Historic moment: Tether has undergone a real audit for the first time

Remember the crypto market’s biggest fear all these years? “What if USDT isn’t actually fully backed?” That question is now settled.

KPMG, one of the Big Four auditors, issued an unqualified opinion on Tether’s 2025 financial statements. This is the company’s first full audit in its entire history. They didn’t just check a “snapshot at a specific date” — they reviewed everything: the balance sheet, revenue, cash flows, and counterparties. All the way down to physically counting every gold bar in the vaults. Bottom line: reserves exceed liabilities by $6.8 billion.

🔎 Why didn’t this happen earlier? There are 3 reasons:

• Major auditors stayed away from crypto for years. There were simply too many scams and too much reputational risk surrounding the sector. Tether itself acknowledged that the company had long been a toxic client for the Big Four: in 2021, it paid fines to U.S. regulators over misleading disclosures about its reserves.

• There were no established accounting standards for valuing such a mix of assets: crypto, Treasuries, gold, and tokenized liabilities.

• Instead of audits, Tether published attestations. And an attestation is like a photo of a wallet at a specific moment: it shows that the money is there right now, but it doesn’t answer where it came from or where it went. An audit examines the entire picture over the course of a year.

💡 Why does this matter?

USDT is the lifeblood of the crypto market: nearly $185 billion is in circulation. As long as its backing was confirmed only through attestations, “Tether risk” remained one of the industry’s biggest systemic fears. And for institutions and regulators — especially in the U.S. — a Big Four audit is an essential ticket into the regulated financial world: without one, serious institutional money simply doesn’t enter the instrument.

Does this mean the market is about to reverse? No: an audit doesn’t print liquidity or move the price. But it removes one of the last barriers between crypto and major institutional capital.