Tether finally gets a real audit
KPMG gave Tether an unqualified opinion for 2025, finding reserves exceed liabilities by $6.814 billion.
Tether says KPMG U.S. has completed its first full financial audit, covering the year ended December 31, 2025, and issued an unqualified opinion. The firm behind the $180 billion USDT stablecoin had promised this for years while relying instead on quarterly attestations.
What KPMG found
The audit put Tether's reserves above liabilities by $6.814 billion at year-end 2025, according to CoinDesk. KPMG tested transactions, systems, valuations, counterparties and ownership records, and physically inspected Tether's gold bars rather than taking custodial statements at face value. That's a different exercise from the quarterly attestations Tether has published since settling with the New York Attorney General: an attestation checks a snapshot of reserves on a given date, while an audit tests the full year of transactions and the evidence behind them. KPMG confirmed to CoinDesk that it issued the unqualified opinion but declined to share details, citing client confidentiality. Tether has not said whether it will publish the underlying report.
An audit answers one question, not all of them
An unqualified opinion from a Big Four firm removes the easiest attack line critics have used against Tether for a decade: that a company holding $180 billion in reserves, much of it in U.S. government debt, had never submitted to the level of scrutiny routine at banks and large asset managers. Ardoino called this out directly, noting detractors said an audit "could not be completed." Now one has been, and the reserve surplus lands well above the token's day-to-day operating buffer needs.
But an opinion on 2025 year-end statements is a backward-looking data point, not an ongoing guarantee. It says the books were fairly presented under U.S. GAAP for one period, tested by one firm, on Tether's terms. It doesn't establish a cadence of independent audits going forward, and Tether hasn't committed to releasing the full report for outside inspection the way a public company's audited financials get filed and scrutinized. The gap between "we passed an audit" and "here's the audit, read it yourself" is where a lot of the skepticism has always lived, and that gap hasn't fully closed. Given USDT's role as the base layer of crypto trading liquidity, the market has strong incentive to accept a positive headline without demanding the underlying workpapers.
What confirms this holds up
Watch whether Tether publishes the full KPMG report or a meaningful summary of it, and whether this becomes an annual, disclosed cycle rather than a one-time announcement. A second audited year, with the same or another Big Four firm, would do more to settle the "Tether FUD" debate than any single unqualified opinion.