Tether has received an unqualified opinion—the cleanest possible audit result, meaning KPMG found no reservations about the financial statements—covering the year ending Dec. 31, 2025. It is the first time a Big Four accounting firm has completed a full independent audit of the company's books. KPMG confirmed the result directly: "We can confirm that we issued an unqualified opinion on Tether International, S.A. de C.V.'s financial statements in accordance with AICPA standards for the year ending December 31, 2025."
Tether's own statement said its numbers "present fairly, in all material respects, the financial position" of the company and that results and cash flows were consistent with the accounting framework used in the audit. That language tracks standard audit sign-off language and leaves no ambiguity about the result itself.
The problem is that Tether did not release the report. The world has KPMG's confirmation that an unqualified opinion was issued and Tether's summary of what it says. The underlying document—the actual audit—is not public. Regulators and large institutional counterparties may have access to the details, but retail users holding USDT are being asked to trust the summary.
The distinction between this audit and what Tether has produced before is critical. For years, Tether published quarterly reserve attestations—snapshots prepared by a third party that check whether reported assets match reported liabilities at a single point in time. An attestation is not an audit. A full audit examines accounting controls, transaction flows, internal processes and the accuracy of financial statements across an entire year. The two are not comparable, and the absence of a full audit was the central transparency complaint against Tether for most of its existence.
That complaint had real consequences. Tether pursued a $500 billion valuation and attempted to raise $20 billion from outside investors. Some investors refused to commit because the company had never been audited. The fundraising effort was paused while the audit was pending and as the broader crypto market cooled. The $20 billion raise has not closed.
The company's legal history adds context to why the audit matters. In February 2021, Tether settled with New York's attorney general, who had alleged that Tether and its affiliate Bitfinex misrepresented their reserves and mixed client funds with exchange funds. That same year, the two companies paid a $42.5 million fine to settle related claims brought by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, with both firms denying wrongdoing. Those settlements did not require Tether to produce a full audit, and the company spent the following four years publishing attestations instead.
Tether issues USDT, the largest stablecoin by circulation at $184 billion. A stablecoin's entire value proposition rests on the issuer holding sufficient reserves to redeem every token at one dollar. An independent audit is the strongest verification mechanism available to prove those reserves exist and are accurately reported. Attestations check a balance sheet at a moment in time; they do not test how that balance sheet was constructed or whether the accounting practices behind it are sound.
KPMG's involvement carries weight on its own. Getting a Big Four firm to take on a stablecoin issuer audit has been difficult—earlier attempts by Tether to secure such a relationship did not result in completed engagements. The firm confirmed its work was conducted under AICPA standards, the framework applied to U.S. financial statement audits, which sets a defined methodology for what must be examined and how conclusions must be reached.
The GENIUS Act, the federal stablecoin law signed in 2025, requires payment stablecoin issuers above certain thresholds to submit to annual audits and disclose reserve compositions. Tether is incorporated in El Salvador, which complicates direct U.S. regulatory jurisdiction, but the audit positions the company ahead of compliance demands from institutions or jurisdictions that reference GENIUS Act standards as a baseline for acceptable transparency.
An audit opinion without the underlying report is an incomplete answer to the transparency problem. The audit happened, KPMG confirmed it and the result was clean. Until Tether publishes the full document, the same structural question that has followed the company for years—show the work—remains only partially answered.
