoin attestation model raise this point about every issuer that uses it, FDUSD included. First Digital's monthly cadence is more frequent than Tether's quarterly schedule and matches Circle's monthly one.
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FDUSD's backing structure is conventional for a fiat-collateralized stablecoin. The differences between issuers show up in custody jurisdiction, attestation cadence, and the precise asset mix rather than in the basic design. The table below sets the reserve facts side by side.
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The clearest structural difference is regulatory home. Circle and Paxos operate under US frameworks, with Paxos chartered by the New York Department of Financial Services. First Digital Trust is regulated under Hong Kong's Trustee Ordinance rather than US money-transmitter law or an EU license. That places FDUSD outside the US GENIUS Act issuer regime and outside the EU's MiCA authorization framework, both of which set their own reserve and reporting rules for tokens issued under them.
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FDUSD does not hold a MiCA license, which means EU-facing exchanges restrict it for European Economic Area residents the same way they restricted USDT. The EU framework sets a hard deadline of July 1, 2026 for stablecoin issuers to obtain authorization, with non-compliant tokens facing delisting from EU venues. Hong Kong's own Stablecoins Ordinance came into effect on August 1, 2025, establishing a licensing regime for fiat-referenced stablecoin issuers under the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, with the first licenses expected in the first half of 2026. How FDUSD's existing trust structure maps onto that newer regime is an open regulatory question rather than a settled fact.
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One contrast worth drawing is reporting frequency against the emerging legal baselines. The US GENIUS Act requires authorized issuers to publish monthly reserve reports prepared by registered accounting firms. FDUSD's monthly Prescient Assurance attestation matches that cadence even though First Digital is not a GENIUS Act issuer, which means the token's disclosure rhythm already resembles the schedule US-regulated tokens are converging on. Cadence alone does not equal a license, but it is the part of the reserve picture a reader can check most easily month to month.
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On April 2, 2025, FDUSD dropped to roughly $0.87, a deviation of about 13% from its dollar peg, within hours of public claims by Tron founder Justin Sun that First Digital was insolvent. Sun's statement framed a roughly $500 million exposure as evidence the issuer could not back the token. The price recovered toward $1.00 over the following days. The episode is the single most-cited stress event in FDUSD's history.
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First Digital responded the same day, stating that FDUSD remained fully backed and redeemable one-for-one and that every dollar backing the token was accounted for in short-dated US Treasury bills, with the ISIN identifiers of the reserves listed in its attestation report. An attestation by Prescient Assurance covering the period ending around that window reported FDUSD reserves of approximately $2.05 billion held in fixed deposits and US Treasuries, a figure that exceeded circulating supply at the time.
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The root of the dispute, as both First Digital and reporting at the time described it, traced to a separate $456 million conflict between Techteryx and First Digital over reserves tied to TrueUSD, a different stablecoin that First Digital had serviced. First Digital stated that the dispute concerned TUSD and did not touch FDUSD's own segregated reserves. The factual takeaway from the episode is narrow: the depeg was driven by a confidence shock and a claim the issuer denied, the published reserve assets at the time exceeded outstanding tokens, and the contested funds related to a different token rather than FDUSD's backing pool.
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Several categories of risk attach to any fiat-collateralized reserve, and FDUSD's are typical for its structure. Custody-concentration risk is the dependence on a single trust entity and its banking partners to hold and move the assets. Attestation risk is the gap inherent in point-in-time snapshots between reporting dates. Jurisdictional risk is the question of how a Hong Kong trust structure performs under stress and under the newer Stablecoins Ordinance. These describe the structure; they are not a forecast.
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Short-dated Treasury bills and overnight repos are among the most liquid and lowest-volatility dollar assets available, which is why issuers favour them. The reserve still carries the ordinary mechanics of any T-bill portfolio: instruments mature and roll, repo counterparties must perform, and bank cash sits with the deposit institutions holding it. First Digital's published ISIN-level disclosure lets third parties verify the specific holdings against the totals, which is more granular than the category-only breakdowns some issuers publish.
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FDUSD's heavy use on Binance, where it serves as a primary trading-pair currency, also concentrates demand and redemption flow through a small number of venues. That is a distribution characteristic rather than a reserve fact, but it shapes how quickly confidence shocks transmit to the price, as the April 2025 episode showed. The token issues natively on BNB Chain and Ethereum, with later deployments to Sui, Solana, and Arbitrum, so the same dollar reserve backs balances spread across multiple chains.
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The April 2025 sequence is the cleanest illustration of how these risk categories interact. The reserve itself did not fail: the attestation at the time showed assets above outstanding supply. What moved was confidence, transmitted fast through concentrated venues, on the back of a claim about a different token's reserves. A reader weighing the backing can separate those two layers. The reserve-adequacy question is answered by the attestation and the ISIN-level Treasury disclosure. The price-stability question depends additionally on where the token trades, who the dominant counterparties are, and how quickly redemption can absorb a rush. Both layers are real, and they are not the same layer.
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For anyone routing dollars across chains, the quality and verifiability of a stablecoin's reserve is part of the cost of holding it between transactions. A token that publishes monthly attestations with traceable ISIN-level Treasury holdings is easier to reason about than one that publishes totals alone. FDUSD's reserve disclosures sit toward the more granular end of that spectrum, which is useful context when a token spends time in a wallet mid-route rather than being held long term.
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Eco's stablecoin routing infrastructure moves dollar tokens across chains like Ethereum, BNB Chain, Solana, and Arbitrum, the same networks FDUSD is issued on, so users can hold the token that fits a given venue and move value where it needs to settle. Understanding what backs each token, and how often that backing is verified, is the groundwork for treating stablecoins as the settlement layer they are becoming. For the full issuer picture, read what is FDUSD, and for practical acquisition and movement, see how to buy FDUSD.
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FDUSD is backed by a reserve of short-dated US Treasury bills (roughly 85%), overnight reverse repurchase agreements collateralized by Treasuries (10 to 12%), and cash held at banks (3 to 5%), according to First Digital's attestation disclosures. The reserve is held in trust by First Digital Trust Limited in Hong Kong and segregated from the trust company's own assets.
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First Digital publishes monthly reserve attestations through the audit firm Prescient Assurance. The January 2026 report, released February 19, 2026, listed $456.1 million in tokens outstanding against $457.9 million in net reserve assets. These are point-in-time attestations rather than full financial audits, which is the prevailing model for major fiat-backed stablecoins.
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The reserves are held by First Digital Trust Limited, a Hong Kong trust company registered under the Trustee Ordinance (Chapter 29) and licensed under the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing Ordinance. The reserve assets are held in trust and segregated from the company's own corporate assets.
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FDUSD briefly fell to about $0.87 on April 2, 2025, after Tron founder Justin Sun publicly claimed First Digital was insolvent. First Digital denied the claim and pointed to an attestation showing roughly $2.05 billion in reserves exceeding circulating supply. The underlying dispute related to TrueUSD reserves rather than FDUSD's own backing, and the price recovered toward $1.00.
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Reserve composition, attestation totals, and custody structure are drawn from First Digital's published reserve reports and the First Digital transparency page. The January 2026 figures are from the report dated February 19, 2026. The April 2025 depeg account is reconstructed from contemporaneous reporting by Cointelegraph and the Prescient Assurance attestation referenced by Binance. Comparative reserve and regulatory context comes from Circle, Tether, and the Hong Kong Stablecoins Ordinance summary from Davis Polk. This article describes reserve structure and risk factually and does not assess the token's suitability for any purpose.
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