Tether

USDT is a token that Tether promises to redeem for one US dollar. Tether mints it when verified customers, mostly exchanges and trading firms, wire in dollars, and burns it when they redeem. Everyone else gets USDT by buying it from those customers on an exchange or peer to peer, which is why the market price, not Tether, keeps the peg day to day.

What makes USDT different from other dollar tokens is where it lives and who uses it. More than half the supply, about $92 billion, sits on Tron, where transfers are cheap and which is the default rail for dollar transfers across much of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Turkey. Another $73 billion is on Ethereum. USDT is the quote currency on most offshore exchanges, and in places like Venezuela and Argentina it works as a street-level savings dollar. Tether says the user base grew by more than 30 million in Q2 2026 alone.

Tether can freeze any address on the chains it issues on, and does so on request from law enforcement; in September 2026 the US Department of Justice publicly credited it for help in a $52 million action against a scam network. For how USDT scores against other stablecoins on reserves, redemption and peg history, see our USDT card.

For most of its history the honest answer was "nobody outside can tell". That changed in stages. In 2021 two regulators found Tether had not been fully backed for long stretches: the CFTC said reserves fell short for most of the time between June 2016 and February 2019 and fined it $41 million (CFTC), and the New York Attorney General settled for $18.5 million over claims tied to Bitfinex's $850 million hole at Crypto Capital. Quarterly attestations by BDO Italia followed. On 13 August 2026 Tether published its first full audit: KPMG gave an unqualified opinion on Tether International's 2025 statements and physically counted the gold bars (Tether).

The bulk of the reserve is short-dated US Treasuries and reverse repo, which is about as safe as dollar assets get. The part to watch is the rest. Gold, bitcoin and secured loans together are several times larger than the equity buffer, so a sharp fall in gold and bitcoin at the same time eats directly into the cushion. That happened in Q2 2026, when the buffer halved. It is still positive. It is also why US-regulated rivals, limited by the GENIUS Act to cash, bank deposits, short Treasuries and similar, can say their reserves are simpler.

The peg record is strong. USDT's worst modern moment was 12 May 2022, during the Terra collapse, when it traded down to about $0.95 while Tether paid out more than $10 billion of redemptions in two weeks; it was back at par by July.

Only verified customers can redeem with Tether itself, and the terms are built for institutions (Tether fees):

1. 01Open an account on tether.to and pass KYC; the verification fee is $150, paid in USDT.
2. 02Send at least $100,000 of USDT to your Tether account.
3. 03Request a withdrawal to a bank account in your name. The fee is the greater of $1,000 or 0.1%.
4. 04Wait for the wire; Tether says processing can take several days.

Anyone below $100,000 exits by selling USDT on an exchange, which in practice is instant and at or near $1 because of the depth. US persons are a separate case: Tether has not served New York residents since the 2021 settlement, and for the US market it now offers USA₮ (USAT) instead, launched on 27 January 2026. USAT is issued by Anchorage Digital Bank under the GENIUS Act, with Cantor Fitzgerald holding the reserves and Bo Hines as its CEO (CoinDesk). It had about $183 million outstanding in late September 2026, according to DefiLlama.

Tether started in July 2014 as Realcoin, founded by Brock Pierce, Reeve Collins and Craig Sellars, and issued its first tokens on Bitcoin's Omni layer that October. Control passed early to the people behind the Bitfinex exchange. The Paradise Papers named Giancarlo Devasini and Philip Potter as the officials who set up Tether Holdings in the British Virgin Islands. Devasini, now chairman, is the largest shareholder. Paolo Ardoino, Tether's CTO from 2017, became CEO in December 2023 (Tether).

In January 2025 the group moved its headquarters and subsidiaries from the BVI to El Salvador after getting a digital asset licence there. The issuing entity audited by KPMG is Tether International, S.A. de C.V.

Tether is privately held and is not an SEC registrant, so there is no 20-F, 10-K or stock. The closest thing to an annual report is the KPMG-audited statements for the year to 31 December 2025 plus the quarterly BDO attestations. From September 2025 Tether tried to raise $15–20 billion at a valuation around $500 billion; investors pushed back, the FT reported the target cut to about $5 billion, and as of this profile we found no announcement that a round closed.

The profits go into more than stablecoins. Tether reported over $10 billion of net profit in 2025 and invests in bitcoin mining, AI (its QVAC research unit), agriculture, media and sport, as well as the private-credit fund with Fasanara it launched in September 2026. Those investments sit at group level; Tether says they are not part of the USDT reserve.

"Tether gold" covers two different things that are easy to mix up.

XAUT is a way to own allocated gold on a blockchain; it trades against USDT on most large exchanges and holders can ask for physical delivery in Switzerland. The reserve gold is a bet by Tether itself. It has bought steadily since 2022, adding 14 tonnes in Q2 2026 alone, which made it one of the largest private holders of bullion. When gold fell about 15% that quarter, the value of those holdings dropped from $19.84 billion to $18.84 billion even though the tonnage rose.

The Celsius settlement is the one with money attached: Celsius's estate claimed Tether sold its bitcoin collateral too early in June 2022; the judge let the case proceed in July 2025 and Tether settled for about 7% of the claim (VanEck).