Hmm. Who do they hold it through? USDC are using Blackrock as an intermediary, but Tether have always been very opaque about their actual structure. And who are all these people who have swapped cash for a non-cash token which does NOT bear interest, unlike the bonds?
As Matt Levine has said multiple times in "Money Stuff", Tether has found the perfect business plan. They hold billions of actual USD, and get to keep all of the interest for themselves.
Cash doesn't earn interest. T-bills and money market funds earn minimal interest compared to equities. Given the size of their holdings, Tether is paying a huge opportunity cost for their position. I don't consider that good business.
They have guaranteed returns on $185b of other people's money, and they only owe the other people the principal. That's like... the best business in the world? If it was all in 6m 2.8% treasuries they'd still be making $5.2b year for holding people's cash and running a token on the blockchain.
How greedy do you have to be to look at that and say "yeah, well they could be getting bigger returns with an actively managed portfolio?"
I'm pretty sure Tether was holding less cash than they said multiple times, and at multiple points it was just a house of cards where they were inflating the price of BTC on their own, but I'm also guessing by now they've had made enough to cover.
The problem is liquidity. If in some fantasy situation there was a run on tether, tether would go to 0 because their investments can't be converted into USD without tanking the price of those investments
Luckily for the crypto people, Tether makes it near impossible to turn their fantasy money into real money
Tether could gate redemptions at a pace that would preserve value of the underlying sovereign debt requiring liquidation, due to no immediate redemption regulatory requirements. Take a number and wait your turn while the treasuries are sold into the market, essentially.
Said another way, returns ALWAYS have to be risk adjusted. Sure they could _probably_ make more in Equities, but their approach is returns with zero risk, which is impossible to beat.
Depends if the purchasing power of the currency holds up. Real returns are what matter, and earning 3% “risk free” is not so “risk free” if the price of things you want to buy increase by more than 3%, etc.
Uh, internet dude, you must be new to finance. Banks have been doing this for centuries. Best business in the world? Sure. But it's even better when you invest in things that earn more, right? Like equities. That's what banks do. It's about the rate of return. Is it more risky? Sure. That's why they hold a diverse basket of goods, to diffuse the risk. But it's worth the risk when weighed against the opportunity cost of not investing and losing that rate of return.
> How greedy do you have to be to look at that and say "yeah, well they could be getting bigger returns with an actively managed portfolio?"
This is banking and finance. Greed only stops when you run into legislative limits, and sometimes, not even there.
Yeah, and we used to separate the investing activities of banks from the depository activities, to reduce overall risk to the financial system. You don't want people investing in higher risk securities with money that is supposed to be available on demand.
The business is good because of the high amount of leverage they have in those T-bills and money markets since those deposits are liabilities on the balance sheet. The actual return they make on the money the owners put into the business is probably great.
Based on the Q2 2025 attestation [1] it looks like they have about 162B in assets and 157B in liabilities which leaves ~5B in shareholder equity. Even if they hold most of those assets in treasuries, they probably have an egregiously high return on shareholder equity.
(Fun fact: I think this puts their leverage ratio as high as banks during the 2008 GFC. But treasuries should theoretically be safer than subprime mortgage loans).
Equities would give a higher return on average, they don't really work when the liabilities can get called at any time. Tether has to be able to produce money for people exchanging their tether.
If you were in their position and I gave you 150 billion dollars on the condition that I can withdraw that 150 billion dollars at any time. You'd probably also park it in a short-term money market fund. If you put it in equities and it dropped 1%, you'd be on the hook for 1.5 billion.
Just that the condition is that you give them 150b and if you withdraw and they Dont have you lost 150b and nothing will happen. Good luck recovering your cash from El Salvador or bvi.
People are giving them money for free. They pay absolutely zero interest or dividend to "investors". For the crypto people, Tether's job is to accept money and do nothing with it.
US debt is about as stable as the dollar itself, so to their crypto customers buying bonds is a no-op. Any yield is pure profit for Tether itself.
They can't ethically put the money into equities because they are obliged to redeem the tether tokens for USD on demand. It's the same thing that your bank manage can't take the cash in your account, bet it on nvda and take the profits if it goes up, unless they want to end up like SBF.
They may have somewhat sketchily put money into bitcoin at times though.
If you believe their attestations, they pretty much are. See, for example, https://assets.ctfassets.net/vyse88cgwfbl/2SGAAXnsb1wKByIzkh.... Most of the money is in Treasuries, or markets like overnight repos that behave much like Treasuries. Most of the rest is in things like corporate bonds, which again generally move like cash. Only their claimed excess equity is in riskier investments, like Bitcoin.
If you doubt their attestation, it is more reasonable to doubt their claimed total assets before worrying about the breakdown of their investments.
There are plenty of people in jurisdictions where it is difficult to get dollars that use them for other things. Normal transactions, gambling, saving in USD. Not uncommon.
I don't think it has dawned on the HN crowd how insatiable the demand for dollars across the world is. This stuff is being used in all corners of the world, and accelerating.
I think the the market for those stablecoins is now broader than criminal and traders.
There is a huge demand for dollars by individuals outside of the US. Countries where people do not really trust their banks and currencies.
Even in the Euro zone, most saving accounts will give you about 1% after taxes. So why not going with USDT, USDC or EURC and get about 5% on a relatively safe lending platform.
There are many ways, the most common is to lend your stablecoins against collateral crypto. So if you put 1000 USD in the lending pool you have let's say the guarantee 2500 USD worth of bitcoin are serving as collateral.
That will get you about 5% on a serious protocol.
You can also provide liquidity on a stable stablecoin/stablecoin pair on a reputable decentralized exchange and get some of the fees.
There are surely many other "safe" ways.
If you live in Switzerland you're probably not gonna bother but it is more transparent and safer than than what a lot of people have access to around the world.
I know the DAI stablecoin was already very popular as a saving account in Argentina around 2018-2019.
its just like your brokerage account, imagine if Schwab issued a stablecoin for every deposit someone made and only delete some of that stablecoin when they redeem
you'll find that people deposit and trade, they keep their balances there their entire life and beyond. when they trade, they are selling the stablecoin to someone else, someone else could redeem but they aren't either. stablecoins are liquid and useful, they have passive income capabilities while holding your principle value
so for Schwab's reporting, the balances always increase as people deposit more whenever they get their paycheck
this is what you're seeing with Tether, and all other leading stablecoins, as they grow at the same pace as they capture the same market
when actual traditional finance brokerage firms start issuing stablecoins, you'll see the same thing, the stablecoin just offers transparent real time behavior into their customer deposits
the only time stablecoin balances go down, and subsequently treasuries are offloaded behind the scenes, is when someone redeems a stablecoin for fiat currency. this isn't necessary, people don't want fiat or don't need to get fiat by redeeming it
NPR Planet Money has a podcast from last week speaking about hedge funds buying US treasuries. They touch on the chaos that can come from hedge funds buying treasuries and suggest that hedge funds might be lumped into the too big to fail group.
Armchair economist here - one implication of this is that a crypto liquidation will cause global interest rates to spike at a time when they will need to be lower to calm the markets.
Selling massive amounts of debt with no additional demand means the required return must be higher.
Stablecoins are now a regulated industry with laws in place to address this very concern. Tether is currently not compliant, but as the largest player in the space, has a great incentive to maintain its dominance.
I'm not sure I see that, depending what you mean by crypto liquidation. If you mean the prices of dogecoin etc. falling then that mostly just effects the number of Tethers changing hands between one speculator and another and wouldn't really affect the bond market.
If you mean Tether holders redeeming them for US dollars, that would involve selling treasuries but I doubt it would drive the price down that much. That's a very liquid market.
a crypto liquidation results in more people going to Tether. "tethered" and "tethering" has been a verb in the crypto space for like 10 years
when market demand of tether is too great the value goes about $1.00 and the organization relies on arbitragers to deposit more to cause the minting of Tethers at $1.00 and selling it into the open market if the price is above $1.00 pushing the market rate back down to $1.00
Tethers in existence still continue to grow in that scenario
Its nearly 1:1 backing, most of the time, even a mass redemption event of Tethers will be orderly and fine. those crisis of confidence have alreay occurred, those stress tests have already happened, farfaaaar beyond what any bank would survive
all fiat collateralized stablecoins function the same way and there are many case studies, actual events that happened, that show it occurring orderly, uneventfully.
> when market demand of tether is too great the value goes about $1.00 and the organization relies on arbitragers to deposit more to cause the minting of Tethers at $1.00 and selling it into the open market if the price is above $1.00 pushing the market rate back down to $1.00
I'm not sure of this.
USDT can only be minted by tether [0] (line 406), hopefully when they acquire more treasuries.
I am not exactly sure where the price of USDT come from and I am pretty sure there is not only one. But I would guess it is an aggregate of the prices on exchanges.
The chainlink oracle [1] is probably the most authoritative one.
Nobody is “setting the price”, people trade. supply and demand. on many venues and contracts. the oracles just read from those (and sometimes the venues and contracts read from the oracles)
when tethers and trading at $1.04 or anything higher than $1.00
arbitrageurs wire money to their account at the Tether organization (bitfinex, otc services) to instruct the organization to mint Tether
the organization does everything necessary: takes the deposited money and buys US treasuries, mints the equivalent amount of Tethers and gives those tethers to the customer
The customer deposited $1 and received 1 tether. Some exchange venues have people rushing to buy 1 Tether for $1.04
Customer sells their tether to them and has some other form of crypto that they can try to get back into dollars and do it all over again, until flooding the market with Tether supply back to $1.00
this happens all day every day for a decade, more pronounced during panic selling periods
Given how conveniently Tethers have appeared in the past to prop up key parts of the crypto ecosystem, many are skeptical that they have actually received as much money as they claim.
Their math has been hilariously unbelievable at times (except to the crypto bros)... at one point they claimed they were banking deposits of about $3B a week.
To put that in perspective, that's what Saudi Aramco or Samsung might get as revenues.
But hey, don't just trust them, trust their bank and it's 33 year old deputy CEO who, when people pointed out that that number didn't match up with international banking numbers, said that was because those people didn't understand the banking licenses being used in The Bahamas, and that there were two, though he couldn't remember their names, or which one they had, or whether they maybe had both.
And when that looked hilariously bad, they removed his info from the bank's website.
And when that looked bad, they added it back.
And when that looked bad, they removed the bank's whole website, and replaced it with a broken WP template with no working links.
Hey, look, several years after that, go to Deltec's website. "Ultra sophisticated private banking" running on a different WordPress site. "Client login"? "This site can’t be reached Check if there is a typo in ebanking.deltecbank.com. DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN". Just as has been the case for years.
If they bought bonds would be amazing. 99% chances there is not much left. We’ve been saying this for years so not sure when will crash. But definitively it’s a scam
If tether wants to maintain their dominant position (they do) then they will work to be compliant with the LAW, on a timeline deemed appropriate by the law makers.
The LAW is spelled "keep in good standing with the President". He might feel his little coin grifts are left behind.
On a timeline deemed appropriate by the law makers is making a lot of heavy lifting here. The (GOP) lawmakers won't lift a finger to do anything unless the Leader says so.
You keep calling out people who ask reasonable questions about Tether/crypto truthers. If I were you I'd probably rethink that strategy as it doesn't seem to be working out well.
Like, even Enron and Wirecard passed audits, so it's pretty weird that Tether can't.
You're right that Tether claims they could not previously get an audit and need the government to smooth the way (https://www.reuters.com/technology/tether-is-talks-with-big-...), but why would that be the case? Companies get audited all the time. Tether seems to have their own "conspiratorial trutherism" in mind, where the Biden administration secretly told all the major audit firms that they mustn't allow Tether to be audited because that might make crypto look good. And even that doesn't explain why they couldn't get an audit from 2017 to 2020.
To me the obvious explanation is that they would not pass an honest audit, and hope having the CEO of their primary brokerage in the Cabinet will help them cheat.
Stablecoins are the greatest business model ever. You hold money as treasuries and earn risk free interest. There is literally no tech spend either. All profit no expenses.
If I was on the board of Tether or Capital Union I'd be a little scared by this.
Trump squeezed Intel for 10%, bullied Tiktok into a sale, and is ordering extrajudicial killings not that far away from the Bahamas.
What is to stop him saying: Tether is sketchily governed (seems true), is secretive and unaudited (seems true?), and holds far too much debt for the USA to be secure (could well be true) — "this is against our national security interests"?
$135bn that Congress can't touch must be really tempting. What stops him just taking it?
Especially since his sense of "national security interests" includes Canada making fun of the USA with clips of Reagan.
(I'm not sure that it would even be the wrong thing to do in a more structured, legal way at least)
reminding everyone that using Tether is being exposed to US credit risk without remuneration. This should be illegal as they are screwing people over who don’t know shit about how these things work.
Presumably the figures for Tether's holdings are based on their attestations. Should we believe those figures to be real?
There is no other source for estimates of their financial holdings than those attestations. For years, Tether has promised that they are working on an audit. No audit has emerged. This is suspicious because audits aren't particularly hard for legitimate organizations.
People have gone looking for evidence that Tether really has as much as it has said. Nobody has succeeded. For example https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-my.... Which, after noting Tether's settlement for past fraud, and prominent executives with suspicious criminal histories, famously said that Tether "is quilted out of red flags."
And yet, many strongly believe that Tether is for real. Given that nobody has produced evidence of their wealth, I regard this belief as a question of psychology.
Said psychological belief has a simple explanation. We humans have a strong tendency towards cognitive dissonance. Meaning that we reject evidence which questions our sense of identity.
If I'm a bitcoin millionaire, my likely identity includes, "I'm a millionaire." But the financial system does not allow us to directly trade bitcoin. What I can actually trade bitcoin for is Tether. And therefore my belief in my own wealth relies on trusting that Tether is equivalent to money.
How can I support that trust? I can point to someone smart and say, "They believe in Tether, so it must be real!" I can point to someone rich and say, "They believe in Tether, so it must be real!" I can get angry at anyone who doubts Tether. It is easy to observe all three behaviors from people into Crypto.
That Bloomberg article offers an ironic example. Back in 2021, many crypto enthusiasts pointed at Sam Bankman-Fried. Who was both rich and smart, and publicly believed in Tether. Therefore he was quoted on the topic. Today, of course, he is in federal prison for having run a Ponzi scheme. If we behaved logically, any crypto enthusiast who used to look up to him, should be saying, "Wait, am I sure I'm placing my trust in the right place?" But, predictably, few do that. Instead they dismiss this past mistake, and place their trust today in someone else.
Now everyone knows that crypto is full of Ponzi schemes on top of Ponzi schemes. People are often OK with trying to take advantage of the greater fool, because they don't believe that they will be the greater fool. Others see people apparently making money and get in, driven by FOMO. But statistically, most people in a Ponzi scheme will lose money. And yet they will look like really smart people - right until the scheme collapses.
So here is the real question. Does Tether really have the money? Or does the entire infrastructure of crypto Ponzi schemes rest on yet another Ponzi scheme?
I wanted to come back to this, and make it explicit how the US program may be running.
If there is a run on Tether, the US government will step in behind the scenes and buy Tether at a discount. This gives Tether a backstop. It also gives the US government an immediate paper profit (buy Tether for less than a dollar, get a dollar of Tether), which can be used to buy Bitcoin. The sight of Tether successfully redeeming currency and Bitcoin going up will trigger a desire to jump back in, and reverse the cash flow. Allowing the US government to withdraw as much money as was actually put in.
This results in a budget neutral investment in Bitcoin. We put $X into Tether, we got out $X. We also got y% of that as Bitcoin. Exactly as the executive order demands that the government should do.
> For years, Tether has promised that they are working on an audit. No audit has emerged. This is suspicious because audits aren't particularly hard for legitimate organizations.
Hey, that's not true! They had several audits in progress over time, but had to fire multiple auditors for ... reasons, I guess.
And then they got one completed, but they can't let you see it! Why not? Because uhh, checks notes it's in Mandarin! (I shit you not. Straight out of their own mouths: https://tether.io/news/tether-update/ )
I'm a little surprised that they expected people to forget that translation services exist. But it fits with how people get sucked into a lot of cults, fraudulent cults, MLMs and the like. (I'm obviously listing nefarious uses. Something similar happens in many relationships.)
First get your target (emotionally or financially) invested. Then put them in a position where they have to accept something uncomfortable (investing emotionally even more), or back out. Repeat and intensify
In extreme cases you try to get them to be swallowing a stream of erratic and blatant lies. At that point you can do anything.
Yes. This says that there is likely a direct connection between Trump's erratic behavior and the fanatical loyalty that he inspires. If you trust him, you have to follow his latest whim. And following his latest whim strengthens your trust. Many charismatic leaders do this.
It isn't linked to the value of a US dollar. It is the US dollar. The value of 1 token will always be 1 USD. If the US economy collapses the USD will be less valuable but again: 1 token is still 1 USD.
As with any good (and especially "currency"), it's only worth 1 USD as long as somebody (including the issuing company) is willing to give you 1 USD for it. Even if it is "linked", "pegged" or called something else.
Tether is a bubble because it is an organization run by criminals, that has in the past been convicted of fraud, and is unable to pass a basic financial audit.
The most reasonable explanation is that it is a Ponzi scheme. Which will appear to work right until it doesn't. And if it stops working, the entire crypto universe will implode.
That said, the current President and many who are close to him have significant portions of money invested in crypto. That depend on Tether. There is therefore a reasonable expectation that the US government will covertly back Tether for the next several years if there is any prospect of a collapse.
This expectation is supported by Trump's declaration last March of creating a "strategic crypto reserve" for the USA. See https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/esta.... On the face of it, this executive order only helps crypto by taking some of it out of circulation. But the provision in 3C of creating "budget neutral" strategies for acquiring more bitcoin, could easily cover converting actual USD to Tether. Particularly if the Tether was available at a discount to the USD.
Curious: why? Aren't bubbles about people buying some instrument (stock, bond, bitcoin...) with borrowed real money that is not eventually worth as much as they think it is? People buying stablecoins are exchanging presumably not-borrowed real money for something that amounts to a zero-interest money market fund. Presumably not borrowed because the stablecoin explicitly pays no yield.
Someone just deleted a comment so I’ll put it again here “ Tether is backed by nothing, so it can presumably print without end. If it's suspected they've done this, it could lose its peg. If that happens, it could have consequences.”
There is no reason not to do an audit except when it’s a scam/all money gone. No accounting company wants to do their audit - guess why.
If you look at their yearly profits and liquid cash, clearly Tether is backed by something. This is not the same as saying that they have full transparency but you cannot have those profits in dollars out of thin air.
“Since at least 2017 … Tether has been assuring investors that it will get audited, though it has yet to deliver“ can you give me a single reasonable reason this was not done in 8 years?
Usually the correct answer is the simplest - fraud.
Profits can be a simple Ponzi scheme without a proper audit. That’s the simpler answer.
Any evidence that they actually own?
“ In its own attestation report for Q2 2025, Tether stated it holds about US$127 billion in U.S. Treasuries” this is the only source. And tbh anyone can “attest” it owns billions of whatever. Again, no audit because there is nothing there. They only attest through BDO Italia. And attestations are easily gamed. Usually worthless, but useful for usdt hodlers.
I wonder why they use bdo? See below their history.
About bdo:
In the UK, a former senior manager at BDO (in the UK member firm) was banned for 20 years for creating false audit documents and mis-using signatures.
In July 2025 the UK regulator Financial Reporting Council (FRC) flagged the BDO network as having audit quality “significantly short of expectations”. Only about half the audits reviewed were deemed satisfactory
The bigger news here is that China is rapidly winding down its holdings of US debt. This is very bad for America. We'll see American standards of living decline without the Chinese financing American extravagance.
Japan holds more US debt than China. The UK has also surpassed China.
China had $776.5B a year ago and has $730.7B now, a roughly 5% drop. They don't seem to "rapidly winding down", unless there's some additional data I'm missing.
Look at the other holders. Belgium and Luxembourg combined have more US debt than China.
If the goal was to crash the US economy by selling their small amount of debt (which likely isn't possible for them to do, despite the rhetoric, they have less than 2% of the total debt), they would also significantly impact of all the countries listed here, which would make them very unpopular indeed:
Stablecoins offer a relentless price insensitive buyer of US debt. This is good for America, good for democracy, and good for property rights globally.
However, stablecoins WILL cause unrest in Nigeria, Venezuela, Lebanon, and Turkey as their corrupt local currency completely erodes and the ruling class can no longer extract from their citizens.
Confidence in crypto will go poof when there's a big enough run that the measly 7 transactions per second can't keep up with demand. We just haven't seen a crypto bank run yet. The $100 / transaction is nothing compared to what it could be. When that happens "stable" coins will lose their stability and the smoke and mirrors behind audit-free coins will collapse. You couldn't pay me to hold crypto.
This number will continue to climb and I am confident before the decade ends, stablecoins broadly will be the largest holder of US debt. The interests are fully aligned between the issuers and US govt - issuers keep the interest, US has a price insensitive buyer of debt.
This is ultimately good for the world, good for democracy, and good for the downtrodden and underprivileged members of corrupt countries such as Nigeria, Venezuela, Lebanon, and Turkey, who have suffered their own currency crises to the great detriment of their citizens. With only an Internet connection, US dollar stablecoins give them property rights which can't be voided through an act of the corrupt ruling class.
Before the tether truthers come out, update your priors. This industry is very different than it was in 2015. It has grown up substantially. The GENIUS act is the largest banking and financial reform of the last 100 years, and the consequences will shape the 21st century and local currencies globally.
>This is ultimately good for the world, good for democracy, and good for the downtrodden and underprivileged members of corrupt countries such as Nigeria, Venezuela, Lebanon, and Turkey.
Wow, US has found a gold mine: The super full wallets of Venezuelans, Nigerians and Lebanese! They will buy a trillion of USDT to prop up US debt!
You mentioned 4 countries that are dirt poor and need to buy food, not stablecoins. The people in those countries who have money don't need stablecoins to invest in the US.
> good for the downtrodden and underprivileged members of corrupt countries such as Nigeria, Venezuela, Lebanon, and Turkey, who have suffered their own currency crises to the great detriment of their citizens.
Well, except that it ties them to USD, an ultimately doomed currency. The short-term interests are aligned, but they'd be better off with a locally-managed currency and simply banning the USD from being held by either the state or any of its representatives.
I'm not arguing for those local currencies; I'm just saying that the USD is never going to be managed with nigerians in mind and it'd be ridiculous to imagine it would be.
Hell, the USD isn't even managed with americans in mind. We just happen to live here.
Hmm. Who do they hold it through? USDC are using Blackrock as an intermediary, but Tether have always been very opaque about their actual structure. And who are all these people who have swapped cash for a non-cash token which does NOT bear interest, unlike the bonds?
As Matt Levine has said multiple times in "Money Stuff", Tether has found the perfect business plan. They hold billions of actual USD, and get to keep all of the interest for themselves.
Cash doesn't earn interest. T-bills and money market funds earn minimal interest compared to equities. Given the size of their holdings, Tether is paying a huge opportunity cost for their position. I don't consider that good business.
They have guaranteed returns on $185b of other people's money, and they only owe the other people the principal. That's like... the best business in the world? If it was all in 6m 2.8% treasuries they'd still be making $5.2b year for holding people's cash and running a token on the blockchain.
How greedy do you have to be to look at that and say "yeah, well they could be getting bigger returns with an actively managed portfolio?"
I'm pretty sure Tether was holding less cash than they said multiple times, and at multiple points it was just a house of cards where they were inflating the price of BTC on their own, but I'm also guessing by now they've had made enough to cover.
The problem is liquidity. If in some fantasy situation there was a run on tether, tether would go to 0 because their investments can't be converted into USD without tanking the price of those investments
Luckily for the crypto people, Tether makes it near impossible to turn their fantasy money into real money
Tether could gate redemptions at a pace that would preserve value of the underlying sovereign debt requiring liquidation, due to no immediate redemption regulatory requirements. Take a number and wait your turn while the treasuries are sold into the market, essentially.
The US treasury market is one of the most liquid markets in the world.
Said another way, returns ALWAYS have to be risk adjusted. Sure they could _probably_ make more in Equities, but their approach is returns with zero risk, which is impossible to beat.
Depends if the purchasing power of the currency holds up. Real returns are what matter, and earning 3% “risk free” is not so “risk free” if the price of things you want to buy increase by more than 3%, etc.
Skimming 3% on OPM is still a pretty, pretty good business.
Well, fortunately for them we are talking about amounts of money where inflation is irrelevant.
Uh, internet dude, you must be new to finance. Banks have been doing this for centuries. Best business in the world? Sure. But it's even better when you invest in things that earn more, right? Like equities. That's what banks do. It's about the rate of return. Is it more risky? Sure. That's why they hold a diverse basket of goods, to diffuse the risk. But it's worth the risk when weighed against the opportunity cost of not investing and losing that rate of return.
> How greedy do you have to be to look at that and say "yeah, well they could be getting bigger returns with an actively managed portfolio?"
This is banking and finance. Greed only stops when you run into legislative limits, and sometimes, not even there.
Yeah, and we used to separate the investing activities of banks from the depository activities, to reduce overall risk to the financial system. You don't want people investing in higher risk securities with money that is supposed to be available on demand.
> It's about the rate of return. Is it more risky? Sure.
Isnt the whole idea this is a stable coin?
The business is good because of the high amount of leverage they have in those T-bills and money markets since those deposits are liabilities on the balance sheet. The actual return they make on the money the owners put into the business is probably great.
Based on the Q2 2025 attestation [1] it looks like they have about 162B in assets and 157B in liabilities which leaves ~5B in shareholder equity. Even if they hold most of those assets in treasuries, they probably have an egregiously high return on shareholder equity.
(Fun fact: I think this puts their leverage ratio as high as banks during the 2008 GFC. But treasuries should theoretically be safer than subprime mortgage loans).
Equities would give a higher return on average, they don't really work when the liabilities can get called at any time. Tether has to be able to produce money for people exchanging their tether.
If you were in their position and I gave you 150 billion dollars on the condition that I can withdraw that 150 billion dollars at any time. You'd probably also park it in a short-term money market fund. If you put it in equities and it dropped 1%, you'd be on the hook for 1.5 billion.
[1] https://tether.io/news/tether-issues-20b-in-usdt-ytd-becomes...
Just that the condition is that you give them 150b and if you withdraw and they Dont have you lost 150b and nothing will happen. Good luck recovering your cash from El Salvador or bvi.
People are giving them money for free. They pay absolutely zero interest or dividend to "investors". For the crypto people, Tether's job is to accept money and do nothing with it.
US debt is about as stable as the dollar itself, so to their crypto customers buying bonds is a no-op. Any yield is pure profit for Tether itself.
They can't ethically put the money into equities because they are obliged to redeem the tether tokens for USD on demand. It's the same thing that your bank manage can't take the cash in your account, bet it on nvda and take the profits if it goes up, unless they want to end up like SBF.
They may have somewhat sketchily put money into bitcoin at times though.
I guess banking isn't a good business then.
They can invest all the interest they make into higher risk higher reward investments, like the S&P500.
that may be true but minimal interest is greater than no interest.
They aren't just holding cash and/or doing nothing with it. Come on.
If you believe their attestations, they pretty much are. See, for example, https://assets.ctfassets.net/vyse88cgwfbl/2SGAAXnsb1wKByIzkh.... Most of the money is in Treasuries, or markets like overnight repos that behave much like Treasuries. Most of the rest is in things like corporate bonds, which again generally move like cash. Only their claimed excess equity is in riskier investments, like Bitcoin.
If you doubt their attestation, it is more reasonable to doubt their claimed total assets before worrying about the breakdown of their investments.
People give tether their USD so they can bypass currency controls when buying and selling crypto online. There are a lot of them to put it mildly.
Can people holding tether for a day or two while entering of exiting crypto really explain these large amounts?
There are plenty of people in jurisdictions where it is difficult to get dollars that use them for other things. Normal transactions, gambling, saving in USD. Not uncommon.
I don't think it has dawned on the HN crowd how insatiable the demand for dollars across the world is. This stuff is being used in all corners of the world, and accelerating.
Why for a day or two?
I thought he meant basically buy tether with dollar transfer exchange for btc. That shouldn't take long.
I think the the market for those stablecoins is now broader than criminal and traders.
There is a huge demand for dollars by individuals outside of the US. Countries where people do not really trust their banks and currencies.
Even in the Euro zone, most saving accounts will give you about 1% after taxes. So why not going with USDT, USDC or EURC and get about 5% on a relatively safe lending platform.
You get 5%? If so, that is surely a big piece of the puzzle. Where do those % come from? Bonds don't yield that right?
There are many ways, the most common is to lend your stablecoins against collateral crypto. So if you put 1000 USD in the lending pool you have let's say the guarantee 2500 USD worth of bitcoin are serving as collateral. That will get you about 5% on a serious protocol.
You can also provide liquidity on a stable stablecoin/stablecoin pair on a reputable decentralized exchange and get some of the fees.
There are surely many other "safe" ways.
If you live in Switzerland you're probably not gonna bother but it is more transparent and safer than than what a lot of people have access to around the world.
I know the DAI stablecoin was already very popular as a saving account in Argentina around 2018-2019.
people don't exit
its just like your brokerage account, imagine if Schwab issued a stablecoin for every deposit someone made and only delete some of that stablecoin when they redeem
you'll find that people deposit and trade, they keep their balances there their entire life and beyond. when they trade, they are selling the stablecoin to someone else, someone else could redeem but they aren't either. stablecoins are liquid and useful, they have passive income capabilities while holding your principle value
so for Schwab's reporting, the balances always increase as people deposit more whenever they get their paycheck
this is what you're seeing with Tether, and all other leading stablecoins, as they grow at the same pace as they capture the same market
when actual traditional finance brokerage firms start issuing stablecoins, you'll see the same thing, the stablecoin just offers transparent real time behavior into their customer deposits
the only time stablecoin balances go down, and subsequently treasuries are offloaded behind the scenes, is when someone redeems a stablecoin for fiat currency. this isn't necessary, people don't want fiat or don't need to get fiat by redeeming it
yes
NPR Planet Money has a podcast from last week speaking about hedge funds buying US treasuries. They touch on the chaos that can come from hedge funds buying treasuries and suggest that hedge funds might be lumped into the too big to fail group.
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/10/nx-s1-5565181/trilemma-treasu...
Do they hold it? How would we know?
Cantor Fitzgerald
Correct, this is the answer. Wasn't really known until this year.
https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/11/25/commerce-nominee-howar...
I hold some Tether. It's fairly normal if you speculate on crypto.
Armchair economist here - one implication of this is that a crypto liquidation will cause global interest rates to spike at a time when they will need to be lower to calm the markets.
Selling massive amounts of debt with no additional demand means the required return must be higher.
Stablecoins are now a regulated industry with laws in place to address this very concern. Tether is currently not compliant, but as the largest player in the space, has a great incentive to maintain its dominance.
Regulated industry.. like banking, stocks, and mortgage origination!
What would the regulation ... enforce?
Some sort of behavior by Tether and others?
Regulators also have enforcement functions.
Are you asking how laws work?
I’m just curious what is being enforced to prevent what exactly.
I think I’m missing what scenario people are thinking of in general.
I'm not sure I see that, depending what you mean by crypto liquidation. If you mean the prices of dogecoin etc. falling then that mostly just effects the number of Tethers changing hands between one speculator and another and wouldn't really affect the bond market.
If you mean Tether holders redeeming them for US dollars, that would involve selling treasuries but I doubt it would drive the price down that much. That's a very liquid market.
I mean tether redemptions. Hedge funds liquidating treasuries last year significantly distorted yields for a short while.
The USA is going to have a fantastic fiscal reputation if/when that has happened.
Good point but it seems like Tether is very healthy, it has the double of daily volume than Bitcoin now and doesn't really depend on crypto rails [1].
[1] Stable Coins ⊄ Blockchains: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stable-coins-blockchains-seba...
that's very armchair indeed
a crypto liquidation results in more people going to Tether. "tethered" and "tethering" has been a verb in the crypto space for like 10 years
when market demand of tether is too great the value goes about $1.00 and the organization relies on arbitragers to deposit more to cause the minting of Tethers at $1.00 and selling it into the open market if the price is above $1.00 pushing the market rate back down to $1.00
Tethers in existence still continue to grow in that scenario
Its nearly 1:1 backing, most of the time, even a mass redemption event of Tethers will be orderly and fine. those crisis of confidence have alreay occurred, those stress tests have already happened, far faaaar beyond what any bank would survive
all fiat collateralized stablecoins function the same way and there are many case studies, actual events that happened, that show it occurring orderly, uneventfully.
> when market demand of tether is too great the value goes about $1.00 and the organization relies on arbitragers to deposit more to cause the minting of Tethers at $1.00 and selling it into the open market if the price is above $1.00 pushing the market rate back down to $1.00
I'm not sure of this. USDT can only be minted by tether [0] (line 406), hopefully when they acquire more treasuries.
I am not exactly sure where the price of USDT come from and I am pretty sure there is not only one. But I would guess it is an aggregate of the prices on exchanges.
The chainlink oracle [1] is probably the most authoritative one.
- [0] https://etherscan.io/token/0xdac17f958d2ee523a2206206994597c...
- [1] https://data.chain.link/feeds/ethereum/mainnet/usdt-usd
Nobody is “setting the price”, people trade. supply and demand. on many venues and contracts. the oracles just read from those (and sometimes the venues and contracts read from the oracles)
when tethers and trading at $1.04 or anything higher than $1.00
arbitrageurs wire money to their account at the Tether organization (bitfinex, otc services) to instruct the organization to mint Tether
the organization does everything necessary: takes the deposited money and buys US treasuries, mints the equivalent amount of Tethers and gives those tethers to the customer
The customer deposited $1 and received 1 tether. Some exchange venues have people rushing to buy 1 Tether for $1.04
Customer sells their tether to them and has some other form of crypto that they can try to get back into dollars and do it all over again, until flooding the market with Tether supply back to $1.00
this happens all day every day for a decade, more pronounced during panic selling periods
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The US Treasury market is BY FAR the deepest most liquid market in the world.
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Have people basically loaned these guys a free $135B to let them buy bonds with?
Yes. IIRC they made over $10B in profit last year. Easily the most successful crypto company ever.
Given how conveniently Tethers have appeared in the past to prop up key parts of the crypto ecosystem, many are skeptical that they have actually received as much money as they claim.
Their math has been hilariously unbelievable at times (except to the crypto bros)... at one point they claimed they were banking deposits of about $3B a week.
To put that in perspective, that's what Saudi Aramco or Samsung might get as revenues.
But hey, don't just trust them, trust their bank and it's 33 year old deputy CEO who, when people pointed out that that number didn't match up with international banking numbers, said that was because those people didn't understand the banking licenses being used in The Bahamas, and that there were two, though he couldn't remember their names, or which one they had, or whether they maybe had both.
And when that looked hilariously bad, they removed his info from the bank's website.
And when that looked bad, they added it back.
And when that looked bad, they removed the bank's whole website, and replaced it with a broken WP template with no working links.
Hey, look, several years after that, go to Deltec's website. "Ultra sophisticated private banking" running on a different WordPress site. "Client login"? "This site can’t be reached Check if there is a typo in ebanking.deltecbank.com. DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN". Just as has been the case for years.
"Sounds legit to me" say the bros.
If they bought bonds would be amazing. 99% chances there is not much left. We’ve been saying this for years so not sure when will crash. But definitively it’s a scam
Totally, utterly, completely false. An honest discussion of this matter has no space for tether truthers stuck in the year 2015.
Can you provide their audits then please?
Otherwise I'm not sure how you can be so certain.
I am not sure about Tether but I see Paxos provides regular reports by KPMG https://www.paxos.com/usdp-transparency#usdp-attestations
If tether wants to maintain their dominant position (they do) then they will work to be compliant with the LAW, on a timeline deemed appropriate by the law makers.
Take your conspiratorial trutherism elsewhere.
The LAW is spelled "keep in good standing with the President". He might feel his little coin grifts are left behind.
On a timeline deemed appropriate by the law makers is making a lot of heavy lifting here. The (GOP) lawmakers won't lift a finger to do anything unless the Leader says so.
You keep calling out people who ask reasonable questions about Tether/crypto truthers. If I were you I'd probably rethink that strategy as it doesn't seem to be working out well.
Like, even Enron and Wirecard passed audits, so it's pretty weird that Tether can't.
You're right that Tether claims they could not previously get an audit and need the government to smooth the way (https://www.reuters.com/technology/tether-is-talks-with-big-...), but why would that be the case? Companies get audited all the time. Tether seems to have their own "conspiratorial trutherism" in mind, where the Biden administration secretly told all the major audit firms that they mustn't allow Tether to be audited because that might make crypto look good. And even that doesn't explain why they couldn't get an audit from 2017 to 2020.
To me the obvious explanation is that they would not pass an honest audit, and hope having the CEO of their primary brokerage in the Cabinet will help them cheat.
Tether's main problem is money laundering regulations, probably not so much not having the money.
https://archive.today/eEJMW
Stablecoins are the greatest business model ever. You hold money as treasuries and earn risk free interest. There is literally no tech spend either. All profit no expenses.
Too big to fail...?
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17th if comparing to sovereign states. There is way more debt held by private domestic investors as well as government agencies.
What are the failure modes here? Is the tether company itself a vulnerability?
If I was on the board of Tether or Capital Union I'd be a little scared by this.
Trump squeezed Intel for 10%, bullied Tiktok into a sale, and is ordering extrajudicial killings not that far away from the Bahamas.
What is to stop him saying: Tether is sketchily governed (seems true), is secretive and unaudited (seems true?), and holds far too much debt for the USA to be secure (could well be true) — "this is against our national security interests"?
$135bn that Congress can't touch must be really tempting. What stops him just taking it?
Especially since his sense of "national security interests" includes Canada making fun of the USA with clips of Reagan.
(I'm not sure that it would even be the wrong thing to do in a more structured, legal way at least)
reminding everyone that using Tether is being exposed to US credit risk without remuneration. This should be illegal as they are screwing people over who don’t know shit about how these things work.
mortgages arr regulated, this should be as well.
Presumably the figures for Tether's holdings are based on their attestations. Should we believe those figures to be real?
There is no other source for estimates of their financial holdings than those attestations. For years, Tether has promised that they are working on an audit. No audit has emerged. This is suspicious because audits aren't particularly hard for legitimate organizations.
People have gone looking for evidence that Tether really has as much as it has said. Nobody has succeeded. For example https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-my.... Which, after noting Tether's settlement for past fraud, and prominent executives with suspicious criminal histories, famously said that Tether "is quilted out of red flags."
And yet, many strongly believe that Tether is for real. Given that nobody has produced evidence of their wealth, I regard this belief as a question of psychology.
Said psychological belief has a simple explanation. We humans have a strong tendency towards cognitive dissonance. Meaning that we reject evidence which questions our sense of identity.
If I'm a bitcoin millionaire, my likely identity includes, "I'm a millionaire." But the financial system does not allow us to directly trade bitcoin. What I can actually trade bitcoin for is Tether. And therefore my belief in my own wealth relies on trusting that Tether is equivalent to money.
How can I support that trust? I can point to someone smart and say, "They believe in Tether, so it must be real!" I can point to someone rich and say, "They believe in Tether, so it must be real!" I can get angry at anyone who doubts Tether. It is easy to observe all three behaviors from people into Crypto.
That Bloomberg article offers an ironic example. Back in 2021, many crypto enthusiasts pointed at Sam Bankman-Fried. Who was both rich and smart, and publicly believed in Tether. Therefore he was quoted on the topic. Today, of course, he is in federal prison for having run a Ponzi scheme. If we behaved logically, any crypto enthusiast who used to look up to him, should be saying, "Wait, am I sure I'm placing my trust in the right place?" But, predictably, few do that. Instead they dismiss this past mistake, and place their trust today in someone else.
Now everyone knows that crypto is full of Ponzi schemes on top of Ponzi schemes. People are often OK with trying to take advantage of the greater fool, because they don't believe that they will be the greater fool. Others see people apparently making money and get in, driven by FOMO. But statistically, most people in a Ponzi scheme will lose money. And yet they will look like really smart people - right until the scheme collapses.
So here is the real question. Does Tether really have the money? Or does the entire infrastructure of crypto Ponzi schemes rest on yet another Ponzi scheme?
I wanted to come back to this, and make it explicit how the US program may be running.
If there is a run on Tether, the US government will step in behind the scenes and buy Tether at a discount. This gives Tether a backstop. It also gives the US government an immediate paper profit (buy Tether for less than a dollar, get a dollar of Tether), which can be used to buy Bitcoin. The sight of Tether successfully redeeming currency and Bitcoin going up will trigger a desire to jump back in, and reverse the cash flow. Allowing the US government to withdraw as much money as was actually put in.
This results in a budget neutral investment in Bitcoin. We put $X into Tether, we got out $X. We also got y% of that as Bitcoin. Exactly as the executive order demands that the government should do.
> For years, Tether has promised that they are working on an audit. No audit has emerged. This is suspicious because audits aren't particularly hard for legitimate organizations.
Hey, that's not true! They had several audits in progress over time, but had to fire multiple auditors for ... reasons, I guess.
And then they got one completed, but they can't let you see it! Why not? Because uhh, checks notes it's in Mandarin! (I shit you not. Straight out of their own mouths: https://tether.io/news/tether-update/ )
I know.
I'm a little surprised that they expected people to forget that translation services exist. But it fits with how people get sucked into a lot of cults, fraudulent cults, MLMs and the like. (I'm obviously listing nefarious uses. Something similar happens in many relationships.)
First get your target (emotionally or financially) invested. Then put them in a position where they have to accept something uncomfortable (investing emotionally even more), or back out. Repeat and intensify
In extreme cases you try to get them to be swallowing a stream of erratic and blatant lies. At that point you can do anything.
Yes. This says that there is likely a direct connection between Trump's erratic behavior and the fanatical loyalty that he inspires. If you trust him, you have to follow his latest whim. And following his latest whim strengthens your trust. Many charismatic leaders do this.
This bubble will inevitably burst louder than Krakatoa.
Why is Tether a bubble?
Isn't it linked to the value of the US Dollar, which itself is linked to the value of the US Economy?
It isn't linked to the value of a US dollar. It is the US dollar. The value of 1 token will always be 1 USD. If the US economy collapses the USD will be less valuable but again: 1 token is still 1 USD.
As with any good (and especially "currency"), it's only worth 1 USD as long as somebody (including the issuing company) is willing to give you 1 USD for it. Even if it is "linked", "pegged" or called something else.
I mean sure. Your logic applies to plain treasury bonds as well.
Tether is a bubble because it is an organization run by criminals, that has in the past been convicted of fraud, and is unable to pass a basic financial audit.
The most reasonable explanation is that it is a Ponzi scheme. Which will appear to work right until it doesn't. And if it stops working, the entire crypto universe will implode.
That said, the current President and many who are close to him have significant portions of money invested in crypto. That depend on Tether. There is therefore a reasonable expectation that the US government will covertly back Tether for the next several years if there is any prospect of a collapse.
This expectation is supported by Trump's declaration last March of creating a "strategic crypto reserve" for the USA. See https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/esta.... On the face of it, this executive order only helps crypto by taking some of it out of circulation. But the provision in 3C of creating "budget neutral" strategies for acquiring more bitcoin, could easily cover converting actual USD to Tether. Particularly if the Tether was available at a discount to the USD.
There are even countries run by criminals, the issue is more about power than the law.
About half of the USA thinks that the USA has become one of those countries...
Again, this is not exactly crypto: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45747958
Curious: why? Aren't bubbles about people buying some instrument (stock, bond, bitcoin...) with borrowed real money that is not eventually worth as much as they think it is? People buying stablecoins are exchanging presumably not-borrowed real money for something that amounts to a zero-interest money market fund. Presumably not borrowed because the stablecoin explicitly pays no yield.
Someone just deleted a comment so I’ll put it again here “ Tether is backed by nothing, so it can presumably print without end. If it's suspected they've done this, it could lose its peg. If that happens, it could have consequences.”
There is no reason not to do an audit except when it’s a scam/all money gone. No accounting company wants to do their audit - guess why.
As of 2025, USD stablecoins are a regulated industry. The frequency of uninformed comments like these will asymptotically go to zero.
> As of 2025, USD stablecoins are a regulated industry. The frequency of uninformed comments like these will asymptotically go to zero.
You didn't answer the audit question, which is really important.
Right, but Tether doesn't comply with the law at all. So...
I mean they might, maybe. But you can't point to the law as proof of something when the thing you're defending doesn't follow the law.
> Tether is backed by nothing...
If you look at their yearly profits and liquid cash, clearly Tether is backed by something. This is not the same as saying that they have full transparency but you cannot have those profits in dollars out of thin air.
“Since at least 2017 … Tether has been assuring investors that it will get audited, though it has yet to deliver“ can you give me a single reasonable reason this was not done in 8 years?
Usually the correct answer is the simplest - fraud.
My argument doesn't contradicts yours but, again, you are not the 17th largest holder of US debt out of thin air.
Profits can be a simple Ponzi scheme without a proper audit. That’s the simpler answer.
Any evidence that they actually own?
“ In its own attestation report for Q2 2025, Tether stated it holds about US$127 billion in U.S. Treasuries” this is the only source. And tbh anyone can “attest” it owns billions of whatever. Again, no audit because there is nothing there. They only attest through BDO Italia. And attestations are easily gamed. Usually worthless, but useful for usdt hodlers.
I wonder why they use bdo? See below their history.
About bdo:
In the UK, a former senior manager at BDO (in the UK member firm) was banned for 20 years for creating false audit documents and mis-using signatures.
In July 2025 the UK regulator Financial Reporting Council (FRC) flagged the BDO network as having audit quality “significantly short of expectations”. Only about half the audits reviewed were deemed satisfactory
The bigger news here is that China is rapidly winding down its holdings of US debt. This is very bad for America. We'll see American standards of living decline without the Chinese financing American extravagance.
Japan holds more US debt than China. The UK has also surpassed China.
China had $776.5B a year ago and has $730.7B now, a roughly 5% drop. They don't seem to "rapidly winding down", unless there's some additional data I'm missing.
Look at the other holders. Belgium and Luxembourg combined have more US debt than China.
If the goal was to crash the US economy by selling their small amount of debt (which likely isn't possible for them to do, despite the rhetoric, they have less than 2% of the total debt), they would also significantly impact of all the countries listed here, which would make them very unpopular indeed:
https://ticdata.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-cent...
China currently only holds about 2% of U.S. debt. What is the risk exactly?
Which will cause great unrest in the US and further allow authoritarian takeover. Fun times.
Stablecoins offer a relentless price insensitive buyer of US debt. This is good for America, good for democracy, and good for property rights globally.
However, stablecoins WILL cause unrest in Nigeria, Venezuela, Lebanon, and Turkey as their corrupt local currency completely erodes and the ruling class can no longer extract from their citizens.
That sounds like a perpetual motion machine that the US can get addicted to and then come apart once stable coins suddenly become price sensitive.
Or, an alternative, and hear me out, maybe this could also be called "an economy"
Confidence in crypto will go poof when there's a big enough run that the measly 7 transactions per second can't keep up with demand. We just haven't seen a crypto bank run yet. The $100 / transaction is nothing compared to what it could be. When that happens "stable" coins will lose their stability and the smoke and mirrors behind audit-free coins will collapse. You couldn't pay me to hold crypto.
This number will continue to climb and I am confident before the decade ends, stablecoins broadly will be the largest holder of US debt. The interests are fully aligned between the issuers and US govt - issuers keep the interest, US has a price insensitive buyer of debt.
This is ultimately good for the world, good for democracy, and good for the downtrodden and underprivileged members of corrupt countries such as Nigeria, Venezuela, Lebanon, and Turkey, who have suffered their own currency crises to the great detriment of their citizens. With only an Internet connection, US dollar stablecoins give them property rights which can't be voided through an act of the corrupt ruling class.
Before the tether truthers come out, update your priors. This industry is very different than it was in 2015. It has grown up substantially. The GENIUS act is the largest banking and financial reform of the last 100 years, and the consequences will shape the 21st century and local currencies globally.
What happens to these people if, hypothetically, a malicious U.S. president subverts the Federal Reserve and wildly inflates the dollar?
The point is that this is massively less likely to happen than with their local currency.
If the dollar starts undergoing wild inflation, then the whole world has a whole lot of problems, not just stablecoins.
Something much, much less unpleasant than what will happen to the rest of us.
He's tried. He can't.
> US has a price insensitive buyer of debt.
>This is ultimately good for the world, good for democracy, and good for the downtrodden and underprivileged members of corrupt countries such as Nigeria, Venezuela, Lebanon, and Turkey.
Wow, US has found a gold mine: The super full wallets of Venezuelans, Nigerians and Lebanese! They will buy a trillion of USDT to prop up US debt!
Unironically yes, and their communities will prosper as a result. I see no problem here.
>I see no problem here.
You mentioned 4 countries that are dirt poor and need to buy food, not stablecoins. The people in those countries who have money don't need stablecoins to invest in the US.
Money can be used to buy goods AND services! Stablecoins are money! Wow!
Yes, Trump now says he got 22 trillion dollars from foreigners! It's increasing all the time.
Was this comment sent from an office in the Cayman Islands, by any chance?
Not a chance.
Tether and their "original" "bank" were in The Bahamas, not the Caymans!
> good for the downtrodden and underprivileged members of corrupt countries such as Nigeria, Venezuela, Lebanon, and Turkey, who have suffered their own currency crises to the great detriment of their citizens.
Well, except that it ties them to USD, an ultimately doomed currency. The short-term interests are aligned, but they'd be better off with a locally-managed currency and simply banning the USD from being held by either the state or any of its representatives.
"Better off with a locally managed currency" wow, please research the counties I mentioned for five minutes.
It's a luxury opinion to view the USD as trash. It means you have options. USD is the best many people in the world can hope for.
I'm not arguing for those local currencies; I'm just saying that the USD is never going to be managed with nigerians in mind and it'd be ridiculous to imagine it would be.
Hell, the USD isn't even managed with americans in mind. We just happen to live here.
Except any country can make up their own crypto "stable" coins.