BDO Italia Comes on Board

The world's largest stablecoin issuer, Tether, has partnered with BDO Italia, the Italian branch of the world's fifth largest accounting firm, to assist the company by issuing reports on financial backing for USDT stablecoin reserves.

The attestations were previously provided by Cayman Islands-based auditing firms, Moore Cayman and MHA Cayman. However, Tether’s new partnership with BDO Italia supplants those two companies. The Cayman firms had assisted the company with the last four quarterly reports in March, June and December 2021, and May 2022.

In addition, Tether said that the company began working with BDO Italia in July 2022 to confirm its quarterly report and said they plan to move forward to providing attestations on a monthly basis.

Tether’s new association with a big-name audit firm comes after a series of public criticisms about the validity of its financial reporting on the backing of USDT.

The concerns began to escalate when Bloomberg published a story in October 2021 raising questions about the company’s holdings.

A week later, Tether and Bitfinex were fined $42.5 million by the U.S. Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Then, short-selling firm Hindenburg Research announced a $1 million bounty payable to anyone who could provide valuable information about the "dark side" of USDT.

Amid the collapse of LUNA/UST, the liquidity crisis of Celsius, and Three Arrow Capital (3AC)’s bankruptcy, on June 27 Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino tweeted that large investment funds had coordinated to harm USDT’s liquidity, collapse the stablecoin’s value and buy it back at a lower price.

According to BDO’s new attestation report published Aug. 19, Tether’s consolidated assets of $66.4 billion exceed its consolidated liabilities of $66.2 billion, as of June 30.

Additionally, Tether had decreased its commercial paper holdings by nearly 60%, from $20 billion to $8.5 billion, according to the report, and increased its cash and bank deposits by 32%.

Tether has announced it will zero-out its exposure to commercial papers by the end of 2022.