Tether has put on hold plans to raise between $15 billion and $20 billion and to pursue a valuation near $500 billion after deciding to move forward with its first full financial audit. The pause reflects how central a comprehensive review of USDT’s roughly $184 billion in reserves has become to the company’s next phase of growth.
According to Bloomberg’s report, the audit will be conducted by an unnamed Big Four accounting firm and is intended to go beyond the attestations Tether has relied on in the past. This process is meant to produce an independent opinion on reserve backing rather than another limited snapshot of balances.
A larger review than prior reserve attestations
Tether has indicated that it wants the audit completed by the end of 2026, although both the company and the auditors have acknowledged that the process could take several months. The timetable matters because the eventual opinion is expected to shape how institutional counterparties assess trust, onboarding and long-term use of USDT.
The review will examine more than reserve totals alone. Auditors are expected to test financial statements, internal controls and operational systems tied to holdings that Tether says include digital assets, traditional instruments and tokenized liabilities. In practical terms, that means the audit will need to reconcile custody records, ledger balances, transfer controls and token issuance procedures before reaching a conclusion on backing.
Tether has also emphasized the composition of its reserves as a point in favor of smoother verification. The company says more than 80% of reserves are held in U.S. Treasury bills, a mix that should make custody review and valuation testing less complicated than it would be with a heavier concentration in harder-to-price assets.
From an operational perspective, the audit has implications well beyond accounting. A favorable opinion could reduce manual reconciliation work for exchanges, treasuries and payment platforms that use USDT, making settlement and counterparty acceptance easier at scale. If the findings were less favorable, the opposite would likely happen: more verification steps, more reporting friction and slower acceptance across institutional channels.
Fundraising now depends on the audit outcome
That is why the fundraising pause is strategically important. Tether is effectively deferring a major capital raise until the audit provides a formal basis for investors to evaluate reserve quality and operational controls. A positive outcome could reopen the path to funding ambitions tied to areas such as AI, commodities and energy, while an adverse result would likely force heavier disclosure work and tighter compliance processes.
The decisive milestone is not the fundraising target but the audit itself. The final report will determine how quickly institutional users simplify USDT acceptance flows and whether Tether can restart its capital plans with stronger credibility in the market.
