Tether said KPMG U.S. completed the first full financial audit in its history — an unqualified opinion on its FY2025 statements showing reserves exceeding liabilities by $6.814 billion behind the world's largest stablecoin. Auditors tested transactions, systems, and counterparties, and physically counted the gold bars.
Tether said KPMG U.S. completed the first full financial audit in its history — an unqualified opinion on its FY2025 statements showing reserves exceeding liabilities by $6.814 billion behind the world's largest stablecoin. Auditors tested transactions, systems, and counterparties, and physically counted the gold bars.
Tether announced Thursday (Aug 13) that KPMG U.S. — one of the Big Four — audited Tether International's financial statements for the year ended Dec 31, 2025 and issued an unqualified opinion: the statements fairly present the company's financial position, results, and cash flows under US GAAP. A KPMG U.S. spokesperson confirmed the opinion, citing client confidentiality for anything further.
The audited statements showed Tether's reserves exceeding liabilities by $6.814 billion at the end of 2025, backing a USDT market capitalization that has swelled to over $180 billion. The audit went beyond Tether's prior quarterly attestations: KPMG examined transactions, systems, valuations, counterparties, and ownership records — including a physical inspection of Tether's gold bars. Tether called it 'the largest inaugural financial audit in history.'
For years Tether relied on quarterly reserve attestations — point-in-time checks — published since its 2021 settlement with the New York Attorney General. Critics kept asking why a firm of this size had never faced the same scrutiny as large financial institutions. Tether hired a Big Four firm in March 2026; the audit landed five months later. The milestone arrives the same summer the OCC began moving stablecoin issuance into the regulated banking perimeter — Circle received a national trust charter in July (over $73B USDC), and World Liberty Trust Co. won conditional approval on Aug 14 (USD1).
USDT is core market infrastructure — the recurring 'is Tether fully backed' debate was crypto's most persistent systemic-risk question. An unqualified Big Four opinion removes the single biggest objection institutions had to holding and settling in USDT. The caveats: the audited surplus is a Dec 31, 2025 snapshot (CoinDesk reported July 31 that Q2 2026 operating profit was $1.5B while the reserve buffer fell by half), and Tether has not said whether it will publish KPMG's full findings. An audit standard that repeats annually — like the attestations did — is what would make this structural rather than one-off.
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