Tether spent years telling the market its stablecoin was fully backed. On August 13 it finally got a Big Four firm to sign the claim. KPMG US issued an unqualified opinion on Tether's 2025 financial statements, the first full audit in the company's history, and one number traveled fast: reserves exceeded liabilities by 6.814 billion dollars. A clean audit for the largest dollar token on earth. The catch sits in the calendar.
The figure KPMG blessed is dated December 31, 2025. Tether announced it more than seven months later. In between, the company's own quarterly report told a different story about the same cushion.
The clean opinion covers a picture from December
An audit verifies a balance sheet at one moment. This one confirmed that at year end the reserves held more than the tokens owed, by 6.814 billion dollars, and that KPMG had checked the transactions, the ownership records, the valuations, even the physical gold bars. Chief executive Paolo Ardoino put it plainly. "The result is an unqualified opinion; in other words, it means Tether has a clean audit."
Fair enough. A snapshot from December still says nothing about February, or June, or the week you actually want to redeem. And there is a fresher number, because Tether publishes one every quarter.
By June the buffer was down to 4.11 billion
Tether's second quarter attestation, signed off by BDO and dated June 30, put excess reserves at 4.11 billion dollars. That is a fall of roughly 40 percent from the audited December figure, in six months. USDT in circulation climbed to 184.6 billion over the same stretch. The surplus shrank while the liabilities it protects grew.
| Snapshot | Excess reserves | Attested by |
|---|---|---|
| December 31, 2025 | 6.814 billion dollars | KPMG (full audit) |
| June 30, 2026 | 4.11 billion dollars | BDO (quarterly) |
| Change | down about 40 percent |
Run the arithmetic and the cushion is thin. 4.11 billion against 183.64 billion in obligations is about 2.2 percent, roughly two cents of spare reserve behind every dollar of USDT. Tether booked around 1.5 billion in operating profit that quarter, most of it from Treasury bills, which means something else in the reserve was bleeding faster than the profit could refill it. Gold is the likely culprit: Tether added 14 tons of it during the quarter, and spot gold fell more than 20 percent from its January peak, marking down part of the backing even as the Treasury book kept earning.
What the clean opinion leaves open
Then there is what nobody has seen. Tether announced the audit but did not release the underlying financial statements KPMG examined, as Bloomberg noted, which keeps the exact reserve composition and the accounting choices out of public view. An unqualified opinion tells you a firm believes the statements are fairly presented. It does not tell you how much of the backing sits in Bitcoin and gold rather than cash and Treasuries, or how the book would hold under a fast redemption wave instead of a calm year end count. Smaller issuers keep showing how quickly a reserve can empty once redemptions actually turn.
None of this makes USDT unsafe. The audit is real, the profit is real, and 4.11 billion of genuine excess is more than most stablecoins have ever had verified. The point is narrower. A clean opinion on last December sat next to a company report showing the margin has narrowed since, even as Tether's share of the stablecoin market keeps drawing new rivals. Read the audit for what it certifies, and check the date on it.
