Morning Minute: Tether Finally Gets An Audit

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors continue slide, BTC at $62.8k
• SEC delays meeting to discuss crypto regulation
• Trezor data breach exposes customer addresses
• Kalshi raising $750M at $40B valuation
• Lighter debuts $20M+ points program with Robinhood Wallet

🏦 Tether Finally Got a Real Audit, and KPMG Signed Off

Tether said Thursday that Big Four accounting firm KPMG issued an unqualified opinion (the best possible result) on its 2025 financial statements.

Tether (the company behind the leading stablecoin USDT) called it the “largest inaugural financial audit in history,” and said KPMG examined its assets, liabilities, income, cash flows, internal systems, records, counterparties, and supporting documentation, even physically counting and inspecting every individual gold bar Tether holds rather than trusting custodian reports.

Tether has spent years fending off questions about whether USDT is truly backed. For most of its history, it published quarterly attestations (a lighter review), rather than submitting to a full audit, which critics treated as a red flag. And the skepticism wasn’t unfounded: Tether paid an $18.5 million settlement to New York in 2021 over misrepresenting its reserves, and the CFTC fined it $41 million the same year for claiming USDT was fully backed by dollars when it wasn’t at all times. A clean opinion from a Big Four firm is the milestone the company has long promised and never delivered, until now.