Tether International, S.A. de C.V. said on 13 August 2026 that KPMG U.S. finished a full independent audit of its financial statements for the year ended 31 December 2025 and issued an unqualified opinion. The company says those statements show reserves exceeding liabilities by $6.814 billion at that year-end date.
That is a bigger job than a quarterly reserve attestation. It is also a 2025 snapshot. It does not, by itself, recertify today’s USDT float.
Bitcoin was $63,363 on the desk CoinGecko snapshot at 2026-08-13T19:16:24+00:00 UTC, down 0.2% over 24 hours. Coinbase BTC-USD last traded at $63,358.29 in the same hour, with a day range of $62,772.84 to $63,949.90 (Coinbase Exchange stats pulled 2026-08-13T19:29:09Z). Quiet tape. The story is in the books.
What happened
In a 13 August 2026 company statement, Tether said KPMG U.S. audited Tether International’s 2025 financial statements under U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). An unqualified opinion, in the company’s telling, means KPMG concluded the statements present fairly, in all material respects, financial position, results, and cash flows, without reservations in the opinion language Tether described.
Tether said the work covered the full set of statements, not only a reserve schedule: balance sheet (including reserve assets and token liabilities), income statement, changes in equity, and cash flows. It also said KPMG physically counted and inspected each gold bar rather than relying only on custodian reports. CEO Paolo Ardoino called the result a “clean audit” and said critics had claimed such an audit could not be completed. CFO Simon McWilliams tied the $6.814 billion surplus to “the quality of the public attestation reports.”
CoinDesk’s same-day report matches those headline figures and notes a gap that matters for readers: CoinDesk asked Tether whether it would share KPMG’s findings and had not received a response at the time of that article. The press page we fetched also has no linked audit PDF. What is public today is Tether’s description of KPMG’s opinion, not the signed report sitting in your browser.
Tether had already said in March 2026 that it had signed a Big Four firm for a first full financial-statement audit. Thursday’s note names KPMG U.S. as the firm that delivered the 2025 opinion. That naming is new. The underlying promise is not.
Context
USDT is still the large stablecoin in crypto trading. DefiLlama’s stablecoin table, pulled 2026-08-13T19:29:09Z, showed about $182.96 billion in circulating USDT versus about $72.15 billion in USD Coin. That is a market-structure fact, not a reserve fact. Size is why the audit conversation never dies: if the backing is wrong, the unwind hits more than one ticker.
Tether has published independent quarterly attestations for years. An attestation checks specified figures at a date. An audit of financial statements is broader. It tests transactions, systems, valuations, counterparties, and the evidence behind the statements. That distinction is real. It is also easy to flatten into “Tether is fully audited now,” which oversells what Thursday’s note actually dated.
The surplus Tether highlighted is 31 December 2025. The latest detailed public reserve reading we have is still the Q2 2026 attestation Tether posted on 31 July. That BDO-prepared package, as of 30 June 2026, described about $184.6 billion of USD₮ issuance, $1.5 billion of net operating profit in the quarter, and a $4.11 billion reserve buffer. We already wrote that the cushion had thinned versus earlier prints. A 2025 year-end surplus of $6.814 billion and a mid-2026 buffer of $4.11 billion can both be true. They are not the same certificate.
That is the counterparty risk point. USDT holders do not hold a claim on KPMG. They hold an issuer liability. The useful question is whether the live issuer, at today’s float, still looks like the 2025 statements. Bitcoin’s role in Tether’s story is mostly through U.S. Treasury holdings and occasional bitcoin on the reserve mix, not through Thursday’s price. For cycle context see our Bitcoin history page. For the last numbered cushion we published, see Tether’s Q2 2026 attestation read.
Circle remains the cleaner public-company comparison on the other large dollar token. Its Q2 2026 print was a securities filing with a shrinking reserve-yield story, not a first-time Big Four debut. Different legal wrapper. Different disclosure habit. Same reader job: match the date on the document to the dollars still in the market.
Our read
My stance: Thursday is progress on 2025 financial-statement quality. It is not a live August 2026 reserve certificate for USDT, and the market should not trade it as one.
I care about this market. Stablecoins are the settlement grease. When the largest issuer finally names a Big Four firm on a completed audit, that is not nothing. Attestations left a hole that critics (and a lot of traders) could point at every cycle. Filling the 2025 financial-statement hole is the job Tether said it would do. Naming KPMG and describing an unqualified GAAP opinion is the first time that job has a dated, firm-specific claim we can argue with.
I will not pretend the press release closes the live debate. Narrative is cheap here. The missing PDF is the tell. If the opinion is as clean as described, publishing the statements and notes is the cheap follow-through. Until that file is public, we are quoting the issuer about the auditor. That is better than quoting nobody. It is not the same as reading the report.
I am not updating the Q2 cushion view. The $4.11 billion June 30 buffer still stands as the last point-in-time reserve surplus Tether put in an attestation package. The $6.814 billion figure is year-end 2025. If someone smashes those two numbers together to say the buffer “just got bigger,” they are mixing calendars.
Falsifiable claim: By 2026-09-15 23:59 UTC, Tether will publish the complete KPMG-signed 2025 audited financial statements (full statements and notes, not only the 13 August press release), or KPMG will issue a public qualification or withdrawal of the opinion Tether described. If neither happens by that deadline, treat Thursday’s note as issuer marketing around an unpublished audit file.
What to watch next
First, the file. Watch Tether’s newsroom and transparency pages for a KPMG-signed PDF. If it appears, read the entity scope (Tether International, S.A. de C.V., versus affiliates), the gold and Treasury notes, and any emphasis-of-matter language the press release skipped.
Second, the next quarterly attestation. If the surplus printed for 30 September 2026 (or the next dated package) is still near the $4.11 billion June level while USDT stays near the ~$183 billion DefiLlama reading, the 2025 audit and the live cushion are telling different stories. If the next attestation surplus moves back toward the $6.814 billion year-end figure, the two tracks start to rhyme.
Third, whether banks, venues, and lawmakers start citing “KPMG-audited Tether” as if it were a current exam. That sentence will show up. Check the date they omit.
Bitcoin can stay in this $62,800–$64,000 Coinbase day box and the audit will still matter. USDT is plumbing. Plumbing news does not need a range break to be the tape.