Tether’s audit of its 2025 financial statements has cleared KPMG U.S. with an unqualified opinion, the accounting term for a clean result with no exceptions or caveats.
The stablecoin issuer announced the result on August 13, 2026, confirming that Tether International, S.A. de C.V. held reserves exceeding its liabilities by $6.814 billion for the year ended December 31, 2025. It is the first completed financial statement audit in the company’s history, after years of relying on quarterly attestations instead.
KPMG Physically Counted Every Gold Bar in Tether’s Vaults
According to Tether’s announcement, KPMG reviewed the full balance sheet, income statement, changes in equity, and cash flow statements rather than a narrower slice of reserve data.
As part of that work, auditors physically counted and inspected every individual gold bar Tether holds, checking each bar’s identifying markings instead of relying on custodian reports alone. Paolo Ardoino, Tether’s CEO, called the result “a defining moment for the stablecoin industry” and said it answers years of claims that a full audit of the company could never be completed.
Simon McWilliams, Tether’s Chief Financial Officer, said the audited statements confirm the same reserve strength shown in the company’s quarterly attestations, which BDO has prepared throughout 2026.
The Big Four Engagement That Started Five Months Earlier
Tether first flagged this work in a March announcement that it had formally engaged a Big Four accounting firm, without naming which of the four networks had taken the assignment. USDT’s market capitalization stood above $184 billion at the time, a detail reported in our coverage of Tether’s Big Four audit signing back in March.
The gap between that announcement and this week’s result matters beyond Tether alone, since institutional partners and regulators increasingly treat a completed audit, not a quarterly attestation, as the baseline for stablecoin credibility across the broader crypto market.
What this means for you: If you hold or move USDT, nothing changes about your day-to-day access to funds. What does change is that the reserve figures Tether reports each quarter now sit behind a Big Four audit opinion rather than the company’s own attestation process alone. Watch whether Tether names KPMG directly in its next quarterly report or continues to credit BDO for that separate work.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Do your own research before making any investment decisions.
