08-19-2026 
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Hell has frozen over as the world’s largest stablecoin issuer finally completed an audit, although Tether’s refusal to release the report has some suggesting there may be less here than meets the eye.
- Tether hails first audit, claims critics were wrong all along
- Tether critics not ready to admit defeat
- Tether ownership still a black box
- Stablecoin-linked card volume soars
- Mastercard’s BVNK acquisition has Visa looking for new stablecoin partner
On August 14, Tether announced the completion of what it called the “largest inaugural financial audit in history.” The audit, conducted by KPMG, examined the financial statements of Tether International, S.A. de C.V. for the year ending December 31, 2025.
For accuracy’s sake, we’re going to quote at length from Tether’s PR regarding the audit.
Tether says KPMG issued “an unqualified audit opinion” of its financial statements and the documents “present fairly, in all material respects, the financial position of the Company as of December 31, 2025, and the results of its operations and its cash flows for the year ended in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles.”
Tether claims KPMG “physically counted and inspected every individual gold bar held by Tether, verifying the existence and identifying information of each bar rather than relying solely on reports from custodians or counterparties.”
Similar “independent substantive testing and verification” was applied “across the entirety of Tether’s financial statements, including the assets composing the reserves and the liabilities” associated with its USDT token.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino called the audit “a defining moment for the stablecoin industry. For years, some detractors said an audit of Tether could not be completed. They said the Company refused to subject itself to the most rigorous scrutiny. We have once again proven them wrong.”
Ardoino added that KPMG “did not simply review a set of headline figures. KPMG conducted a full and thorough audit in accordance with AICPA [American Institute of Certified Public Accountants] standards—examining the assets, transactions, systems, documentation, and other evidence supporting our financial statements. The result is an unqualified opinion; in other words, it means Tether has a clean audit.”
Tether’s chief financial officer, Simon McWilliams, who was hired in March 2025 to help prepare for this fiscal probing, called the audit “a landmark moment for Tether and for the industry we serve … Tether’s audited financial statements for the year ended 31 December 2025 report reserves exceeding the liabilities by $6.814 billion, confirming the quality of the public attestation reports.”
Ardoino later tweeted a reference to Tether’s ‘largest inaugural audit’ claim, saying it earned that designation “by at least an order of magnitude.” But that claim wouldn’t have applied had Tether not studiously avoided conducting said audit for well over a decade.
Ardoino also celebrated Tether having withstood “several years of detractors’ false claims, competitors lies, political attacks and misinformed coverage by several mainstream newspapers trying desperately to discredit us for the benefit of their friends in the tall ivory towers.”
Again, Tether could have reduced much of this criticism had it shown any interest in submitting its reserves to an independent inspection at any point over the past decade. Also, it’s widely believed that the chief reason Tether’s management agreed to let KPMG peek under its hood is the company’s failure to convince outside investors that buying a piece of Tether wasn’t the crypto equivalent of buying a pig in a poke.
Not so fast, say critics
While some in the crypto community were quick to congratulate Tether on its milestone, critics aren’t giving up that easily. For one thing, Tether appears to have no plans to release KPMG’s audit report or any future audits that might be conducted on an annual basis going forward. Instead, Tether says it will continue to publish the quarterly ‘attestations’ of its reserves conducted by BDO Italia.
Some critics pounced on the fact that KPMG audited Tether International rather than its parent company Tether Holdings, S.A. de C.V. While Ardoino told The Starting Block podcast that International was “the only entity issuing USDT,” Tether was previously caught shifting assets between its affiliated entities to cover financial shortfalls, including multiple instances of moving assets out of one division the day after publishing “self-proclaimed verification[s] of its cash reserves.”
Others called into question the language Tether used to describe KPMG’s inspection of its $18.8 billion worth of gold bricks (as of its Q2 attestation), which might not translate into actual ownership of said bricks.
Some might call that a reach, but language red flags emerged long before this audit. For instance, Tether’s most recent attestation showed a change in how Tether referenced its highly controversial ‘secured loans.’ This year’s Q1 attestation claimed, as such reports have in the past, that the loans are “fully collateralized by liquid assets.” The Q2 report issued earlier this month claims these loans are “over collateralized,” with no reference to how liquid these backing assets might be.
Translation, according to one critic: “Fully collateralized by liquid assets = 100% backed by things we can sell at any time. Over collaterlized [sic] and regularly monitored = 120% backed by things we cannot sell at any time and could take a loss on, that’s why the extra collateral is there, to buy time.”
Asked on the podcast about Tether critics being unwilling to accept the audit as proof that all is well in USDT-land, Ardoino said “I honestly don’t care.” But you could argue that this dismissive view also summed up Tether’s approach to audits before would-be investors allegedly balked at investing due to the opacity of Tether’s finances, after which Tether suddenly appeared to care a lot.
Regarding potential investors, Ardoino claimed there was “huge interest” from those looking to acquire a piece of Tether. But Ardoino also claimed he didn’t want to “wake up every single day having to optimize every single cent because otherwise I will have one additional shareholder upset with me. So people joining Tether need to be mission-driven … we are going to be very careful with whom we add to the cap table.”
New Tether investors could join extremely select club
As for who’s currently sitting at that table, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released a report on Tether’s ownership earlier this month titled The $200 billion company you can’t look inside.
The ICIJ notes USDT’s origins as ‘Realcoin,’ launched in 2014 by a trio of entrepreneurs, including the controversial figure Brock Pierce. The following year, this trio transferred control/ownership to Giancarlo Devasini and Jean-Louis van der Velde, the execs behind Tether’s (now) sister firm, the Bitfinex exchange.By early 2016, Devasini owned 100% of Tether Holdings, but transferred “at least 55%” of his shares to van der Velde later that year. Devasini also transferred shares to DigFinex Inc. But by 2018, van der Velde’s stake in Tether Holdings had retreated to ~15%, while Devasini’s stake stood at ~43%.
An individual named Kristian Hansen was said to control a 6.6% stake in Tether, while a 2023 Wall Street Journal report gave Tether’s former general counsel, Stuart Hoegner, a ~15% stake. British national Christopher Harborne, who came on board in 2016, was said to control 12% of Tether. (Harborne was recently in the news for giving millions to Nigel Farage’s Reform U.K. party.) Ardoino’s stake in Tether was estimated at ~3.5% in 2018, but Forbes claimed his stake has since risen to 20%.
Last year, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings listed Devasini as having “a greater than 50% voting interest” in Tether Holdings. The ICIJ said van der Velde’s name, which was previously listed alongside Devasini’s, “disappeared” from these filings.
In 2024, Howard Lutnick, founder of Wall Street financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald (NASDAQ: ZCFITX) and current U.S. Secretary of Commerce, told Congress that Cantor “owns a convertible bond with Tether.” This bond was later revealed as representing a 5% stake in Tether.
Around the same time, Tether made loans of undisclosed size to a trust benefiting Lutnick’s children. After joining the Trump administration, Lutnick sold his stake in Cantor to a number of trusts benefiting his kids, around the time that the amount of ‘secured loans’ on Tether’s balance sheet grew significantly.
Stablecoin card volume soars
In June, Tether teamed up with the Fasset digital banking/investment platform on “the world’s first gold-backed neobanking Visa Card.” The card works by first converting Tether’s gold-backed XAUT token to USDT and then to fiat at the point of transaction, all conducted behind the scenes, wherever Visa is accepted.
Earlier this month, a16zcrypto reported that on-chain stablecoin-based card spending tracked by Paymentscan hit $759 million in July. That’s a 2.5x increase from the same month last year and ~759x higher than in 2023, when tracking of this volume began.
Around 8.8 million individual stablecoin card transactions were recorded in July, up from 5.2 million in July 2025. The average spend per transaction works out to ~$86. (New stats show just under 2.5 million transactions last week, a new record, while the value of these transactions totaled nearly $204 million, the third-highest weekly sum to date.)
The Ethereum layer-2 network Optimism (OP Mainnet) accounted for 29% of July’s volume, with Solana and Base (the layer-2 backed by the Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) exchange) each accounting for ~19%.
USDC, the dollar-backed stablecoin issued by Circle (NASDAQ: CRCL), dominates card spending with a ~59% share in July, 11 points higher than the same month last year. But Tether’s USDT is coming on fast, rising from 7% a year ago to 26% this July.
The rise of dollar-backed stablecoin card spending represents a significant turnaround from early 2024, when ~88% of card volume was settled in the euro-backed EURe (Monerium) on the Gnosis network. Today? EURe’s share of July’s pie was a mere 2%.
Earlier this month, Western Union (NASDAQ: WU) and its stablecoin infrastructure partner Rain launched Stablecard, a Visa-secured (NASDAQ: V) card that transacts using WU’s U.S. Dollar Payment Token (USDPT).
Stablecard users can transact online or at any retail outlet where Visa is accepted, receive WU money transfers directly into their USDPT wallet, and add Stablecard to their current digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc.). WU says Stablecard is currently available in 37 markets, a figure the company hopes to boost to 60+ by year’s end.
Despite the hype, most stablecoin transaction volume continues to represent trading and transfers rather than purchases. Surveys show that stablecoin holders want to use their tokens for ‘major purchases,’ but without greater merchant acceptance/integration, only a handful are currently able to do so.
Visa looking for stablecoin settlement dance partner
WU chose its card partner wisely, as Visa dominates the crypto card spending volume chart, dwarfing rival Mastercard’s (NASDAQ: MA) share. Visa’s lead has been credited to its willingness to partner with infrastructure providers like Rain and Reap, while Mastercard opted to partner with centralized exchanges.
Mastercard has taken steps to close this gap, including its $1.8 billion deal this March to acquire stablecoin infrastructure firm BNVK. That acquisition was officially completed this month, leading Mastercard chief product officer Jorn Lambert to say: “In a multi-money world where fiat, stablecoins and tokenized deposits and other forms of value coexist, the next payments paradigm will defined by how effectively each rail, network or form of money connects and works together.”
BVNK provides the infrastructure behind Visa Direct, the $1.7 trillion real-time payments network, and Visa Ventures made a strategic investment in BVNK in May 2025. But the Mastercard deal reportedly has Visa on the hunt for a new settlement partner.
CoinDesk reported this week that Visa has issued a request for product (RFP) that seeks a partner with the capacity to swap and support a number of stablecoins. Visa is said to be particularly eyeing one potential (unnamed) partner that boasts digital asset exchange licenses in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Singapore.
Among the stablecoins that Visa’s new partner will need to handle is OpenUSD (OUSD), the recently announced token supported by a broad consortium of partners, including Visa and Mastercard. In July, Visa announced that OUSD would be the first token to feature on its new Visa Stablecoin Platform (VSP), “a new enterprise platform designed to help financial institutions, fintechs, and crypto natives access stablecoin capabilities through a single Visa-managed environment.”
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