Tether, the company behind the world’s largest stablecoin, said it has completed its first independent audit by a Big Four accounting firm—a milestone the company had been promising for nearly a decade and critics had long said would never come.
KPMG U.S. issued an unqualified opinion on Tether International’s full 2025 financial statements, which showed the company’s reserves exceeding liabilities by $6.814 billion at the end of last year. An unqualified opinion—also called a “clean” opinion—is the strongest result an auditor can give, meaning no reservations or caveats were attached.
“For years, some detractors said an audit of Tether could not be completed,” Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said in a statement. “They said the Company refused to subject itself to the most rigorous scrutiny. We have once again proven them wrong. Completing our financial statement audit sets a new standard for the industry and reflects the leadership we’ve brought to this market from the start.”
The audit is a meaningful step beyond the quarterly reserve attestations Tether has published for years—first required after settling an investigation with the New York Attorney General’s office in 2021. Unlike attestations, which provide a snapshot of reserves at a specific point in time, a full financial audit tests transactions, systems, assets, and the evidence underlying them.
Wen Tether audit? nOw.
Today Tether announces its first full financial audit for Tether International, conducted by KPMG U.S. which resulted in an unqualified clean opinion, marking the highest result possible.
An unqualified opinion is the best possible audit opinion an… pic.twitter.com/quav6uUIhy— Paolo Ardoino 🤖 (@paoloardoino) August 13, 2026
As part of the process, Tether said KPMG physically counted and inspected every individual gold bar the company holds, “verifying the existence and identifying information of each bar rather than relying solely on reports from custodians or counterparties.” All assets and statements were subject to “independent substantive testing and verification,” Tether said.
The company’s USDT stablecoin has a market capitalization of over $183 billion, accounting for roughly 61% of the entire stablecoin market, with Circle’s USDC a distant second at around $72 billion.
“Tether has evolved from a disruptive stablecoin issuer into one of the most financially significant and operationally sophisticated private companies in the world,” Ardoino continued in the company’s official statement. “This audit demonstrates that our financial infrastructure and governance have evolved alongside that responsibility.”
A long time coming
Tether first promised a full financial audit in 2017, when it hired accounting firm Friedman LLP, but the relationship ended without one being completed. In the following years, Tether executives repeatedly said a full audit was coming. In 2021, Tether paid $18.5 million to settle with the New York Attorney General over claims about its reserves, and a separate $41 million CFTC fine over misleading statements that USDT was fully backed by U.S. dollars.
Tether formally announced its selection of a Big Four firm in March 2026, with the KPMG engagement covering the fiscal year ending December 31, 2025.
KPMG’s unqualified opinion addressed whether the statements were fairly presented under U.S. GAAP—the standard accounting framework used in the United States. The claim about it being “the largest inaugural financial audit in history” came from Tether itself, not from KPMG.
Most importnatly, Tether did not release the underlying audit alongside its announcement.
Without the statements themselves, counterparties, regulators, and analysts cannot examine the composition of the reserves, the nature of the liabilities, or the accounting treatments applied. Notes, accounting policies, and related-party disclosures—the detail that allows outside analysts to stress-test the numbers rather than simply accept a headline figure — remain unavailable
The reserve cushion it verified has also declined materially since then. Tether’s own second-quarter attestation, published July 31 and prepared by BDO, recorded $4.11 billion in excess reserves as of June 30, 2026—roughly 40% below the $6.814 billion figure KPMG verified. The cushion shrank even as Tether booked around $1.5 billion in net operating profit, suggesting unrealized losses or outflows elsewhere in the reserve. Spot gold, which Tether holds in significant quantities, fell more than 20% from its January record.
Neither did Tether mention its Bitcoin holdings in its official announcement. According to data from Arkham Intelligence, the company holds nearly $60 billion in Bitcoin in its reserves—a position that has grown substantially in recent years alongside its gold and U.S. Treasury holdings.