On October 30, 2026, Tether released its Q3 figures. The publication date and the balance date are different: the release is dated October 30, but its reserve figures describe September 30. That distinction is not a technicality. It defines what a counterparty can take from the new numbers and what remains outside the report. For readers unfamiliar with the category, Forkast’s stablecoin overview supplies background; the key point here is that reserve claims refer to assets measured at a stated time.
Tether says it earned $1.5 billion in net operating profit in Q3 and $4.5 billion across the first nine months of 2026. Those are the issuer’s own figures. The October 30 release attributes most of the income to Treasury bills and reverse repurchase agreements, and says USD₮ issuance held broadly steady at $184 billion across the first three quarters. CEO Paolo Ardoino said, “Generating $1.5 billion in net operating profit while maintaining nearly $8.0 billion in excess reserves gives us a strong foundation for that work.” The quote is useful as the issuer’s framing; it does not change what BDO examined.
The report’s most visible movement is the excess-reserve buffer. Tether says it reached $7.95 billion, up from $4.1 billion at the end of Q2, an increase of $3.8 billion. Our Q2 reserve coverage recorded the $4.11 billion figure at June 30. The new release therefore updates the quarter-end comparison, but the step-up remains a statement about balances on September 30, not about the weeks after it.
BDO’s report lists $191.451 billion in assets and reserves against $183.496 billion in liabilities, leaving $7.9546 billion in excess reserves. That excess is the reported difference between assets and liabilities, not a total cash balance. BDO’s reasonable-assurance engagement under ISAE 3000R concludes the Financial Figures and Reserves Report is fairly presented in all material respects under its stated criteria and management accounting policies. The report itself says it is not the company’s financial statements; it discloses financial information extracted from accounting records. Assurance attaches to this defined report, not to every claim about the issuer or every moment in its operating life.
The work behind the conclusion is concrete. BDO says it obtained confirmations directly from banks and depositaries, checked reconciliations between accounting records and bank statements, tested sampled asset valuations, reconciled management’s accounting records with blockchain ledgers, and sampled collateral supporting secured loans. These procedures help explain why the report is more than a bare issuer statement. They also show the boundary: the work tests selected balances and supporting records for the specified reporting date; it does not turn a point-in-time engagement into continuous observation.
The reserve schedule also prevents “reserves” from collapsing into a synonym for cash. BDO groups $139.578 billion under cash, cash equivalents and other short-term deposits. Within that category it lists $122.840 billion in U.S. Treasury bills, $9.519 billion in overnight repos and $7.178 billion in term repos. Separate rows list $19.085 billion in precious metals, $8.367 billion in Bitcoin, $4.178 billion in public equities, $6.004 billion in other investments and $14.175 billion in secured loans. These are the report’s categories, not a claim that every asset can be realized on the same timetable.
Tether’s release separately says direct and indirect U.S. Treasury bill holdings total $132.4 billion. The BDO schedule’s $122.84 billion Treasury-bill row is narrower by its wording; the two figures should not be substituted for one another, and the documents do not provide a reconciliation between them. That is a small but useful edge case: the headline can compress several asset classifications into one number, while a counterparty needs to know which number belongs to which measurement.
BDO limits the assurance to the report and corresponding total assets and liabilities as of September 30 at 11:59 PM UTC. Its report says it performed no procedures and provided no assurance at any other date or time, and that activity before or after the cutoff was not considered. The Notes were outside the engagement. The report also says valuation assumes normal trading conditions, not extraordinary markets or substantial custodian or counterparty illiquidity that could delay realization; BDO does not assure management’s going-concern assessment.
Management’s accounting policy classifies issued Tether tokens as refund liabilities, repayable on demand and recorded at contractual redemption value. That describes the accounting treatment in the report, not a BDO guarantee of a future redemption. The separate question of how issuers earn on underlying assets is covered in our issuer monetization analysis; it should not be mistaken for reserve assurance. The counterparty takeaway is narrower: this disclosure offers a reasonably assured view of specified balances at one date. It does not establish present-day liquidity or future redemption performance.
