KPMG has completed a full audit of Tether Gold’s issuer and found 520,089.350 fine troy ounces of allocated gold behind 520,089.300 XAUT tokens on 31 December 2025, Tether announced on Thursday 12 November. KPMG U.S. gave an unqualified opinion on the 2025 financial statements of TG Commodities, S.A. de C.V., which issues the token, and valued the gold at $2.246 billion. It is the second Tether company to pass a Big Four audit, after the USDT issuer in August.
The Tether Gold audit answers one old question about the token: whether the bars exist. KPMG counted and inspected each one rather than relying on letters from the custodian, according to Tether. It leaves others open. The figures are more than ten months old, the audited statements have not been published, and since the audit date the number of tokens has grown by 59%.
A KPMG spokesperson confirmed the clean opinion to The Block, which reported that the work followed standards of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). That outside confirmation matters because the audited statements of Tether’s USDT issuer, cleared by KPMG in August, were not released either, so most of the detail comes from Tether’s own announcement.
What the KPMG audit of XAUT found
The audit covers the year to 31 December 2025, with statements prepared under US generally accepted accounting principles. On that date TG Commodities held 520,089.350 ounces against 520,089.300 tokens in issue. The surplus is 0.05 ounce, a little over one and a half grams.
The dollar value of $2.246 billion puts the year-end gold price used at about $4,318 an ounce, by simple division of Tether’s two figures. The release gives no price itself.
The gold sits in vaults in Switzerland and meets the London Good Delivery standard, the bar specification of the London bullion market. Tether says the metal belongs to token holders and that each XAUT is an undivided ownership interest in gold on specified bars. Between audits, management hires an independent firm each quarter to test a sample of bars against the data reported by the refineries that cast them.
“KPMG counted every single bar as part of its Tether Gold audit,” chief executive Paolo Ardoino said in the release. Chief financial officer Simon McWilliams said: “The audited figures are consistent with the reserves we have published every quarter.”
Before the USDT audit in August, Tether’s reserve reporting consisted of attestations covering holdings and liabilities on a given date, The Block noted. A financial statement audit goes further: the auditor tests a whole year of accounts, the controls behind them and the existence of the assets, and signs an opinion on the result. An unqualified opinion is the cleanest outcome an auditor can give.
The audit is ten months old and the token has grown 59% since
Tether Gold’s Ethereum contract showed a total supply of 827,417.63 XAUT at 17:39 UTC on 12 November, according to Etherscan, and a direct read of the contract at 17:45 UTC gave the same figure. That is about 307,300 tokens more than KPMG counted. Put differently, 37% of the XAUT in existence today did not exist on the audit date, and the gold behind those tokens is outside the audited balance sheet.
The issuer’s third-quarter reserve report, as of 30 September, already showed about 827,418 ounces, according to Turkish broadcaster CNBC-e, which reported it on 9 November citing TG Commodities. By CNBC-e’s account, the report listed 2,057 bars, 766 of them added this year in Switzerland, and split the tokens between 709,323.66 XAUT sold to buyers and 118,093.97 XAUT held by the issuer ready for sale. On Thursday the on-chain supply showed the same figure, to the hundredth of a token.
Those figures, if accurate, allow a rough cross-check of the audit. Taking the 766 new bars away leaves about 1,291 bars at the end of 2025; divided into 520,089 ounces that gives roughly 403 ounces a bar, in line with the weight of a standard Good Delivery bar. It is arithmetic on two reports, not a figure KPMG published.
McWilliams’s statement that the audit matches the quarterly reports is the bridge between the old audit and today’s supply. It is a statement by the company, not by KPMG, and it covers the past: the 2026 quarters will only be audited when the 2026 accounts are.
Gold is about 10% below the audited valuation
Spot gold was bid at $3,872.80 an ounce at 17:37 UTC on Thursday, down $114.20 (2.86%) on the day, according to Kitco. That is about 10% below the year-end price implied by the audited figures and about 7% below the $4,157.41 an ounce used in the 30 September reserve report, as cited by CNBC-e. XAUT itself traded at $3,866.25 on Etherscan at 17:39 UTC, close to spot.
At that spot price, the 827,417.63 tokens in existence correspond to about $3.2 billion of gold. The figure is higher than the audited $2.246 billion only because there are more ounces; the price has fallen. The audit proves ounces, not a dollar value an investor would get today.
Tether Gold vs PAX Gold: what each issuer publishes
The closest rival, Paxos’s PAX Gold (PAXG), has a different reporting model. Paxos posts a monthly report on its transparency page; those posted since 28 February 2025 are issued by KPMG LLP. The latest, signed on 23 October, is an examination of management’s assertion that 435,306 ounces of London Good Delivery gold backed 435,306 PAXG on 30 September at 5:00 pm New York time, spread over Ethereum, Solana, Base and the Robinhood blockchain.
That report is an attestation on a single date, not an audit of financial statements, but it is public and it names the chain of custody: the gold is bought from StoneX and stored with Brink’s Global Services and ICBC Standard Bank, both approved by the London Bullion Market Association. Paxos Trust Company converted on 12 December 2025 from a New York trust company into a national bank limited to trust activities, supervised by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the report says.
| Tether Gold (XAUT) | PAX Gold (PAXG) | |
|---|---|---|
| Issuer | TG Commodities, S.A. de C.V. (Tether) | Paxos Trust Company (OCC-supervised) |
| Latest independent check | KPMG U.S. audit of 2025 financial statements, opinion announced 12 Nov 2026 | KPMG LLP examination as of 30 Sep 2026, signed 23 Oct 2026 |
| Report published | No, only Tether’s summary | Yes, PDF on Paxos’s site |
| Gold at last reported date | About 827,418 oz (30 Sep 2026, issuer report cited by CNBC-e) | 435,306 oz (30 Sep 2026) |
| Vault operator named | No, Switzerland only | Yes, Brink’s and ICBC Standard Bank |
| Supply on Ethereum, 17:45 UTC 12 Nov | 827,417.63 XAUT | 444,301.45 PAXG |
Both tokens claim one fine troy ounce per token, and both now have KPMG names on their paperwork. The difference is in what a holder can read. A PAXG holder can open a monthly report that names the vaults. An XAUT holder gets a stronger kind of assurance on an older date, through a press release.
Ardoino also said XAUT “is on track to become the first true competitor to the gold ETF market,” according to Decrypt. That remains a company claim. A gold exchange-traded fund is a regulated fund that files a prospectus with a securities regulator; XAUT is a crypto token, and a holder’s rights rest on the issuer’s terms.
What the Tether Gold audit does not cover
Several things a holder might want to check are not in the announcement. The KPMG report and the audited statements are not linked, and nothing says they will be released. The Swiss vault operator is not named. There is no word on whether any of the gold is pledged, lent or otherwise encumbered, beyond the description of it as allocated and owned by holders. Redemption terms are not part of the audit at all.
The standards question also needs care. The Defiant pointed out after the USDT audit that the work followed AICPA standards rather than those of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, which the GENIUS Act sets for licensed US payment stablecoin issuers. That debate concerns USDT. A gold token is not pegged to a currency, and Paxos’s own report notes that the AICPA stablecoin criteria it uses apply only to fiat-pegged tokens.
For USDT, the quarterly reserve reports are still attestations by BDO; the last one, for 30 September, is covered in our article on Tether’s $7.95 billion reserve buffer. Our profile of Tether, its reserves and the KPMG audit of USDT explains how the group is organised, and our count of Tether’s US-listed stakes shows where else its money goes.
Attestation, audit, proof of reserves: the short version
An attestation checks a company’s claim about one moment, such as gold held at 5:00 pm on 30 September. An audit tests a full year of accounts and the controls behind them, and ends with an opinion on the financial statements. Proof of reserves, used by exchanges, usually means a cryptographic snapshot of balances, with no accountant’s opinion at all. For a token backed by a physical asset, none of the three replaces knowing who holds the metal and on what terms; our beginner’s guide to stablecoins covers the main backing models.
McWilliams told The Block that Tether is working toward audits of the rest of its businesses. For XAUT holders, the next test is an audit of the 2026 accounts, the first that would cover the tokens issued this year; Tether has not given a date for it.