KPMG U.S. issued an unqualified opinion on the 2025 financial statements of Tether International, S.A. de C.V. The company announced the result Thursday. The question of whether Tether would ever submit its books to a full independent audit had followed USDT for nearly a decade.
An unqualified opinion comes with no reservations or exceptions. It is the strongest conclusion an independent auditor can reach.
The audited statements show reserves exceeding liabilities by $6.814 billion at year-end 2025. Tether describes the engagement as the largest inaugural financial audit in history.
What KPMG actually examined
The audit went well beyond the quarterly reserve attestations that BDO Italia has prepared for Tether over the years. KPMG reviewed the full balance sheet, covering the assets behind the issued tokens and the liabilities they represent. The examination extended to the income statement and the cash flow statement, with each area subject to independent substantive testing.
One part of the process stood apart. Auditors physically counted and inspected every individual gold bar held by Tether. Each bar was verified for existence and identity, not through custodian or counterparty records alone.
"KPMG did not simply review a set of headline figures," Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said. "KPMG conducted a full and thorough audit in accordance with AICPA standards - examining the assets, transactions, systems, documentation, and other evidence supporting our financial statements. The result is an unqualified opinion; in other words, it means Tether has a clean audit."
Nearly a decade of broken timelines
Tether first promised a full audit in 2017, when it hired accounting firm Friedman LLP. That relationship ended without a completed audit. Years of executive statements followed. Each promised the same result.
In 2021, Tether paid $18.5 million to settle with the New York Attorney General over claims about its reserves. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined the company $41 million that same year. The CFTC found that Tether held sufficient fiat reserves to back USDT in circulation for only 27.6% of the days in a 26-month sample from 2016 through 2018. The regulator also found that Tether had told customers every token was backed by an equivalent amount of fiat currency, while its reserves at times included unsecured receivables and non-fiat assets.
Tether moved to quarterly reserve attestations after those settlements. BDO Italia replaced MHA Cayman on those reports in 2022, which Tether described at the time as a step toward a complete audit. A SOC 2 Type 1 examination followed in 2024, which covered IT and security controls, but stopped short of the financial statements.
"For years, some detractors said an audit of Tether could not be completed. 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," Ardoino said.
In March, Tether announced it had signed with a Big Four accounting firm. The company did not name the firm at the time. The Financial Times, citing anonymous sources, reported that Tether hired KPMG and also brought in PwC to help prepare its internal systems for the audit. Tether's Thursday announcement made no mention of PwC.
The scale of the business today
USDT now carries a market capitalization of roughly $183 billion to $184 billion, about 61% of the total stablecoin market according to DefiLlama data. Circle's USDC, the nearest rival, held $72 billion at the time of that comparison.
Tether generated more than $10 billion in net profit in 2025. In the second quarter of 2026, the company reported $1.5 billion in net operating profit, with U.S. Treasury holdings and repurchase agreements as the primary income sources. The BDO attestation for Q1 2026 reported an $8.23 billion excess reserve buffer. The Q2 2026 report put USDT issuance at roughly $184.6 billion, with more than 146 tons of gold behind Tether Gold.
"This is a landmark moment for Tether and for the industry we serve - a milestone in Tether's commitment to transparency," said Simon McWilliams, Tether's chief financial officer. "We subjected our financial statements to the scrutiny of a Big Four audit, one of the most ambitious projects in the Company's history, and completed it with the highest priority following the announcement of our signing with a Big Four auditor. This was our Finance team stepping into the highest league and leading in it."
Outside the stablecoin business, Tether put $20 million into Argentine neobank Ualá this year and led a $50 million funding round for AI sleep technology company Eight Sleep. Despite its scale, CEO Ardoino has shown little interest in a public listing. He wrote on X in June 2025:
"No need to go public."
Ardoino has put the user count at more than 650 million people, concentrated in emerging markets where USDT functions as a dollar substitute for savings and cross-border transactions.
"People may describe this as the end of a long journey, but we see it as the beginning of the next one," he said. "Tether has evolved from a disruptive stablecoin issuer into one of the most financially significant and operationally sophisticated private companies in the world. This audit demonstrates that our financial infrastructure and governance have evolved alongside that responsibility. Today, more than 650 million users across all emerging markets continue to rely on Tether daily, choosing USD(T) as their currency, for their life savings, for their commerce, for the future of their children."
Matvii Diadkov
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