Tether says KPMG completed Tether's first full audit and found its 2025 financial statements fairly presented its financial position in all material respects
Context & Ripple Effects
Tether’s audit effort moved from a March engagement with a Big Four firm to completion after years in which it had promised a full audit and instead pursued reserve assurances through BDO Italia. The reported KPMG opinion marks a change from planned monthly reserve assurances and the earlier commitment to an independent audit to an opinion on Tether’s 2025 financial statements.
The milestone also closes a long-running gap: Tether had said an audit was still months away in 2022, despite audit promises dating back years. That history makes the completion—not merely the stated conclusion—the consequential development.
First-order effects
- Tether can point customers, counterparties and other users of its financial statements to KPMG’s finding that the 2025 statements fairly present its financial position in all material respects.
- KPMG becomes the accounting firm associated with Tether’s first full audit, replacing a disclosure narrative centered on reserve attestations with a completed financial-statement audit.
Second-order effects
- Tether’s disclosure baseline rises from periodic assurance reporting to a full audited annual statement, increasing pressure on its own future reporting to maintain that level of scrutiny.
- The shift gives counterparties a more formal document for evaluating Tether than the earlier planned BDO assurance reports, while leaving the reported conclusion confined to the 2025 financial statements.
Third-order effects
- If full audits become repeatable rather than one-off milestones, stablecoin transparency will be judged more by the continuity and scope of audited financial reporting than by reserve attestations alone.
- Tether’s progression from a long-delayed audit promise to a completed KPMG engagement shows how assurance expectations can harden into a recurring governance standard for major issuers.
The trend: Stablecoin issuers are moving from reserve-focused assurance claims toward fuller financial-statement audits as the benchmark for institutional credibility.