Tether Gold Passes KPMG Audit: Can It Beat America’s Biggest Gold Fund? Lockridge Okoth Thu, November 12, 2026 at 8:42 AM EST 2 min read USDT-USD -0.00% GC=F -2.32% XAUT-USD -2.94% GLD -2.23% Trade Tether on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
KPMG auditors reportedly counted the gold bar by bar. Every ounce matched. On Thursday, Tether Gold (XAU₮), a crypto token backed by that gold, got a clean bill of health.
Now Tether wants Wall Street's gold business. Its target is SPDR Gold Shares (GLD), America's biggest gold fund. The catch is that most Americans cannot buy XAU₮ from Tether.
At the end of 2025, KPMG found 520,089.35 ounces of gold, worth $2.25 billion. Tether had issued 520,089.30 tokens. One token equals one ounce.
The auditor gave an unqualified opinion, the cleanest result there is. Until this year, Tether had never had a full audit of any kind.
"I firmly believe XAU₮ is on track to become the first true competitor to the gold ETF market," he said.
GLD holds $134.29 billion, according to State Street. That is 39 times XAU₮'s $3.44 billion. Anyone with a U.S. brokerage account can buy it.
XAU₮ is different. Tether Gold's terms bar U.S. persons from opening an account. The only exception is a legal class of large institutions and wealthy investors.
Buying directly also starts at 50 tokens, about $208,000.
On cost, Tether has a point. GLD charges 0.40% a year. Tether's fee schedule shows 0.25% to buy, 0.25% to redeem, and nothing yearly. Yet State Street's smaller GLDM fund charges just 0.10%.
The audit stops at Dec. 31, 2025. By Sept. 30, Tether reported 827,418 ounces. That extra gold is checked only by quarterly sample tests.
BeInCrypto spotted the same gap in August. Tether's first clean USDT audit confirmed a reserve cushion that had already shrunk 40%.
Tokenized gold is one of the few growing crypto sectors this year. Tether has proved its 2025 gold was real. No audit yet covers 2026, and Americans still cannot buy in directly.
Read the Original story Tether Gold Passes KPMG Audit: Can It Beat America's Biggest Gold Fund? by Lockridge Okoth at beincrypto.com
