Tether has completed its first full independent financial audit, with KPMG U.S. issuing an unqualified opinion on the stablecoin issuer’s 2025 financial statements and confirming reserves exceeded liabilities by $6.8 billion at year end. For a company that spent a decade dodging the question, the milestone is hard to overstate, and competitors will now have to answer for their own paperwork.
The audit covered Tether International, S.A. de C.V.’s statements for the year ended December 31, 2025. An unqualified opinion is the cleanest result an auditor can issue: the financial statements present the company’s position fairly, in all material respects, under professional standards. The company described it as the largest inaugural financial audit in history.
The physical verification detail stands out. KPMG counted and inspected every individual gold bar in Tether’s custody, verifying existence and identifying information rather than relying on custodian reports. The audit covered the full balance sheet, income statement, equity changes, and cash flows, with independent substantive testing across each area.
From attestations to a real audit
Until now, Tether’s transparency rested on monthly attestations from BDO Italia. An attestation confirms a snapshot of reserves at a point in time. It is not the same thing as an audit, which examines the accounting systems behind the numbers across a full reporting period. Critics, including short sellers and several state financial regulators over the years, have pointed at that gap since the company’s earliest days.
The path here was visible. In March, the Financial Times reported Tether had engaged KPMG for the first full financial statement audit of the $184 billion issuer, with PwC hired in parallel to prepare internal systems. At the time, skeptics noted that previous audit promises from the company had gone quiet. This one shipped.
CEO Paolo Ardoino did not hide the vindication. “For years, some detractors said an audit of Tether could not be completed,” he said in the company’s announcement.
“This is a defining moment for the stablecoin industry,” Ardoino said, framing the audit as a benchmark for financial scrutiny across the stablecoin market rather than a one-off for his own company.
What the numbers show
The audit confirms the reserve surplus at $6.814 billion as of December 31, 2025. Earlier attestation data fill in the picture around it: Tether’s Q3 2025 attestation showed reserves of $181.22 billion against $174.45 billion in liabilities, with year-to-date profit above $10 billion and roughly $135 billion in US Treasury exposure, a figure that would place the company near 17th among sovereign holders if it were a country.
| Metric | Figure |
|---|---|
| Auditor | KPMG U.S. |
| Period covered | FY 2025 (ended Dec. 31, 2025) |
| Opinion | Unqualified |
| Reserve surplus | $6.814 billion |
| USDT in circulation | About $184 billion |
Why it matters beyond Tether
The timing is not incidental. US stablecoin legislation has pushed issuers toward formal reporting and reserve requirements, and the CLARITY Act debate in the Senate has kept market-structure scrutiny high. An audited Tether removes the most common argument for excluding USDT from regulated venues, and it pressures Circle, the issuer of USDC, which already publishes monthly attestations but has not completed a comparable full audit of its own financial statements.
The remaining questions are practical. An audit of 2025 financials does not disclose what Tether’s reserve mix looks like today, and the company’s known holdings of gold and bitcoin introduce valuation volatility that Treasury-heavy competitors do not carry. Quarterly attestations from BDO continue in parallel; Tether’s most recent one covered June 30, 2026, showing issuance near $184.6 billion.
Still, the structural fact has changed. The largest stablecoin issuer in the market now has a Big Four audit behind it, something as recently as March that industry watchers treated as unlikely. Whether competitors follow, and whether regulators treat audits as sufficient, will shape the next phase of the stablecoin market more than any single reserve report.
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