Tether Publishes First Full Audit by KPMG, Reports $6.814B Reserve Surplus

Weekly crypto and blockchain roundup — the key stories and context. Tether completes first full audit with KPMG After nearly a decade of repeated assurances, Tether has produced a full annual audit. KPMG U.S. issued an unqualified opinion for the 2025 financial year and confirmed a reserve surplus of $6.814 billion. Unlike prior quarterly attestations, the audit went beyond a balance snapshot on a single cutoff date. KPMG also examined the financial statements, internal controls and valuation methods. Auditors additionally inspected Tether's physical gold holdings on site — 130 tonnes verified bar by bar. U.S. Treasuries make up the largest reserve component at $141 billion. USDT in circulation stood at $186.5 billion at year end. Profit topped $10 billion, down 23% from the previous year. The significance of the opinion is clearer in context. In 2018, accounting firm Friedman LLP ended its engagement without delivering a result. In 2021, the U.S. futures regulator CFTC fined Tether $41 million over misleading claims about dollar backing. Questions remain: the audit covers only Tether International, S.A. de C.V., and the full report has not been published. Senate postpones the Clarity Act The U.S. Senate delayed this week's vote on the Clarity Act until mid-September, setting it for September 15. Majority Leader John Thune filed the key procedural motion shortly before the five-week summer recess. The bill divides digital-asset oversight between the SEC and the CFTC and sets criteria for when a token is treated as a commodity versus a security. The House passed the measure in July 2025 by 294 to 134, but the Senate path is tougher. Republicans hold 53 seats, while cloture requires 60 votes — meaning at least seven Democrats would need to join. With only 36 session days left in the year, time is also a constraint. Still disputed: ethics rules for government officials, enforcement authority for state attorneys general, and whether stablecoins may pay interest. Senator Cynthia Lummis warned that "death by a thousand cuts is as deadly as a bullet". Goldman Sachs to buy Neos for up to $2.25B, adds crypto income ETFs Major Wall Street firms are moving ahead regardless of the legislative calendar. Goldman Sachs is acquiring ETF provider Neos Investments for up to $2.25 billion in cash and stock. Neos focuses on options-based income ETFs and manages more than $30 billion across 19 products. These funds typically sell options on their holdings and distribute option premiums monthly. The deal includes three crypto-related ETFs with more than $1.2 billion in assets combined. The largest, the Bitcoin High Income ETF, has over $1 billion. The package also includes a leveraged related product and an Ethereum version. The funds do not hold Bitcoin or Ethereum directly; they gain exposure via exchange-traded products. Monthly payouts can also limit upside participation. The purchase follows Goldman's roughly $2 billion acquisition of Innovator Capital Management in April. Goldman now oversees more than $130 billion across its ETF platforms, ranking as the world's eighth-largest active ETF provider. Across the industry, about $180 billion sits in options income ETFs, with annual growth rates above 70% since 2021. BIP110 chain split fizzles after two blocks While Bitcoin is being packaged into financial products, the protocol itself saw renewed tension over transaction content. Last weekend, the soft-fork proposal BIP110 triggered a chain split. BIP110 aimed to restrict non-financial data in transactions for one year, primarily targeting Ordinals inscriptions. Avoiding a split required 55% miner signaling, though support had recently been just 2.53%. AntPool initiated the break at block 961,632 by mining a block without the required signaling bit. Nodes enforcing BIP110 rejected it, and the mining group Roughnecks produced an alternative chain via Ocean Pool. Two chains briefly diverged. The minority chain quickly stalled: it produced only two blocks, while roughly 2,000 would have been needed to be viable. Ocean's hashrate on that chain fell 96.5% within a day, and Roughnecks stopped mining the next day. No major exchanges or custodians supported the split, and no tradable token emerged. Supporters are now considering changing the proof-of-work algorithm to bypass established mining pools' boycott. Trezor customer data exposed at shipping partner Separately, a data breach at ShipMonk, a fulfillment partner used for shipping Trezor devices, exposed customer details. The incident affected 13,689 buyers of SatoshiLabs' hardware wallets across seven countries. For 11,742 customers, the exposed data included name, delivery address, phone number and email address. The affected orders date from May through August. Trezor said devices, private keys and wallet backups were not impacted, and its own systems were not breached. The company attributed the limited scope to a contractual 90-day data retention period. Risk remains significant given historical precedent. After the 2020 Ledger leak, 272,000 exposed records led to phishing campaigns and threats targeting victims. Chainalysis counted 46 violent crypto robberies worldwide in the first half of 2026, up from 40 a year earlier. Following the disclosure, Trezor announced anonymous delivery to parcel lockers starting in September for EU customers. That change does not mitigate exposure for the 13,689 customers already affected. Want our weekly review delivered to your inbox every Saturday? Subscribe to the CVJ.CH Newsletter. Email address: