Zoax

Tether is a $184 BILLION stablecoin and has never been audited

Tether is the 17th largest holder of US Treasuries on earth, holding more US government debt than Germany, South Korea, or the UAE.

None of it has ever been verified by a full audit

In 2017 Tether hired Friedman LLP to audit the reserves. Friedman started asking what Tether called "excruciatingly detailed" questions, which is literally what an audit is and the engagement ended

5 years later the SEC fined Friedman 1.5 million dollars for failed audits of public companies during the same period they were looking at Tether

In 2018 Tether's own lawyer Stuart Hoegner said a full audit was "months away, not years"

That was 8 years ago

In 2021 the CFTC fined Tether 41 million dollars for lying about reserves

The regulator found that from June 2016 through February 2019, USDT was only fully backed 27.6% of the time

For 17.5 of those 26 months, the stablecoin "pegged 1 to 1 to the dollar" was not actually backed 1 to 1 to the dollar

In June 2017 Tether had 442 million tokens in circulation and never more than 61.5 million dollars in the bank to back them

The New York Attorney General separately found Tether had secretly lent 850 million dollars of reserves to Bitfinex to cover a hole from frozen payment processor funds

The AG called Tether's claim of full backing "a lie"

In 2024 Tether's CEO Paolo Ardoino admitted the Big Four accounting firms refused to touch the company

His quote: "Why would you risk 100,000 customers for a couple of stablecoins?"

The biggest auditors on earth said Tether was too risky to their reputation

Instead of a real audit, Tether publishes quarterly "attestations" from BDO Italia

Attestations are not audits, they are one day snapshots of what Tether showed the accountant

The BDO reports themselves say the engagement is limited to a single point in time and management's own notes were not subject to any assurance

In March 2026 Tether finally announced they hired a Big Four firm for their first real audit in 12 years but they refused to name it

Tether has promised an audit every year since 2014 and every single one of them collapsed

One company controls 184 billion dollars, holds more US government debt than most countries, owns 148 tons of physical gold, prints a dollar every time someone wants one and has never shown anyone the vault