Tether International, S.A. de C.V. announced on August 13 that KPMG U.S. issued an unqualified opinion on its 2025 financial statements — the first time a Big Four accounting firm has audited the company behind the world’s largest stablecoin.
The audit, conducted under AICPA standards and U.S. GAAP, confirmed that as of December 31, 2025, reserves backing roughly $180 billion in USDT exceeded liabilities by $6.814 billion. KPMG physically counted and inspected every gold bar held by the company, and tested transactions, systems, valuations, counterparties, and ownership records. Tether characterized the engagement as “the largest inaugural financial audit in history.”
CoinDesk and Reuters reported the announcement, with KPMG confirming the unqualified opinion through a spokesperson while declining further comment on client confidentiality grounds.
“For years, some detractors said an audit of Tether could not be completed,” CEO Paolo Ardoino said. “We have once again proven them wrong. Completing our financial statement audit sets a new standard for the industry and reflects the leadership we have brought to this market from the start.”
The milestone addresses a question that has trailed Tether since the company settled with the New York Attorney General’s office in 2021: why an entity managing a $180 billion liability had never undergone a full financial audit. The company had relied on quarterly reserve attestations from BDO Italia, which provide a snapshot of assets at a specific date but do not examine internal controls, transaction flows, or the accounting processes underneath.
But the announcement contains a structural absence. Tether did not publish the underlying balance sheet, income statement, or the full KPMG report. Market participants are left to rely on Tether’s summary of the findings rather than an independent review of the complete financial data. The gap between “Big Four signed off” and “here are the books” is the kind of structural ambiguity that tends to persist in this market.
The year-end figures also arrive against a backdrop of subsequent pressure. Our July 1 analysis of the BDO Italia Q2 2026 attestation showed the excess reserve buffer had dropped to $4.11 billion, down from $8.23 billion in Q1 — a 50% decline in a single quarter while USDT supply grew by roughly $446 million. The Q2 attestation also stripped out dollar valuations for gold and removed bitcoin valuations entirely, a retreat from prior disclosure practices.
Regulatory alignment remains incomplete. Under the GENIUS Act, which defines eligible collateral for stablecoin reserves, Tether’s holdings of gold and bitcoin fall outside the statutory framework. The company has engaged both KPMG and PwC to prepare its internal systems for U.S. expansion, and introduced the USAT product through Anchorage Digital, but the core USDT product remains outside the GENIUS Act’s compliance perimeter.
The audit closes one chapter — the long-running debate about whether a Big Four firm would ever touch Tether’s books. It opens another: whether the market will treat a clean opinion on year-end 2025 figures, released without the underlying financial statements, as sufficient institutional validation when the next set of quarterly numbers tells a materially different story about reserve adequacy.