KPMG U.S., one of the Big Four accounting firms, has issued Tether an unqualified opinion on its full 2025 financial statements — the most favorable assessment an independent auditor can give. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino called it “the largest inaugural audit in the history of finance,” by his estimate at least an order of magnitude larger than any first-time audit before it.
The distinction matters because of what Tether has relied on until now. For years, the world's largest stablecoin issuer published periodic attestations — point-in-time snapshots confirming reserves matched liabilities on a given date — rather than a full financial-statement audit covering a complete fiscal year's transactions, liabilities, internal systems and controls. That gap fueled persistent industry skepticism about USDT's backing, skepticism this audit is explicitly designed to close.
Counting Every Gold Bar
KPMG's verification went beyond paperwork. Rather than relying solely on custodian reports, the firm physically counted and inspected every individual gold bar Tether holds, confirming both existence and the identifying markings on each bar. In its own announcement of the results, Tether quoted Ardoino summing up the process bluntly:
No rock was left unturned. Tether has all the gold it says it has. Now reviewed by KPMG.
The Scale Behind the Headline
The numbers underlying the audit are substantial. Under Tether's most recent BDO-reviewed quarterly attestation, for the period ended June 30, 2026, total assets stood at $187.75 billion against liabilities of $183.64 billion — an excess reserve buffer of roughly $4.11 billion. Gold holdings reached 146 tonnes worth about $18.8 billion, or roughly 10% of reserves, after Tether added 14 tonnes during the quarter. USDT in circulation hit $184.6 billion, and the company remains one of the world's largest holders of U.S. Treasuries, whose interest income helped drive $1.5 billion in net operating profit for the quarter alone.
That scale of Treasury exposure means Tether's profitability is increasingly tied to the same macro currents moving traditional markets — including the rate-cut bets that recently helped push the S&P 500 above 7,800 for the first time on cooling inflation data.
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Closing the Trust Gap
A full-year audit is a different animal from a quarterly attestation: it tests a company's internal controls and systems over time rather than confirming a single balance-sheet snapshot, which is precisely why Tether is framing this one as historic rather than routine. The move also lands as regulated competitors built around frameworks like the GENIUS Act put new pressure on every stablecoin issuer to demonstrate exactly what sits behind each token in circulation — pressure Tether is now betting a Big Four audit opinion can help it withstand.
