KPMG issued an unqualified opinion on Tether International's full-year 2025 accounts—the cleanest possible audit result, meaning the firm had no reservations about how the financial statements were presented. The announcement came Aug. 13 in an official press release from Tether, which described the review as the "largest inaugural financial audit in history." An unqualified opinion does not mean KPMG is endorsing the business or guaranteeing Tether can meet its obligations; it means the statements were prepared without material misstatement.
The scope of the review was broad. KPMG examined Tether's assets, liabilities, income, cash flows, internal systems, records, counterparties and supporting documentation. On the reserve side, auditors went further than desk review: they physically counted and inspected every individual gold bar held by Tether, verifying the existence and identifying information of each bar rather than relying on reports from custodians. Tether disclosed the surplus figure in the announcement—reserves exceed liabilities by $6.814 billion.
The audit had been in preparation since at least March of this year, when Tether confirmed it had hired a Big Four firm without naming it. Days after that disclosure, KPMG was identified as the auditor of record for USDT, with PwC brought in separately to help prepare Tether's internal systems ahead of the review.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino addressed critics directly in a post tied to the announcement. "Despite our company being subject to several years of detractors' false claims, competitors' lies, political attacks and misinformed coverage by several mainstream newspapers trying desperately to discredit us for the benefit of their friends in the tall ivory towers, Tether delivered what it promised," Ardoino said. He added: "Our company has evolved 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."
The backdrop to the announcement is a long paper trail of regulatory penalties. In Feb. 2021, Tether settled with the New York Attorney General, paying an $18.5 million fine over a gap in its finances. Eight months later, in Oct. 2021, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined Tether $41 million over claims that USDT was not fully backed by U.S. dollars at all times as the company had represented. Both actions kept Tether's reserve adequacy under sustained scrutiny from regulators and critics for the years that followed.
The choice of KPMG carries weight in context. Tether had relied on attestations—point-in-time snapshots of reserves prepared by smaller accounting firms—rather than a full-scope audit. An attestation is not an audit: it verifies a balance at a specific moment but does not test internal controls, review counterparty relationships or examine cash flow statements. The KPMG engagement covers all of those, making it structurally more rigorous than anything Tether had previously published.
For USDT, which operates as the primary settlement layer across most DeFi protocols, centralized exchanges and cross-border payment flows, the audit touches a structural dependency that spans the entire on-chain ecosystem. USDT is the dominant stablecoin by total supply and remains the most used stablecoin for liquidity pairs on AMMs and lending markets. Reserve uncertainty at Tether has historically been cited as a systemic risk in DeFi, where protocol TVL and collateral ratios depend on stablecoin pegs holding under stress.
The timing of the audit also fits Tether's push into the U.S. market. The GENIUS Act, the federal stablecoin law signed in 2025, established reserve and audit requirements for payment stablecoin issuers operating in the United States. A full-scope Big Four opinion on 2025 financials positions Tether to meet those standards—or to argue it already does—as the regulatory framework takes effect.
The $6.814 billion surplus figure is the most specific reserve disclosure Tether has made in a formal audited context. Prior quarterly attestations reported reserve compositions—Treasury bills, money-market funds, gold, Bitcoin—but the surplus margin was not subject to independent verification at the same level. KPMG's physical gold count adds a layer of verification that attestation-only disclosures could not provide.
What the opinion does not resolve is whether KPMG's findings cover Tether's full corporate structure or only Tether International as a legal entity. The press release specifies Tether International as the audited party. Tether operates across multiple jurisdictions and corporate entities; the scope boundary matters for anyone trying to assess total group exposure. That question was not addressed in the Aug. 13 announcement.
