USDC’s reserve disclosure is more frequent and more granular than USDT’s on every dimension our sources describe, but neither issuer has published a completed full financial statement audit a
USDC’s reserve disclosure is more frequent and more granular than USDT’s on every dimension our sources describe, but neither issuer has published a completed full financial statement audit as of mid-2026. Circle’s USDC gets a monthly attestation from Deloitte; Tether’s USDT gets a quarterly attestation from BDO Italia at category level, according to The Block and Eco. Tether announced that it had engaged a Big Four accounting firm for its first audit, per CNBC; Stablecoin Insider dates that engagement to March 2026. An audit engagement and a completed audit are not the same thing, and none of the sources reviewed for this page report that audit as finished.
An attestation is a check that reserves matched the tokens outstanding on one specific date. A full audit examines financial records, internal controls and reporting practices across an entire period, which is a materially heavier exercise, according to both The Block and MetaMask. Tether’s Q1 2026 attestation illustrates the gap directly: it covered the balance date of 31 March 2026 but was not published until 1 May 2026, a lag of 31 days during which reserve activity was not independently checked, per Stablecoin Insider and MetaMask. USDC’s own attestation-to-publication lag runs roughly three to four weeks, per MetaMask – shorter, but the same underlying limitation applies: an attestation says nothing about the days between snapshots.
Per Eco’s comparison, dated to 29 April 2026, USDC’s supply stood at $77.3B and USDT’s at $189.5B; together the two accounted for roughly $266B of the ~$318B on-chain stablecoin market, citing DeFiLlama. Circle’s reserves at that date were roughly 80% short-dated US Treasury bills and 20% cash at US banks, per Eco, held through the Circle Reserve Fund, an SEC-registered fund managed by BlackRock. Tether’s reserves, per the same Eco comparison, mix Treasuries with secured loans, Bitcoin, gold and other assets, disclosed by category rather than by individual security.
MetaMask’s account of Tether’s Q1 2026 BDO attestation gives more detail: about $141 billion in US Treasury and short-term exposure, alongside roughly $50.5 billion in non-Treasury assets covering commodities, corporate bonds, Bitcoin, secured loans and equities. Within that non-Treasury bucket, MetaMask puts Bitcoin at roughly $7 billion and secured loans at roughly $5B, both as of Q1 2026. Tether’s total assets in that attestation came to $191.7 billion against $183.5 billion in liabilities (outstanding USDT), leaving excess reserves of $8.23 billion, a figure both MetaMask and Stablecoin Insider report and describe as a positive disclosure signal because Tether states it explicitly rather than leaving readers to infer it.
Circle’s own circulation figure for the same period, per MetaMask citing Circle’s March 2026 report, was approximately $77.215 billion as of 31 March 2026. Stablecoin Insider, reporting as of May 2026, gives USDC reserves of about $76.7 billion against $76.5 billion in circulation, and puts USDT’s overall size at approximately $184 billion. These are three different snapshot dates from three different sources, not one another’s confirmation – a reader should treat each figure as tied to its own date rather than averaging them.
Stablecoin Insider, reporting on Tether’s Q1 2026 reserves, states the gold allocation at approximately $8 billion. MetaMask, describing the same Q1 2026 attestation, puts Tether’s gold holdings at approximately $20B. Both outlets are describing the same reporting period and the same underlying BDO attestation, and neither is a republication of the other. This page holds no primary Tether attestation document to check against, so it cannot say which figure is correct. A reader who needs the precise number should go to Tether’s own transparency page for the Q1 2026 report rather than rely on either secondary figure here.
USDC operates under US state money transmitter licenses, NYDFS oversight, and MiCA authorization in the EU, per Eco. Stablecoin Insider adds that Circle received approval for a national trust charter from the OCC on 10 July 2026, and that Circle listed on the NYSE under the ticker CRCL in June 2025, per MetaMask. USDT operates under El Salvador’s Digital Asset Service Provider framework and is not MiCA-compliant, per Eco; Stablecoin Insider describes this as the lowest tier in the license-stack dimension of its transparency index, which weights regulatory oversight and license stack at 25% of its overall score, alongside reserve composition disclosure depth at 30%, attestation frequency and auditor quality at 25%, on-chain verifiability at 10%, and operational and governance transparency at 10%, per the index Stablecoin Insider published on 29 July 2026.
On the audit announcement specifically: CNBC reported that Tether hired an unnamed Big Four accounting firm to audit USDT reserves for the first time, a framing that could read as the audit being underway or settled. The Block, describing the same development, names the firm as KPMG, engaged in early 2026. Stablecoin Insider likewise names KPMG. CNBC’s own text, however, does not name the firm at all. None of the four sources that discuss the engagement report a completed audit; MetaMask states plainly that no completed audit had been published as of May 2026, and Stablecoin Insider says the same as of its July 2026 publication. Two enforcement actions sit in Tether’s record from before the current attestation regime, per MetaMask: a 2021 CFTC settlement of $41 million over reserve misrepresentations during 2016-2018, and a separate New York Attorney General settlement of $18.5 million over disclosure issues and intercompany lending with Bitfinex – MetaMask does not give a specific year for the NYAG settlement.
This page is built from newsroom and industry-site summaries of issuer disclosures, not from Circle’s or Tether’s own transparency pages directly, and every figure here should be checked against the issuer’s current published report before being relied on. An attestation, for either issuer, only confirms that reserves matched tokens on one stated date – it is a structural limit of the mechanism itself, not a flaw specific to either company. This page cannot confirm whether Tether’s announced audit engagement has since produced a completed audit; none of the sources reviewed report a completion date. Where sources disagree – Tether’s Q1 2026 gold holdings at roughly $8 billion versus roughly $20B – this page states both versions rather than choosing one, because no primary document was available to adjudicate between them. Supply and reserve figures throughout are snapshots from different dates (31 March, 29 April and May 2026); there is no single up-to-date figure that applies to today’s reader, and stablecoin reserves change on a quarterly or monthly cycle depending on the issuer.
Every fact above is attributed to one of these reports. Where they disagree, the article says so.
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