Tether’s First Full Financial Audit Receives Unqualified KPMG Opinion

Tether said on August 13 that KPMG U.S. completed the company’s first full financial audit. The accounting firm issued an unqualified opinion on Tether International’s financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2025.

With the audit Tether moves beyond the quarterly reserve attestations it has published for years. KPMG examined company-wide financial statements and the evidence behind them, not only a snapshot of assets backing USDT, Tether’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, on one reporting date.

A KPMG spokesperson confirmed the unqualified opinion to The Block. Tether did not link the signed audit opinion or complete financial statements in its announcement.

What does the audit check that attestations don’t?

Tether’s quarterly attestations check specific information reported at a particular date. For example, they focus on whether the value and composition of disclosed reserves match the company’s figures at that point.

A financial-statement audit covers more ground. The financial audit included Tether’s balance sheet, income statement, changes in equity and cash flows for 2025. According to Tether, KPMG tested transactions, systems, ownership records, valuations, counterparties and supporting evidence.

Tether also said the auditors physically inspected and counted every gold bar it held. It checked the bars’ existence and identifying information instead of relying only on custodian reports.

KPMG’s unqualified opinion means it concluded that the financial statements fairly presented Tether International’s position in all material respects under U.S. accounting rules. It does not mean every figure is exact to the last dollar. Nor does it eliminate liquidity, market, operational or counterparty risk. A qualified opinion, by contrast, would flag one specific unverified item while still endorsing the rest of the statements; KPMG issued no such carve-out here.

>>> Related: Tether Moves Toward Full USDT Audit With KPMG

Does the audit reflect Tether’s current reserves?

The audited statements showed reserves exceeding token liabilities by $6.814 billion at the end of 2025, Tether said.

The company has since published a more recent snapshot: a separate BDO attestation for June 30, 2026 shows a $4.11 billion reserve buffer. USDT’s market value has grown beyond $180 billion in the same period. The audit speaks to how Tether’s 2025 books were built, not to what backs the tokens circulating today.

Attestations alone could not settle a question that has hung over Tether since 2021: whether its statements about USDT’s backing could be trusted. That October, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found the company had made untrue or misleading statements about the token’s dollar backing and fined it $41 million, the kind of finding a quarterly snapshot could not address. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said the completed audit proved critics wrong who claimed “the company refused to subject itself to the most rigorous scrutiny.”

Why haven’t the full documents been released?

Tether’s announcement summarizes the audit scope and result. However, the page does not include the signed KPMG opinion, the complete statements or their accompanying notes. Tether is privately held and not registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), so it faces no legal requirement to publish full audited financials. Circle, the SEC-registered issuer of USDC, faces that requirement: it files annual audited statements in its 10-K, the annual report public companies must submit, which becomes publicly searchable through the SEC’s EDGAR database.

The Block reported that KPMG confirmed issuing the opinion but declined further comment because of client confidentiality. CoinDesk separately asked Tether whether it would share KPMG’s findings and had not received an answer when its report was updated.

The missing documents limit what outsiders can assess for themselves. Full statements would show detailed line items, accounting policies and explanatory notes. They could also clarify how Tether accounts for reserve assets, token liabilities, affiliated holdings and valuation methods.

Their absence does not reverse KPMG’s confirmation that it issued an unqualified opinion.

>>> Related: Tether’s Reserve Buffer Shrinks Despite Strong Operating Profit

Will Tether repeat the audit next year?

Tether had promised a full audit for years before formally hiring a Big Four firm, one of the four dominant global accounting firms, in March. Completing the engagement answers one longstanding question: a major accounting firm has now signed an unqualified opinion on Tether International’s annual statements.

But the next questions concern access and repeatability. Tether has not said when it will publish the full 2025 documents or whether future annual audits will follow a fixed schedule.

For USDT users, the Tether financial audit adds stronger independent scrutiny than the issuer’s previous reporting.