- Tether has chosen KPMG to carry out a full audit of its USDT reserves, moving beyond its long-running monthly attestation model.
- The company has also hired PwC to help prepare internal controls and reporting systems as it eyes U.S. expansion and a major capital raise.
Tether is taking a bigger swing at one of the market’s oldest trust questions: what sits behind USDT, how robust the controls are, and whether the company can satisfy a more institutional standard of scrutiny.
Tether moves beyond attestations with a full-scale audit push
According to reports, Tether has selected KPMG to conduct a full audit of its roughly $185 billion USDT reserve base. At the same time, PwC has been brought in to help get the issuer’s internal systems ready for that level of review.
That is a meaningful shift. For years, Tether has relied on monthly attestations from BDO Italia, which gave the market periodic reserve snapshots but stopped short of a full audit. This new process is expected to go further, covering not just assets and liabilities, but also internal controls, reporting systems, and the broader financial architecture supporting the stablecoin.
In crypto terms, that matters because attestations and audits do not carry the same weight. An attestation tells you what appears to be there at a specific point in time. A full audit digs deeper into whether the system holding everything together is actually sound.
U.S. ambitions are raising the pressure on transparency
The timing does not look accidental. Tether is reportedly preparing for a broader U.S. push and is said to be exploring a fundraising round in the $15 billion to $20 billion range. That kind of ambition naturally puts more pressure on the company to answer long-running questions around transparency, governance and regulatory readiness.
Investor concerns have reportedly centered on valuation, regulatory exposure, and the credibility of reserve oversight. In that environment, a full audit starts to look less like a nice-to-have and more like core market infrastructure.
For Tether, the calculation seems straightforward enough. If it wants to expand deeper into the U.S. financial system while asking investors to back the next phase of growth, the era of reserve snapshots alone may no longer be enough.