Tether has promised a Big Four audit for roughly a decade. On August 13, 2026, it finally produced one — and the number at the center of it has already moved.
What Did KPMG's Audit of Tether Actually Find?
KPMG U.S. issued an unqualified — meaning clean — opinion on the full-year 2025 financial statements of Tether International, S.A. de C.V., the entity Tether identifies as the issuer of USDT . The audited statements showed reserves exceeding liabilities by $6.814 billion as of December 31, 2025, a figure attributed to CFO Simon McWilliams . It is the first full financial-statement audit in the company's history.
Quick Answer: KPMG U.S. gave Tether International, S.A. de C.V. an unqualified opinion on its 2025 financial statements, the first full audit Tether has ever cleared. Audited reserves exceeded liabilities by $6.814 billion as of December 31, 2025 — a backward-looking figure that Tether's own June 2026 attestation has since put at $4.11 billion.
The distinction from Tether's usual disclosure matters. Quarterly attestations confirm asset balances at a single point in time; the KPMG engagement covered a complete set of statements — balance sheet, income statement, statement of changes in equity and cash flow statement — under U.S. GAAP and AICPA professional standards, the same framework applied to U.S. public-company audits .
What the scope included, per Tether's own description:
- Transactions, internal systems, ownership records and valuations
- Counterparties and supporting evidence behind reserve claims
- A physical count and inspection of every individual gold bar Tether holds, verifying existence and identifying information bar by bar rather than relying solely on custodian reports
That last procedure is the most-quoted detail, and it addresses a specific credibility gap: Tether's reserves include assets that cannot be confirmed by a bank statement.
"This is a defining moment for the stablecoin industry. For years, some detractors said an audit of Tether could not be completed... We have once again proven them wrong," — Paolo Ardoino, CEO at Tether (source: Tether, 2026-08).
Ardoino's framing is fair on its own terms. The caveats sit elsewhere — in what was published, what was covered, and how much of that $6.814 billion cushion is still there.
What Changed: A Real Audit, Not Another Attestation
The difference is the product, not the auditor's brand name. For years Tether's reserve reporting came from BDO Italia's quarterly reasonable-assurance attestations, which confirm asset and liability balances on a single calendar day. The KPMG U.S. engagement covered a full set of financial statements — balance sheet, income statement, statement of changes in equity and cash flow statement — for the year ended December 31, 2025, under U.S. GAAP and AICPA standards .
How the two differ in practice:
- Attestation (BDO Italia, quarterly): point-in-time balances, no coverage of activity before or after the reporting date, no opinion on the financial statements as a whole .
- Audit (KPMG U.S., annual): full-year statements, internal systems, ownership records, valuations, counterparties and supporting evidence, ending in an unqualified opinion .
- Physical verification: KPMG counted and inspected every individual gold bar Tether holds, checking existence and identifying details rather than relying only on custodian reports .
Getting there took setup. Tether engaged KPMG in March 2026 and separately brought in PwC to prepare internal systems, as the San Salvador-headquartered issuer positioned for U.S. expansion and a capital raise reported at up to $20 billion . A Big Four audit had been promised for roughly a decade.
That promise sits against an enforcement record. In February 2021, the New York Attorney General announced an $18.5 million settlement with Bitfinex and Tether, stating the firms overstated reserves and concealed roughly $850 million in losses . In October 2021, the CFTC ordered Tether-related entities to pay $41 million, finding fiat reserves fully covered USDT on only 27.6% of days in a sampled 26-month period from 2016 to 2018, with no audits during that window .
Measured against that baseline, a clean opinion from a Big Four firm with physical asset inspection is a real governance shift — a change in the evidence standard, not merely in the reporting cadence.
Why It Matters: The Audited Surplus Has Already Halved
The $6.814 billion surplus KPMG signed off on is a December 31, 2025 figure, and Tether's own later disclosure shows the cushion has since shrunk by roughly half. BDO Italia's reasonable-assurance report for June 30, 2026, published July 31, 2026, put total assets at $187,751,426,411 against total liabilities of $183,641,897,215 — excess assets of about $4.11 billion, down from $8.23 billion at the end of Q1 2026 .
Relative to supply, the buffer fell from roughly 4.5% to roughly 2.2% in a single quarter . That is the number USDT holders are actually exposed to today — the live balance sheet, not the audited snapshot from eight months earlier.
The mechanism matters as much as the size. The decline came from mark-to-market losses on volatile reserve assets, not from selling them off. Tether added to both gold and bitcoin during the quarter while the dollar value of each holding fell .
| Reserve asset | Q1 2026 | Q2 2026 (Jun 30) | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gold (tonnage) | 132.2 t | 146.2 t | Holdings up |
| Gold (reported value) | $19.84B | $18.84B | Value down (~15% price drop, to ~$4,000/oz) |
| Bitcoin (coins) | ~97,137 BTC | 98,933 BTC | Holdings up (+~1,796 BTC) |
| Bitcoin (reported value) | $6.62B | $5.80B | Value down (~$68,200 → ~$58,600 valuation price) |
| Excess assets | $8.23B | $4.11B | Buffer roughly halved |
Two further points frame the risk :
- Earnings are still strong: Q2 operating profit came in near $1.5 billion, up from about $1.04 billion in Q1, driven mainly by T-bills and repos .
- The bulk of reserves remains conservative — $114.96 billion in U.S. Treasury bills and $18.63 billion in overnight reverse repos — with volatility concentrated in the $18.84 billion precious-metals and $5.80 billion bitcoin sleeves.
- BDO's report explicitly limits its assurance to a single point in time, excludes activity before or after June 30, 2026, and assumes normal trading conditions rather than extraordinary stress or custodian illiquidity.
A clean historical opinion and a thinning current cushion are not contradictory findings; they answer different questions. The audit tells you what was verifiably there at year-end 2025. The attestation tells you how much room sits above liabilities right now — and that figure has been moving in one direction.
What to Watch Next
The next verifiable checkpoints are disclosure, recurrence, and scope — not the headline surplus. Tether announced KPMG U.S.'s unqualified opinion on August 13, 2026 but did not publish the audited financial statements, the signed audit report, or the accompanying notes . Until those documents appear, the year-end 2025 reserve composition behind the $6.814 billion figure stays outside public view, and a KPMG U.S. spokesperson declined to comment further, citing client confidentiality .
Four open items are worth tracking directly:
- Full statements and notes. Whether Tether releases the balance sheet, income statement and accounting-treatment notes, or leaves the opinion as a standalone claim .
- Audited entity scope. The opinion covers Tether International, S.A. de C.V. Whether that entity captures the full Tether corporate group is not established by the available materials — treat group-wide coverage as unverified .
- Recurrence. Whether KPMG audits become an annual fixture or this remains a one-time engagement. Tether hired KPMG in March 2026 and brought in PwC to prepare internal systems .
- Disclosure granularity. Q2 2026 attestation detail thinned — gold reported by weight without dollar valuation, bitcoin dollar values absent, T-bill maturity composition undisclosed .
Separately, a clean audit is not GENIUS Act compliance. The statute limits reserves to high-quality liquid assets — cash, T-bills of 93 days or less, repos, money market funds and Federal Reserve balances — and explicitly excludes gold and bitcoin, which together accounted for roughly $24.6 billion of Tether's mid-2026 reserves . Tether's answer for the U.S. market is USAT, a separate dollar-backed token issued through Anchorage Digital Bank.
The practical takeaway: treat the KPMG opinion as a governance upgrade, not a live solvency reading. The number that moves with your risk is the current buffer — $4.11 billion at June 30, 2026, or about 2.2% of supply . Watch the next quarterly attestation and whether the audited statements are published; those two documents, not the August headline, will show whether transparency held.
Frequently asked questions
What did Tether's KPMG audit actually find?
KPMG U.S. issued an unqualified — clean — opinion on the full-year 2025 financial statements of Tether International, S.A. de C.V., the entity Tether names as the USDT issuer. The audited statements showed reserves exceeding liabilities by $6.814 billion as of December 31, 2025 . The engagement ran under U.S. GAAP and AICPA standards and covered the balance sheet, income statement, changes in equity and cash flow statement. Procedurally, KPMG physically counted and inspected every individual gold bar Tether holds rather than relying on custodian reports alone .
Why did Tether's reserve surplus drop from $6.8B to $4.1B?
The two figures describe different dates, not a single sequence of losses. The $6.814 billion is the audited December 31, 2025 position; BDO's reasonable-assurance report for June 30, 2026 put excess assets at $4,109,529,196, down from $8.23 billion at the end of Q1 2026 . The driver was mark-to-market, not selling: Tether's gold holdings rose to 146.2 metric tons from 132.2 while their reported value fell to $18.84 billion, and bitcoin holdings rose to 98,933 BTC while their reported value fell to $5.80 billion .
Does this audit mean Tether is GENIUS Act compliant?
No. The GENIUS Act limits stablecoin reserves to high-quality liquid assets — cash, short-term Treasury bills, repos, money market funds and Federal Reserve balances — and explicitly excludes gold and bitcoin, which together accounted for roughly $24.6 billion of Tether's mid-2026 reserves . A clean historical audit opinion addresses none of the statute's reserve-composition, licensing or ongoing-audit requirements. Tether's answer for the regulated U.S. market is a separate token, USAT (USA₮), issued through Anchorage Digital Bank .
Has Tether released the full audited financial statements?
No. Tether announced the opinion and the headline surplus figure, but the audited financial statements, the accompanying notes and the signed audit report have not been published . That leaves year-end 2025 reserve composition, the nature of the liabilities and specific accounting treatments outside public view. A KPMG U.S. spokesperson confirmed the unqualified opinion on Tether International's 2025 statements but declined further comment, citing client confidentiality .
Does the audit cover all of Tether's operations?
The opinion covers Tether International, S.A. de C.V., the San Salvador-headquartered entity Tether identifies as the issuer of USDT . Whether that entity captures the full Tether corporate group is not established by the materials released so far, and the announcement does not address corporate hierarchy. Traders should treat "the whole Tether group is audited" as unverified until the statements or a group-level scope description are published .
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