Tether Finishes First Full Audit, Gets Clean KPMG Opinion

Tether has completed what it describes as its first comprehensive independent audit of its annual financial statements, with KPMG US issuing a clean opinion for its 2025 accounts. The audit, covering the year ended Dec. 31, 2025, extends beyond Tether’s routine reserve attestations by examining the company’s broader financial reporting and the evidence behind it.

According to Tether, the audited statements show reserves exceeding liabilities by $6.814 billion. The company said the engagement tested the balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statements, including the assets backing issued tokens and the liabilities those tokens represent.

Key takeaways

• KPMG US issued an unqualified (clean) opinion on Tether’s 2025 annual financial statements under US accounting standards.
• The audit examined Tether’s full set of annual statements—including systems, transactions, valuations, counterparties, and ownership records—rather than only reserve attestations.
• Tether reported that audited reserves were greater than liabilities by $6.814 billion as of Dec. 31, 2025.
• KPMG physically inspected Tether’s gold holdings, including counting each bar rather than relying only on custodian documentation.
• The result arrives as Tether continues to expand its wider tokenization footprint alongside USDT’s dominance in the stablecoin market.

What makes this audit different from Tether’s usual attestations

For years, Tether has published quarterly reserve attestations that focus on whether the assets backing its stablecoins meet stated coverage levels. This new step moves the verification closer to a traditional financial statement audit—subjecting not just reserve balances but the company’s broader accounting and underlying documentation to independent scrutiny.

Tether said the audit covered its balance sheet, income statement and cash flows for the period ended Dec. 31, 2025, and included review of the transactions and systems used to produce the statements. The audit also involved evaluation of ownership records, valuations, counterparties and related evidence—areas that typically go beyond what reserve attestations concentrate on.

In another key procedural detail, Tether said KPMG physically inspected and counted its gold holdings, verifying each gold bar rather than relying solely on custodian records. That kind of direct verification can be particularly relevant for investors focused on commodity-backed products and the reliability of custody arrangements.

The clean opinion and what Tether says the numbers show

Tether reported that KPMG issued an unqualified opinion, stating that the audited statements fairly present the company’s financial position, results and cash flows in all material respects under US accounting standards. That phrasing is commonly used to indicate there were no material departures from required accounting frameworks as presented in the report.

On the headline coverage metric, Tether said the audited statements reflect reserves exceeding liabilities by $6.814 billion. While investors will likely treat this figure as a high-level indicator rather than a complete picture of risk, it is the central quantitative conclusion tied directly to the audit outcome.

For readers trying to interpret the importance of a clean audit, the practical takeaway is that it reduces one category of uncertainty: whether the reported annual financial statements—covering income and cash flows as well as reserves—were prepared in accordance with the framework and supported by examined evidence.

Tether’s expanding footprint beyond USDT

USDT remains at the center of Tether’s business. The stablecoin’s market capitalization is reported at roughly $183 billion, representing about 61% of the approximately $301 billion stablecoin market, according to DefiLlama. That puts USDT well ahead of the nearest rival, Circle’s USDC, which is reported at about $72 billion.

The audit news also comes as Tether continues investing in areas adjacent to stablecoin issuance. In the company’s reported 2025 performance narrative, Tether said it delivered more than $10 billion in net profit in 2025, with a larger share tied to income from US Treasury holdings and repurchase agreements. In the second quarter of 2025, Tether reportedly posted $1.5 billion in net operating profit, again with Treasury-related income highlighted as the main driver.

Tether has also used profits to fund expansion projects in traditional and crypto-adjacent markets, including investments in Argentine neobank Ualá and Brazilian crypto platform Mercado Bitcoin, each reported as $20 million this year. In addition, Tether has participated in a $50 million funding round for Eight Sleep, according to earlier coverage cited within the article.

At the tokenization layer, Tether’s commodity product is gaining visibility as well. The company’s tokenized gold offering, Tether Gold (XAUt), saw physical reserves increase by 9.5% in the second quarter, with the article noting that XAUt is currently the largest tokenized commodity product at around $2.7 billion in value, based on data from RWA.xyz.

Why investors and builders should watch the next step

An annual audit with an unqualified opinion is the kind of signal that can matter to institutions deciding whether to integrate stablecoins into payment, treasury, and tokenization workflows. It doesn’t automatically resolve every operational or regulatory question around stablecoins, but it does strengthen the credibility of Tether’s annual financial reporting process—especially when compared with periodic reserve attestations alone.

Going forward, market participants will likely focus on whether Tether repeats this level of audit scope in subsequent years and how regulators and counterparties interpret the audit’s evidence-based approach. With USDT still dominating stablecoin market share and Tether expanding into broader tokenized assets, the audited annual accounts may become an increasingly important reference point for due diligence.

The key question for the next cycle is whether this “first full independent audit” becomes a consistent feature of Tether’s transparency toolkit—and how quickly the wider market’s reliance on stablecoins translates into more standardized expectations for audited annual reporting across issuers.