KPMG U.S. issued an unqualified opinion—the cleanest possible audit result—on Tether International, S.A. de C.V.'s full financial statements for the year ended Dec. 31, 2025. It is the first complete audit in Tether's history, covering not just reserve attestations but the entire balance sheet, income statement, equity changes and cash flows.
The reserve surplus verified in the audit stands at $6.81 billion above outstanding liabilities—the gap between assets backing USDT and the value of tokens in circulation—confirmed through independent substantive testing rather than management-supplied reports alone.
Gold holdings received particular scrutiny. KPMG auditors physically counted and inspected every individual gold bar held by Tether, verifying existence and identifying details on each bar rather than relying on custodian statements. That level of physical verification goes beyond what previous quarterly attestations covered.
Tether has not released the audit. The company confirmed KPMG's clean opinion in an official statement but said it will not publish the underlying financial statements. The El Salvador-based firm gave no timeline for disclosure and offered no explanation beyond the announcement itself.
The gap between confirming an audit exists and publishing it is not trivial for USDT holders and counterparties. An unqualified opinion from KPMG confirms the auditor found the statements fairly presented—but without the statements themselves, on-chain users, exchanges and institutional counterparties cannot independently verify the composition of the $6.81 billion surplus, the breakdown of reserve assets, or any off-balance-sheet exposures.
Tether's prior public statements cited difficulty obtaining an audit as a structural problem: major accounting firms had declined to take the engagement, citing reputational concerns and the absence of standardized crypto-sector regulations. Securing KPMG—one of the Big Four—closes that credibility gap on the auditor side. Withholding the report reopens a different one.
Before this audit, Tether's reserve verification consisted of quarterly attestations—narrow-scope engagements in which an accountant confirms specific figures supplied by management, without the full-scope independent testing that a financial statement audit requires. The shift to a complete audit represents a substantive change in verification standard, not a rebrand of the existing attestation process.
USDT remains the largest stablecoin by circulation and the dominant trading pair across centralized and decentralized venues. Its reserve structure directly affects liquidity across lending protocols, DEX pairs and cross-chain bridges that treat USDT as a base asset. A verified $6.81 billion surplus is material information for any protocol holding USDT as collateral or settling trades against it.
The GENIUS Act, signed in 2025, established the federal framework for payment stablecoin issuers and set reserve and audit requirements for U.S.-regulated entities. Tether operates out of El Salvador and is not a U.S.-regulated issuer under that framework, so GENIUS Act disclosure requirements do not apply directly. The audit is a voluntary step, not a compliance response to U.S. law.
KPMG's opinion is on record. The statements it covers are not.
