KPMG U.S. issued an unqualified opinion on Tether International, S.A. de C.V. for the year ended Dec. 31, 2025. The announcement, made Thursday, marks the first full financial statement audit in Tether's history, closing a gap that has followed the world's largest stablecoin issuer for more than a decade.
Audited reserves exceeded total liabilities by $6.81 billion at year-end 2025. That buffer narrowed to $4.11 billion by June 30 of this year — a 40 percent decline in six months that Tether has not publicly explained.
The audit's scope was comprehensive by the standards of any financial institution. KPMG reviewed the complete balance sheet, covering both the assets underpinning the reserves and the liabilities represented by outstanding USDT. The firm also assessed the income statement, the statement of changes in equity and cash flows. Tether said every category was subject to independent substantive testing rather than reliance on management representations alone.
The most operationally specific disclosure concerned Tether's gold holdings. KPMG physically counted and inspected each individual gold bar on hand, verifying the existence and identifying details of every bar rather than accepting custodian reports or third-party certifications at face value. The bar-by-bar count distinguishes this process from the attestations Tether has published quarterly, which rely on a point-in-time snapshot of reported balances rather than direct examination.
Despite confirming the audit took place, Tether has not published the audited financial statements. Readers cannot independently review the balance sheet, the income statement or the KPMG opinion letter. The company's announcement describes the audit's conclusions but does not provide the underlying document.
That gap matters for USDT's position in institutional markets. Under the GENIUS Act — the federal stablecoin law signed in 2025 that sets reserve, audit and disclosure requirements for payment stablecoin issuers — public disclosure of audited financials is a core compliance obligation for qualifying issuers. Tether is incorporated in El Salvador and its reserves include Bitcoin and gold holdings held outside the United States, which places it outside the direct jurisdiction of U.S. regulators. The company has not said whether it intends to publish the statements or seek a U.S. operating license under the GENIUS Act framework.
Tether's history with auditors shapes how this announcement reads. The company previously said it was unable to secure a full audit because major accounting firms had reputational concerns about crypto clients and because no standardized regulatory framework existed for cryptocurrency. The absence of standardized rules was a genuine industry-wide problem through most of the 2010s, but Tether's peers — Circle being the most prominent — moved to full financial statement audits before Tether did. Circle has published annual audited financials for several years.
The switch from quarterly attestations to a full audit changes what the numbers mean. An attestation, performed by an accountant who does not audit the entity, verifies that reported balances exist at a specific moment. An audit applies a higher standard: it requires the firm to assess whether the financials as a whole present a fair picture of the entity's financial position, and it includes testing of internal controls and transaction flows, not just ending balances. KPMG's unqualified opinion on the full financial statements is a stronger statement than any attestation Tether has previously released.
The reserve composition remains a point of scrutiny. Tether's reserves include U.S. Treasury holdings, Bitcoin and gold — the latter two of which sit outside U.S. custody and carry mark-to-market risk that dollar-denominated Treasuries do not. With Bitcoin at $63,077 as of Saturday, the volatility profile of those non-dollar assets is material to the reserve cushion calculation. The $2.70 billion difference between the Dec. 31 buffer and the June 30 figure reflects, at least in part, asset price movements in that portion of the book.
For DeFi protocols, the audit's existence without the underlying document creates an awkward position. Tether's USDT is the dominant stablecoin in on-chain liquidity pools across Ethereum, Tron and virtually every major L2. Lending protocols like Aave and Compound list USDT as collateral. A reserve shortfall would propagate instantly through any pool carrying USDT as a base asset. The KPMG opinion is the strongest assurance Tether has ever provided, but without the published statements, protocol risk managers are left accepting the company's characterization of what the auditors found rather than reading the opinion themselves.
