Tether has completed its first full financial audit for the year ended Dec. 31, 2025, a long-promised step for the company behind the world's largest stablecoin. KPMG U.S. issued an unqualified audit opinion on Tether International's 2025 financial statements.
The audit found that Tether's reserves exceeded its liabilities by $6.814 billion at the end of 2025. 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.
Tether called the audit "the largest inaugural financial audit in history." CEO Paolo Ardoino said, "For years, some detractors said an audit of Tether could not be completed."
They said the Company refused to subject itself to the most rigorous scrutiny. We have once again proven them wrong.
In a post on X, Ardoino addressed years of criticism: "Despite our company being subject to several years of detractors' false claims, competitors' lies, political attacks and misinformed coverage by several mainstream newspapers trying desperately to discredit us for the benefit of their friends in the tall ivory towers, Tether delivered what it promised."
Ardoino added: "Our company has evolved into one of the most financially significant and operationally sophisticated private companies in the world. This audit demonstrates that our financial infrastructure and governance have evolved alongside that responsibility."
Tether's reserves exceeded its liabilities at the end of 2025, according to the audit.
Tether hired a Big Four accounting firm in March 2025 to conduct its first full audit, and KPMG was identified as the firm. PwC helped prepare Tether's internal systems for the audit.
Tether's USDT stablecoin has a market capitalization of over $183 billion, according to some reports, and accounts for about 61% of the $301 billion stablecoin market, more than twice the $72 billion held by Circle's USDC. The company generated more than $10 billion in net profit in 2025, and reported $1.5 billion in net operating profit in the second quarter of 2025, driven largely by income from its U.S. Treasury holdings and repurchase agreements.
Tether holds nearly $60 billion in Bitcoin in its reserves, according to data from Arkham Intelligence, though the company did not mention its Bitcoin holdings in its public statement about the audit. Its tokenized gold product, XAUt, has around $2.7 billion in value and is the largest tokenized commodity product; physical reserves backing XAUt rose 9.5% in the second quarter of 2025.
The company has expanded beyond stablecoins, investing $20 million each in Argentine neobank Ualá and Brazilian crypto platform Mercado Bitcoin in 2025, and leading a $50 million funding round for AI sleep technology company Eight Sleep. Ardoino wrote on X in June 2025: "No need to go public."
Tether's history includes regulatory settlements: it paid an $18.5 million fine to the New York Attorney General's office in February 2021 regarding a hole in its finances, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined it $41 million in October 2021 over claims that USDT was not fully backed by U.S. dollars. Since the New York settlement, Tether has published quarterly reserve attestations. The audit covered its balance sheet, income statement, and cash flows for the year ended Dec. 31, 2025, including assets backing its issued tokens and the liabilities they represent, with independent substantive testing and verification of all assets and statements. Tether is a San Salvador-based company and has become a major buyer of U.S. government debt for reserve assets.
