On 13 August, Tether said KPMG U.S. had audited the 2025 financial statements of its issuing entity and returned an unqualified opinion — an accountant's clean bill of health. The auditors examined the full balance sheet, income statement and cash flows, and, according to the company, physically counted every gold bar held in reserve.

For a firm that spent years batting away doubts over whether its USDt token is truly backed one-to-one, it is a symbolic win. The audited accounts, Tether said, show reserves exceeding liabilities by 6.814 billion dollars at the end of 2025. Chief executive Paolo Ardoino did not hold back.

«This is a defining moment for the stablecoin industry,» Ardoino said. «We have once again proven them wrong.»

A Clean Bill, With a Catch

Yet for all the fanfare, one thing was missing from the announcement: the statements themselves. Tether trumpeted «the largest inaugural financial audit in history» but did not release the underlying balance sheet or income statement for outsiders to inspect.

That is familiar territory. Until now the company has leaned on quarterly attestations from accounting firm BDO — snapshots that, as Tether's own regulatory filing concedes, «are not financial statements but selected financial information extracted from accounting records.» A full Big Four audit had been promised, and repeatedly delayed, for years.

The Numbers Tether Does Show

The most recent quarterly report, dated 30 June 2026, puts total group assets at 187.7 billion dollars against 183.6 billion in liabilities, with roughly 184.6 billion USDt in circulation. US Treasury bills and repurchase agreements remain the largest slice of the reserves and the main profit engine, alongside 146 tonnes of gold and close to 99,000 bitcoin worth some 5.8 billion dollars. Second-quarter operating profit came in at 1.5 billion dollars.

The cushion, though, is thinning. Excess reserves stood at 4.11 billion dollars at the end of June — roughly half the 8.23 billion reported three months earlier. For a company that markets itself on the strength of its buffer, a halving in one quarter is not a footnote.

A Salvadoran Address

The audited entity, Tether International, S.A. de C.V., is registered in San Salvador and licensed by El Salvador's digital-asset regulator, the CNAD, as both a stablecoin issuer and a digital-asset service provider. It sits under two Salvadoran parents, Tether Global Investment Fund, SICAF, S.A. and Tether Operations, S.A. de C.V. — the corporate scaffolding Tether erected after relocating to the country. Chief financial officer Simon McWilliams called the audit «a landmark moment for Tether and for the industry we serve.»

With USDt the dominant dollar stablecoin and, by Tether's count, more than 650 million users, the clean opinion is a milestone the company will wield against its critics. Whether an audit whose statements no one outside KPMG has seen is enough to settle the question is another matter.