KPMG Gives Tether Gold Its First Big Four Audit at $2.25 Billion

By Elena Vasquez

KPMG U.S. has issued an unqualified audit opinion on Tether Gold's 2025 financial statements, covering $2.25 billion in gold reserves backing the XAUT token — the product's first Big Four audit in more than five years of operation. Tether announced the engagement's completion on November 12. The opinion covers TG Commodities, S.A. de C.V., the issuing entity for XAUT.

The audited period ended December 31, 2025, when Tether Gold held 520,089.35 fine troy ounces of gold. KPMG physically inspected and counted individual bullion bars, the company said, matching bar-level identifying information against supporting records. An unqualified opinion means the statements fairly present the issuer's financial position under applicable accounting standards; it does not, by itself, vouch for the token's redemption mechanics or market conduct.

The takeaway: the gold is now counted by a Big Four firm, but only after half a decade in which nobody outside Tether counted it.

Why did the audit take five years?

Tether Gold launched in January 2020, offering tokenized ownership of physical bullion stored in Switzerland at a ratio of one fine troy ounce per token. Despite that straightforward structure, XAUT received no product-specific independent reserves attestation until April 2025.

That first report, which was an attestation rather than a full audit, showed Tether held 246,523.33 ounces of gold — roughly 7.7 metric tons — against tokens then in circulation. An attestation provides assurance over reserves at a single date; it does not examine a full year of financial statements. The distinction matters, and Tether's marketing has not always made it loudly.

How fast have the reserves grown?

Growth since the first attestation has been rapid. By March 31, 2026, reserves reached approximately 707,747 ounces — a 36% increase from the end of 2025 — with a market value above $3.3 billion. The latest available attestation, prepared by BDO as of September 30, places reserves at 827,417.63 fine troy ounces valued at $3.44 billion.

The same BDO report shows 827,417.63 XAUT minted, of which approximately 709,323.66 tokens had been sold and 118,093.97 remained available for sale. That means roughly one token in seven was sitting unsold in the issuer's own inventory — a supply position, not customer demand.

In plain terms: the gold pile has grown about three and a half times since April 2025, and a meaningful slice of the corresponding token supply has never left Tether's hands.

What is the regulatory backdrop?

The audit push follows years of scrutiny of Tether's disclosures, most of it concerning USDT rather than gold. In October 2021, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission ordered Tether to pay $41 million after finding the company made misleading statements about USDT being fully backed by U.S. dollars. The CFTC found Tether held sufficient fiat to cover circulating USDT on only 27.6% of days examined across a 26-month period from 2016 to 2018.

Those findings concerned historical USDT reserves, not the bullion behind XAUT. Still, the episode shaped the reporting regime that followed: quarterly BDO attestations, then a KPMG appointment for a full audit in March 2026, with PwC reportedly engaged to help prepare internal systems.

KPMG completed its audit of Tether International in August, issuing an unqualified opinion on its 2025 accounts and reporting that reserves exceeded token-related liabilities by $6.814 billion at year-end. That review examined transactions, asset ownership, valuations, counterparties and supporting records across the USDT issuer's operations.

Chief Financial Officer Simon McWilliams said Tether intends to extend its financial audit program across its businesses following the two engagements. The commitment is a statement of intent, not a published schedule, and investors have no deadline against which to measure it.