Tether says KPMG completed its first full financial statement audit
Tether says KPMG U.S. issued an unqualified opinion on its 2025 accounts, a broader review than the issuer's regular point-in-time reserve attestations.
Tether said Thursday that KPMG U.S. has completed a full independent audit of Tether International, S.A. de C.V.'s financial statements for the year ended Dec. 31, 2025. The issuer's announcement says KPMG issued an unqualified opinion, meaning the auditor concluded the statements fairly present the company's financial position, results and cash flows under U.S. generally accepted accounting principles.
What KPMG examined
Tether says the engagement examined transactions, systems, ownership records, valuations, counterparties and the supporting evidence for the balance sheet, income statement, changes in equity and cash-flow statement. The company also says KPMG physically counted and inspected each gold bar it held, checking the bars' existence and identifying information rather than relying only on custodian records.
“This is a defining moment for the stablecoin industry,” CEO Paolo Ardoino said in the release. CFO Simon McWilliams said the audited statements reported reserves exceeding liabilities by $6.814 billion at the 2025 year-end. Those figures come from Tether's announcement; the public release does not link to a signed KPMG opinion or the complete audited statements.
An audit is not the same as a live reserve report
Tether's regular disclosures are different documents. Its latest BDO assurance report covers the Financial Figures and Reserves Report as of June 30, 2026. BDO says its work included bank and depository confirmations, selected precious-metals procedures, sample asset valuations and blockchain-ledger reconciliations. It also states that its assurance is limited to that reporting date and does not cover activity before or after it.
The same report says its asset valuation assumes normal trading conditions and does not provide assurance about extraordinary market conditions or a key custodian or counterparty becoming substantially illiquid. Those are not findings that Tether failed the engagement. They define what the report does and does not establish.
The next test is disclosure
The audit gives banks, exchanges and other counterparties a historical financial-statement opinion that did not exist before. It does not replace the need for dated reserve reporting. Tether's June attestation listed $187.75 billion of assets and $183.64 billion of liabilities, leaving a reported $4.11 billion excess; the BDO report's scope and date remain attached to those figures.
The practical question now is whether Tether publishes the audited statements and opinion in a form outside its announcement, then keeps the quarterly reserve reports current as the balance sheet changes. A clean opinion on 2025 accounts is a meaningful transparency milestone. It is not a substitute for readers checking which entity, date, accounting basis and assurance level each new reserve figure represents.
