KPMG U.S. issued an unqualified opinion — the cleanest possible audit result, meaning the firm had no reservations about the financials — on Tether International, S.A. de C.V.'s complete financial statements for the year ended Dec. 31, 2025. It is the first full financial statement audit in Tether's history, closing a gap that has followed the world's largest stablecoin issuer since USDT launched more than a decade ago.
The audit verified that Tether's reserves exceed its liabilities by $6.81 billion. That cushion covers the outstanding USDT supply beyond a one-to-one backing, meaning the company holds more than a dollar of assets for every dollar of stablecoin in circulation. Prior to this audit, Tether published quarterly attestations — point-in-time snapshots prepared by BDO that confirmed reserve balances but did not subject the full balance sheet, income statement, equity changes or cash flow statement to independent substantive testing.
The scope KPMG covered goes well beyond any prior Tether disclosure. The audit encompassed the full balance sheet, including every asset category composing the reserves and every liability represented by issued tokens, along with the income statement, changes in equity and cash flows. Each area underwent independent substantive testing rather than reliance on management representations or custodian reports.
The physical verification of Tether's gold holdings was the most operationally intensive part of the engagement. KPMG auditors physically counted and inspected every individual gold bar Tether holds, verifying the existence and identifying details of each bar rather than accepting custodian-generated reports at face value. Gold is a meaningful line item in Tether's disclosed reserve mix, alongside U.S. Treasury bills and cash equivalents.
Tether described the engagement as the largest inaugural audit in history — a claim that reflects the scale of USDT's circulation rather than any third-party endorsement of that characterization. USDT is the dominant stablecoin by market cap and daily volume, underpinning a substantial share of all on-chain trading activity across every major chain.
Despite clearing the audit, Tether has not published the underlying financial statements themselves. The company announced the result and the opinion but stopped short of releasing the documents KPMG reviewed. That decision is already drawing scrutiny from corners of the DeFi community that viewed a full audit as a prerequisite for publishing the statements, not a substitute for them.
The road to this audit was unusually long. Tether previously acknowledged it was unable to secure a major accounting firm for a full audit, citing reputational concerns among global accounting firms about the crypto sector and the absence of standardized cryptocurrency accounting regulations during that period. KPMG's willingness to take on the engagement reflects a shift in how the Big Four treat digital asset clients — several firms have expanded crypto-native audit practices over the past two years as institutional adoption deepened.
The El Salvador domicile of Tether International matters for the audit's jurisdictional framing. Tether relocated its primary issuing entity there after El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as legal tender and established a favorable regulatory environment for digital asset companies. KPMG U.S. handled the engagement despite the entity's Central American registration.
For DeFi protocols that use USDT as a base asset — money markets like Aave and Compound, DEX liquidity pools across Uniswap and Curve, and collateral frameworks on chains from Ethereum to Tron — the audit result does not change the mechanical risk profile of holding USDT, but it does establish a verified reserve surplus figure for the first time. Protocols that set USDT-specific collateral factors or borrow caps in governance have historically had to work from attestations alone.
The 2025 statements themselves remain unpublished. Tether has given no timeline for releasing them. Until the documents are public, counterparties, protocol governance voters and institutional treasuries cannot independently verify the audit's findings or examine the footnotes and disclosures that typically accompany a full set of audited financial statements — and are often where the material detail lives.
