Tether, the issuer of the world’s largest stablecoin, has completed its first full independent audit of its financial statements, ending years of promises and scrutiny over the assets backing its USDT token.
KPMG US issued an “unqualified audit opinion” on Tether International S.A. de C.V.’s financial statements for the year ended Dec. 31, 2025, meaning the statements fairly present the company’s financial position, results of operations and cash flows in accordance with US generally accepted accounting principles, according to Tether’s announcement.
KPMG confirmed the opinion in an email but declined to provide further details, citing client confidentiality, Bloomberg reported.
Tether has not released the audit itself, leaving investors and the public without access to the underlying financial statements or detailed audit findings. Bloomberg reported that the company instead disclosed the auditor’s conclusion.
The development is nevertheless a major milestone for Tether, which has historically relied on quarterly reserve attestations rather than a full audit. Those attestations provided time-specific snapshots of the company’s holdings but did not constitute a comprehensive examination of its financial statements.
Tether’s USDT has grown into a roughly $180 billion stablecoin, making it a crucial source of liquidity for cryptocurrency trading and an increasingly important instrument for cross-border transactions, according to Bloomberg.
The audit also comes at an important moment for Tether’s corporate ambitions. The company had sought to raise as much as $20 billion at a valuation of about $500 billion, but some prospective investors were reportedly reluctant to invest in a company without an independent audit. Bloomberg reported that concerns over the lack of an audit were among the issues raised by potential investors.
That fundraising effort was subsequently put on hold, partly while Tether awaited the audit and partly because of the downturn in cryptocurrency markets, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg.
The audit closes a long-running chapter in Tether’s history. The company had previously said it faced difficulty securing a Big Four audit because of reputational concerns among major accounting firms and the absence of standardized crypto regulations, according to Bloomberg.
Tether began publishing quarterly attestations after a February 2021 settlement with the New York Attorney General over allegations that the company and its sister exchange Bitfinex had misrepresented reserves and commingled client funds. Tether denied wrongdoing. Later that year, the company and Bitfinex agreed to pay a $42.5 million penalty to the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission to settle allegations concerning reserve disclosures, according to Bloomberg.
Tether described the engagement as the “largest inaugural financial audit in history,” positioning the exercise as a new transparency benchmark for the stablecoin industry. Tether said KPMG examined its financial statements under AICPA standards.
For Tether, the KPMG opinion could strengthen its credibility with institutional investors just as stablecoins are becoming increasingly integrated into mainstream financial markets.
But the absence of the actual audit report means an important question remains: how much additional transparency will investors ultimately receive?
For an issuer with about $180 billion of USDT in circulation, that distinction matters. The KPMG opinion represents a significant step forward for Tether, but the market will likely continue to focus on the composition and liquidity of the assets backing the world’s largest stablecoin.