People profile
In-House Experts, Senior Bitcoin Developer
Norma Escobar, BBA, AWS CCP, is a Senior Bitcoin Developer at Kingston Ross Pasnak LLP in Edmonton, Alberta. She is a developer first: she has spent her career on the other side of the table, designing and building complex systems, and she brings that builder’s view to the firm’s digital-asset assurance and SOC 2 engagements. She joined KRP in 2021 on Justin Rousseau’s audit team and works alongside the partners on cryptocurrency audits, blockchain verification for external auditors, and Bitcoin agreed-upon procedures for exchanges, trading platforms, custodians, treasuries, and funds.
Because she has built the kind of systems she now examines, Norma can sit down with a client’s engineers, read their architecture, and know which questions matter. On a digital-asset engagement that means scoping what evidence exists on-chain and in the client’s systems, confirming it is complete and reliable, and putting it in a form that stands up in an audit file. On SOC 2 work it means looking at a software company’s controls the way an engineer would, and helping the team get ready for a readiness assessment or a Type 1 or Type 2 report without slowing their release cycle.
Audit support and attestation for businesses holding or handling digital assets. Results are based entirely on on-chain data.
Independent verification and specialist reporting for audit teams that need technical documentation of digital-asset holdings but lack in-house blockchain capacity.
Defined procedures over Bitcoin data and Bitcoin-related systems, performed exactly as specified in the engagement letter.
Does the system do what the vendor says?
Norma works primarily within the Bitcoin network. She has run and queried Bitcoin nodes, worked directly with raw protocol data, and built systems that reconstruct wallet balances and transaction histories from institutional-scale datasets: exchanges, trading platforms, liquidity providers, custodians, treasuries, and funds. That hands-on engineering is what lets her speak directly with a client’s developers and operators, and then explain the results in terms an auditor, lender, or investor can rely on.
Her cloud and security certifications carry into the SOC 2 practice, where she works with clients on control design and evidence across the Trust Services Criteria. Clients reach her directly throughout an engagement, and she works with the same partners from scoping to issuance.