Tether Gold (XAU₮) Becomes Tether’s Second Stablecoin to Complete a Big Four Audit
- Published
- Updated
KPMG U.S. completed an audit of TG Commodities, S.A.’s 2025 financial statements and issued an unqualified opinion for Tether Gold on 12 November 2026. The new coverage adds that the auditor counted and inspected the gold backing XAU₮, with one report stating the metal matched the token supply, and another saying this was Tether’s first Big Four audit for the gold token after more than five years on the market.
Key claims & sources
What it means
XAU₮ launched in 2020 as Tether's gold-backed token, each unit tied to one fine troy ounce held in a Swiss vault, but for more than five years the company relied on attestations rather than full audits to back that claim. Tether's flagship USDT only secured its own Big Four audit from KPMG U.S. in August 2026. XAU₮ now enters a market long dominated by SPDR Gold Shares, the exchange-traded fund widely cited as America's largest gold holding.
KPMG physically counted the bars and matched 520,089.350 fine troy ounces against 520,089.300 tokens in circulation, backing roughly $2.2 billion in token supply with verified metal rather than a paper claim. Custodians, exchanges and institutional holders can now point to an unqualified Big Four opinion instead of a self-published attestation. That access still excludes most retail buyers in the United States, who cannot purchase XAU₮ directly from Tether and remain limited to secondary markets.
A clean KPMG opinion does more for Tether's broader credibility than for XAU₮ alone, arriving after years of scrutiny over whether USDT's reserves matched its claims. Confirming bar-by-bar gold backing sets a transparency bar other tokenized commodity issuers will be measured against, but one annual audit is not the same as continuous, real-time verification. Investors weighing tokenized gold against a regulated fund like GLD are still trading audited custody for an unregulated product.
The open question is whether this becomes routine rather than a one-off milestone: Tether has not committed to a fixed annual cycle of Big Four audits across its full stablecoin lineup, which still includes CNHT, MXNT and EURT without comparable sign-off. A second consecutive audited year for TG Commodities would signal a durable standard; silence until another five-year gap would suggest the November 2026 opinion was a one-time credibility exercise timed to market pressure.
Market reaction i
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Coverage timeline
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Where this sits in the Tether series
| When | What happened | Figure |
|---|---|---|
| 38 days ago | USDT at $1.0000 high | today it sits -0.1% from there |
| 14 days ago | USDT at $0.9980 low | today it sits +0.1% from there |
From what we have stored, starting 2 months ago.