Tether announces a clean audit and publishes no audit report

What happened

Tether announced on 13 August 2026 that KPMG US had completed an audit of the financial statements of Tether International, S.A. de C.V. for the year ended 31 December 2025 and issued an unqualified opinion. The release says the opinion means that in KPMG's view the statements 'present fairly, in all material respects, the financial position of the Company as of December 31, 2025, and the results of its operations and its cash flows for the year ended in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles', and describes an unqualified opinion as one 'issued without reservations, exceptions, or caveats'. It says the work covered 'the transactions, systems, ownership records, valuations, counterparties, and underlying evidence supporting the Company's financial statements', the full balance sheet including the assets composing the reserves and the liabilities represented by the issued token, and the income statement, statement of changes in equity and cash flow statement, and that KPMG 'physically counted and inspected every individual gold bar held by Tether, verifying the existence and identifying information of each bar rather than relying solely on reports from custodians or counterparties'. Chief financial officer Simon McWilliams said that the audited statements 'report reserves exceeding the liabilities by $6.814 billion, confirming the quality of the public attestation reports'. Chief executive Paolo Ardoino said that 'For years, some detractors said an audit of Tether could not be completed', that 'KPMG did not simply review a set of headline figures' but 'conducted a full and thorough audit in accordance with AICPA standards', and that 'the proof of that stability is no longer just a Tether promise; it's a signed opinion'. A KPMG US spokesperson confirmed to CoinDesk that the firm had issued an unqualified opinion on Tether International's 2025 financials and said it had no further comment because of client confidentiality. CoinDesk asked Tether whether it would share KPMG's findings and had no answer by the time it published. Speaking to The Block the following day, Ardoino said of critics that 'Honestly, I don't care. We proved ourselves many times', that 'I'm happy to get the criticism because it makes us better, makes us stronger', and, on the scope question, that 'TIL is the only entity issuing USDT. To be clear.'

Why it matters

An audit and an attestation are different instruments and the difference is the whole story. Tether has published quarterly attestations for years, and an attestation checks stated information at a stated date: how much is in reserve and what it consists of. An audit tests the accounts, which means transactions, systems, valuations, counterparties and the evidence behind them, and produces an opinion an accountant signs and can be sued over. No issuer of this size had one. That said, the number now signed for is old, and this corpus can put it in a series the reports do not assemble. The audited surplus is $6.814bn at 31 December 2025. Tether's own attestation for the first quarter of 2026 put the excess of assets over liabilities at $8.23bn on 31 March, and the second-quarter attestation put it at $4.11bn on 30 June against $183.6bn of issued tokens, a figure this site recorded on 31 July. So the buffer KPMG's opinion covers is nearly double the last one Tether attested to, and it is seven and a half months out of date. An unqualified opinion on the year to 31 December 2025 says the accounts for that year fairly present what happened in it. It says nothing about the cushion behind USDT this morning, which the issuer's own quarterly reporting shows has roughly halved since. What the opinion does change is the standing of the quarterly numbers themselves: an auditor has now tested the systems and records that produce them, which is a stronger statement about the process than any single attestation is about a date. It also lands in a week in which a federal regulator chartered a bank to issue a competing dollar token under supervision. Two answers to the same question are now on the table. One is a charter, examination and conditions imposed in writing by a banking agency. The other is a private company voluntarily buying an opinion from a Big Four firm. The first is enforceable by the supervisor; the second is enforceable by nobody, and its value depends entirely on what the buyer chooses to publish.

What is not settled

The audited financial statements have not been published and neither has KPMG's report. What exists in public is Tether's description of the opinion, one sentence of the opinion's wording quoted inside that description, and a press-office confirmation from KPMG that declined to say anything further. That means the basis for the opinion, the date it was signed, any emphasis of matter, the treatment and valuation of the reserve components and the notes to the accounts are all unread. The Block reported that Tether withholds the documents because it is a private company and provides them to regulators and banks on request, attributed to a person familiar with the matter rather than to the company. The scope is the other open question and Tether addressed it only in an interview. The audited entity is Tether International, S.A. de C.V., not a consolidated group and not the ultimate parent, and Ardoino's answer is that Tether International is the only entity issuing USDT. No document on the record establishes which balances sit outside it, and the release does not say whether a group audit exists or is intended. The claim that this is 'the largest inaugural financial audit in history' is made without a stated measure. And nothing has been said about the current period: whether the second-quarter attestation for 2026 will be audited, whether the auditor will be reappointed for the year to 31 December 2026, or whether an opinion will be published when it is. Tether says annual audits will continue alongside quarterly attestations.