Tether Says KPMG Signed the Audit. The Letter Is the Part That Matters.

Tether announced that KPMG US has issued a positive opinion on the company after a complete financial statement audit, and said the audited statements put reserves above liabilities by $6.814 billion at year-end ^[1][5]. Per Crowdfund Insider, the actual opinion letter was not immediately available ^[2], which means the sector's longest-standing objection has been answered by a press release describing an audit rather than by the audit.

The described scope is broad. According to Tether, the work covered assets, liabilities, income, equity and cash flows, along with the transactions, systems, valuations and supporting evidence beneath them ^[3]. KPMG also reportedly counted and inspected every individual gold bar Tether holds ^[4]. That is a meaningful step up from the quarterly reserve attestations Tether has published until now ^[6], because an attestation on a point-in-time reserve schedule and an opinion on a full set of financial statements are different products with different liability attached to the signature.

What the published account does not include is the detail that determines how much the signature is worth. The source does not state which entity was audited, the accounting framework applied, the fiscal year covered, or whether the opinion is unqualified ^[8]. Until the letter is public, those are open questions, and "positive opinion" is Tether's characterisation, not a term of art.

The cushion, meanwhile, is thin relative to the balance sheet it supports. USDT's market capitalisation is around $183 billion ^[11]; a $6.814 billion excess is roughly 3.7 percent of that ^[13], and the two figures are not measured on the same date, since the surplus is a year-end number and the market cap is current ^[5][11]. Tether separately reported $1.5 billion in net operating profit for the three months ending June 30, 2026 ^[10], so the equity buffer is on the order of one year of that run rate.

The competitive context explains the timing. USDT is about 2.5 times the size of Circle's USDC at roughly $72 billion ^[11][12][14], and the GENIUS Act has established US rules for payment stablecoins ^[15], pulling banks and traditional institutions toward issuing their own ^[16]. In that market, an audit is a procurement document.

CEO Paolo Ardoino framed it as vindication, saying critics claimed the company refused the most rigorous scrutiny and that "completing our financial statement audit sets a new standard for the industry" ^[7]. He also said more than 650 million users in emerging markets rely on Tether daily, and that the proof of stability "is no longer just a Tether promise; it's a signed opinion" ^[9]. Chief Financial Officer Simon McWilliams called it a landmark moment for the firm ^[17]. Ardoino separately described Tether as having evolved into one of the most financially sophisticated private companies in the world ^[18].

Every one of those sentences depends on a document nobody outside the process has read.