Tether announced Thursday that KPMG U.S. completed an audit of Tether International, S.A. de C.V.'s financial statements for the year ended Dec. 31, 2025—the first full financial statement audit in the company's history. KPMG issued an unqualified opinion, the cleanest possible audit result, meaning the firm had no reservations about the accuracy of the financials.
The audit found Tether's reserves exceeded its liabilities by $6.81 billion. That surplus figure is the headline number from the engagement: it represents the buffer between the assets Tether holds and the USDT it has issued into circulation. KPMG verified the reserves down to the level of counting physical gold bars held on Tether's behalf.
Despite clearing the audit, Tether will not release the full financial statements to the public. The company confirmed the KPMG engagement and the opinion but has not published the underlying document that KPMG reviewed. What exists publicly is Tether's announcement of the result, not the audit report itself.
That decision matters for anyone relying on the audit as proof of reserves. An unqualified opinion tells the market that an auditor found no material misstatements in the statements it reviewed. Without the statements themselves, on-chain observers and USDT counterparties cannot independently verify what line items KPMG examined, how the reserves are categorized, or what accounting standards governed the engagement.
Tether's history with audits is long and contentious. The company previously said it was unable to secure a full audit because major global accounting firms had reputational concerns about crypto clients, and because standardized accounting rules for digital asset companies did not exist in a form the firms would accept. Tether had published quarterly attestations—a narrower procedure where an accountant confirms a specific figure at a point in time, without the full review of internal controls and accounting policies that a financial statement audit entails—but those were not audits.
The gap between an attestation and an audit is material. An attestation is a snapshot; an audit covers the full year, tests controls, examines how assets are valued and categorized, and requires the auditor to stand behind the statements as a whole. KPMG's engagement here is the latter, which is why the company described it as completing a "long-promised" obligation.
KPMG U.S. is one of the four largest accounting firms globally. Its willingness to take on Tether as an audit client is notable given Tether's own account of prior difficulty attracting top-tier auditors. The engagement required KPMG to assess Tether International's full balance sheet, including its U.S. Treasury holdings, gold positions and any other reserve assets backing USDT.
Tether is incorporated in El Salvador, where it relocated its primary operations. The entity audited is Tether International, S.A. de C.V.—the El Salvador legal entity. The structure of the corporate group and which liabilities and assets fall within that entity versus other Tether affiliates are details that would appear in the full statements Tether has not published.
For protocols and desks running USDT liquidity—whether in Curve pools, Aave markets or centralized OTC books—the audit removes one long-standing objection: that Tether had never submitted to a full third-party review. The $6.81 billion surplus, if it reflects the actual reserve composition, represents a meaningful overcollateralization cushion against a sudden redemption surge. USDT's circulating supply has grown to the point where that surplus figure and the asset breakdown behind it are directly relevant to anyone pricing counterparty risk on the stablecoin.
The 2025 financial statements themselves remain unpublished as of Thursday. Tether has not indicated when or whether it plans to release them, leaving the market with a confirmed audit outcome and a verified surplus number but without the document that would allow independent scrutiny of what KPMG actually reviewed.
