Tether Secures Clean KPMG Opinion in First Full Audit

Tether’s USDT is the world’s largest dollar-pegged stablecoin, backed primarily by U.S. Treasury securities, cash and other reserve assets. Returns on those holdings have become a major earnings engine as elevated interest rates boosted income, while the size of Tether’s excess reserve cushion remains a key gauge of its ability to absorb losses and meet redemptions during periods of market stress.

Tether reported $1.5 billion in net operating profit for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, while excess reserves stood at $4.11 billion, roughly half the prior-quarter buffer. USDT supply climbed to $184.6 billion despite a contraction in the broader stablecoin market, and the company added 30 million users during the quarter. Tether also increased its physical gold holdings by about 14 metric tons and expanded into artificial intelligence with an open-source vision-language model.

USDT, issued by Tether and pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar, had about $184 billion in circulation at the time of the event. It was the world’s largest stablecoin and a major source of liquidity for cryptocurrency trading and cross-border settlement. Since 2022, Tether has provided only quarterly reserve attestations from BDO Italia and has never completed a full audit of its financial statements, fueling longstanding market concerns about whether its reserves are sufficient and how it manages risk.

Tether announced on March 24, 2026, that it had formally appointed a Big Four accounting firm. The Financial Times reported on March 27 that KPMG would lead the audit, while Tether also hired PwC to help prepare its internal controls, systems and financial-reporting processes. The audit will cover assets, liabilities and USDT reserves, but no completion or report-delivery date has been announced.

The United States signed the GENIUS Act into law on July 18, 2025, establishing reserve and disclosure requirements for payment stablecoins. USAT is issued by Office of the Comptroller of the Currency-regulated Anchorage Digital Bank with support from Tether and operates separately from USDT, which has not undergone a full financial-statement audit. The report is significant because it marks the first time a Big Four accounting firm has issued an attestation opinion for a Tether-related product.

Anchorage Digital Bank released the first report on February 28, 2026, with Deloitte & Touche providing assurance as of January 31. At that date, 17,501,391 USAT tokens were in circulation, backed by $17,604,716 in reserves, leaving an excess of $103,325. The reserves consisted of $3,654,716 in cash and $13,950,000 in repurchase agreements collateralized by U.S. Treasurys.