Tether Completes First Full Financial Audit With Clean KPMG Opinion

KPMG’s audit examined Tether’s 2025 financial statements and determined that its reserves were $6.8 billion higher than its total liabilities.

Tether completed its first full independent audit of its annual financial statements, while KPMG US issued an unqualified opinion on the stablecoin issuer’s 2025 accounts.

The audit reviewed Tether’s balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement for the year ending Dec. 31, 2025, along with the assets backing its issued tokens and the corresponding liabilities. Tether said the audited accounts showed that its reserves surpassed total liabilities by $6.814 billion.

Unlike Tether’s quarterly reserve attestations, which have been released for years, the comprehensive audit examined the company’s wider financial statements and supporting evidence independently, covering transactions, systems, ownership records, valuations and counterparties.

As part of the audit, KPMG physically inspected and counted Tether’s gold holdings, with each bar independently verified rather than being assessed solely through custodian records.

Tether said KPMG issued an unqualified opinion on its financial statements, concluding that they fairly reflected the company’s financial position, results and cash flows in all material respects under US accounting standards.

Tether’s Expanding Financial Footprint#

Tether introduced its USDt (USDT) stablecoin in 2014 and has since become one of the crypto industry’s biggest companies, posting more than $10 billion in net profit during 2025. In the second quarter of this year, the company reported $1.5 billion in net operating profit, with earnings driven largely by income from its US Treasury holdings and repurchase agreements.

USDT continues to serve as Tether’s primary product and holds a dominant position in the stablecoin sector. Its market capitalization of roughly $183 billion represents about 61% of the overall $301 billion market, more than double the approximately $72 billion market cap of its closest competitor, Circle’s USDC, according to DefiLlama.

Tether has been using its profits to broaden its business beyond stablecoins, investing $20 million each in Argentine neobank Ualá and Brazilian crypto platform Mercado Bitcoin this year. The company also led a $50 million funding round for AI sleep technology firm Eight Sleep.

The company has also grown its tokenized gold operations, with the physical reserves backing Tether Gold (XAUt) increasing 9.5% during the second quarter. At the time of writing, XAUt ranks as the largest tokenized commodity product, holding approximately $2.7 billion in value, according to RWA.xyz data.

Despite Tether’s continued expansion, CEO Paolo Ardoino has expressed limited interest in pursuing a public listing. In June 2025, as speculation grew around a possible Tether IPO, Ardoino posted on X that there was “no need to go public.”