Tether Is Not a Stablecoin Company
It printed its own money to bootstrap a conglomerate at sovereign scale. Now it's investing in the infrastructure of the next economy, with Washington’s blessing.
We have come to Tether from opposite ends.
Marieke spent years at Circle, Tether’s rival, and carried the industry’s scepticism about it almost as a professional identity: the opaque reserves, the Bitfinex entanglement, the attestations that fell short of audits. Later, running the NEAR Foundation, she became a Tether customer and worked to bring USDT to the NEAR protocol. She now advises startups and non-profits that Tether funds. Finally, in October 2025 she went to the Plan B conference in Lugano and left convinced that something large was under way, something most of finance was missing.
As for Nicolas, he works in venture capital and is now watching Tether burst into the space, leading large rounds in companies such as Neura Robotics, with no obvious link to stablecoins1.
We have reached the same conclusion by these different routes. Tether is one of the most consequential financial institutions of the decade, but mainstream finance still does not treat it as one. What follows is our case for taking it that seriously.
The Machine That Prints Its Own Float
Tether issues USDT, a digital dollar. Customers hand over conventional dollars to get it, or convert other assets into dollars to get it. Tether puts those dollars into short-dated US Treasury bills, held through Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street firm that buys and holds the bills for it, and keeps the yield. None of that yield reaches USDT holders, and none ever has.
For most of Tether’s life, when its holdings were tiny and interest rates were low, this earned little. But at today’s rates, on close to $190 billion of tokens outstanding, the arithmetic changes. Tether reported more than $13 billion in profit for 2024 and around $10 billion for 2025, on a staff of roughly three hundred. No branches, no loan book, no credit risk worth the name. Some call it a hedge fund that happens to issue a stablecoin.
As for Circle, Tether’s most direct competitor, it earns the same spread between a zero-yield token and interest-bearing reserves. But the two firms differ in what they do with the money. Circle spends it on credentials: compliance, institutional relationships, the standing to serve as regulated infrastructure. As a result, it is listed, MiCA-compliant for both USDC and EURC, and holds its reserves in BlackRock money market funds. It also hands a large share of its yield to distribution partners such as Coinbase, a cost Tether does not carry.
Beyond its core product, USDC, Circle has now actively started to build the entire stack required for money to move: from proprietary purpose-made Layer 1 blockchain ARC, to Circle Payment Network and more recently Circle Nanopayment, a gateway for stablecoin payments.
In short, Circle goes deep in building the stack that the future of money requires. Meanwhile, Tether seems to spend its money on everything else.
