Major private gold buyer may need a Big Four audit now more than ever

Major private gold buyer may need a Big Four audit now more than ever
Pooja Rajkumari
7 min read
On March 24, Tether, the issuer of the largest stablecoin by market cap, USDT, announced it had hired a Big Four accounting firm to conduct its first full financial audit. It declined to name the firm.
But on March 27, the Financial Times reported that the firm is KPMG. A second Big Four firm, PwC, has also been reportedly roped in to prepare Tether’s internal systems.
TheStreet Roundtable reached out to Tether for a comment and had not received a response by the time of publication.
But for a company that has spent a decade deflecting this exact question, this may finally be the moment it answers.
Tether has been promising an audit since roughly the time it launched USDT in 2014, initially called “Realcoin.”
That promise has aged like milk.
For the initial years between 2014 and 2017, it functioned without any audits.
In 2017, Tether tried for an audit with Friedman LLP. But in 2018, the companies parted ways, with a spokesperson from Tether telling CoinDesk that a successful audit was “unattainable in a reasonable time frame.”
By the way, in 2022, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Friedman for improper auditing of two public companies between 2017 and 2022, roughly around the same time it was auditing Tether. Although the case was settled with a $1.5 million fine, it did raise concerns.
In fact, a preliminary report that Friedman produced for Tether was also very incomplete.
While it is not available to the public, screenshots shared by a few showed that Friedman reported Tether had $442.9 million of cash on reserve and it matched the outstanding issuance of USDT at that time.
Tether holds roughly $17.5 billion in gold reserves, according to its latest disclosures, making it one of the most significant corporate holders of precious metals.
For years, Tether relied on attestations from BDO Italia, its Italian auditing partner since 2022, which confirmed at a point in time that the assets Tether claimed to hold were, in fact, held.
But attestations are not audits. They do not examine internal controls, governance, or the valuation methodology behind complex or illiquid assets. At best, you can call an attestation a photograph of a balance sheet, but it doesn’t show how the company got there.
The distinction matters enormously given what Tether’s history looks like on paper.
In 2021, the company settled with the New York Attorney General’s office over misrepresentations about the backing of USDT. It paid $18.5 million along with its sister company, Bitfinex.
That same year, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined Tether $41 million for what regulators described as “untrue or misleading statements” about its dollar reserves.
During the New York AG investigation, CoinDesk requested access to additional information under a Freedom of Information Law request. The documents revealed that a significant portion of the then-$40.6 billion reserve sat at Deltec Bank in the Bahamas, with a notable chunk held in short-term notes from Chinese and other international banks. This was not the plain dollar holdings many users assumed.
In 2024, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino revealed to DL News that Big Four firms were simply afraid of the reputational risk.
“So you are a Big Four auditing firm, and you have the entire banking industry that is your customer,” he said. “Why would you risk 100,000 customers for a couple of stablecoins?”
But now, in 2026, USDT is much bigger. When Ardoino made that comment in April 2022, the USDT market cap stood at roughly $82.7 billion, as per CoinMarketCap. As of March 27, the stablecoin stands close to $184 billion in circulation. That’s a 122.5% increase.
And now that Tether is planning to come back to the United States after its nine-year hiatus, an audit might be the need of the hour.
Tether decided to stop catering to users and corporations in the U.S. in 2018 due to heightened regulatory scrutiny.
In 2026, crypto regulations are comparatively more welcoming, thanks to the GENIUS Act. But it doesn’t mean Tether can just land in the country.
The GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, established the first federal regulatory framework for stablecoins in the United States. Among its requirements is that stablecoin issuers looking for U.S. registration must satisfy reserve verification and reporting standards that a Big Four audit is widely expected to meet.
El Salvador-based Tether has already signalled its intent to operate under this framework. It launched USAT, a GENIUS Act-compliant dollar-pegged token, in January 2026. USAT currently has a circulating supply of around $28 million.
But the real prize, and the real compliance challenge, is getting USDT recognized under U.S. law. Without an audit, that path is closed.
The second pressure is financial. Tether has been in discussions about a significant equity raise for months. In September 2025, reports pointed out that the company was exploring raising to $20 billion at a valuation of $500 billion.
Those talks subsequently scaled back. Bloomberg reported that Tether wants to wait until the full audit before raising any funds. Investors and bankers have reportedly been pressuring the firm for audited financials before committing.
Tether’s CFO, Simon McWilliams, noted that the Big Four was chosen through a competitive process and that Tether already operates at Big Four audit standards internally.
The natural benchmark for Tether’s KPMG engagement is Circle’s relationship with Deloitte. Circle, the issuer of USDC, which is the second largest stablecoin by market cap after USDT, has been audited annually by Deloitte since fiscal year 2022. It has previously worked with Grant Thornton since 2015.
It issues monthly reserve attestations on top of that.
As a publicly traded company following its 2025 IPO, Circle is also subject to SEC reporting requirements.
But it is not easy to compare Circle with Tether.
First of all, Tether is a private company and has no plans so far to go public. So technically, it is not required for Tether to follow SEC reporting rules.
Second, Circle’s reserve structure is deliberately simple. USDC is backed almost entirely by cash and short-term U.S. Treasuries, held in the Circle Reserve Fund managed by BlackRock. The audit becomes fairly simple.
Tether’s balance sheet is a different animal altogether. Its reserves include U.S. Treasuries, Bitcoin (BTC), precious metals, short-term loans, and tokenized liabilities issued across multiple blockchains.
Meanwhile, the market has already begun pricing in the competitive implications.
When Tether announced the audit engagement on March 24, Circle’s stock fell sharply. Even on March 27, after reports of KPMG getting involved, Circle fell by over 7% during trading hours.
Transparency has been USDC’s biggest selling point. If KPMG signs off on Tether’s reserves, it will no longer have that advantage. USDT already commands roughly 60% of the stablecoin market compared to USDC’s approximately 25%.
Does an audit really matter?
There is no doubt that without any audits, USDT is still dominating the stablecoin market.
However, an audit matters, if not for retail users but definitely for institutional allocators, U.S.-regulated entities, payment companies building on stablecoins, and governments considering USDT for cross-border settlement.
These are the parties for whom an audit is a legal or fiduciary requirement, not a preference.
The main reason for an audit is simple. For an asset that has hundreds of billions of dollars in daily crypto trading, getting a Big Four audit is important for removing a big institutional and regulatory hurdle for USDT, especially in the U.S. If the GENIUS Act built the highway for USDT to reach this audience, an audit is the toll Tether has to pay.