Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said the stablecoin issuer holds approximately 150,000 Bitcoin, worth roughly $11.5 billion at current prices—a figure about 50,000 coins above what the company's own reserve disclosures imply.

"We have give or take 150,000 bitcoin ourselves. It's not much, but it's honest work," Ardoino said during a keynote at the Plan ₿ Forum in Lugano, Switzerland, the city where Tether has run a Bitcoin and stablecoin adoption program since 2022.

USDT, the largest stablecoin by value in circulation and designed to track the U.S. dollar, is backed by a reserve portfolio whose composition Tether publishes through regular attestation reports. Because that portfolio—not the company's other assets—is what stands behind USDT, the split between reserves and corporate holdings is the detail to keep in view when weighing Ardoino's figure.

A gap in the paper trail

The claim stands out because it does not square neatly with the company's published figures. Tether's third-quarter reserve attestation, which covers the assets backing USDT, lists $8.37 billion of Bitcoin valued at $83,621 per coin, implying roughly 100,060 BTC. That leaves about 50,000 coins, worth close to $3.8 billion, that the company's public filings do not yet account for.

Attestations provide a point-in-time snapshot of reserves rather than the fuller assurance of a complete financial audit.

Ardoino did not say where the additional Bitcoin is held or when it was acquired, so his comment does not necessarily indicate a fresh purchase of that size. Tether has long maintained that its corporate Bitcoin investments sit separately from the reserves supporting USDT.

Years of accumulation

The stablecoin issuer has been accumulating Bitcoin for years. In May 2023, Tether said it would funnel up to 15% of its net realized operating profits into Bitcoin, and that it would custody the coins itself rather than rely on third-party custodians. The strategy has been fueled by substantial profits: the company reported $1.5 billion in net operating profit in the third quarter alone, and it has posted billion-dollar quarterly profits throughout the year while its USDT supply has continued to grow.

The broader reserve picture laid out in the Q3 report shows $191.45 billion in assets against $183.50 billion in liabilities, leaving an excess cushion of $7.95 billion—nearly double the $4.11 billion buffer the company reported in June. U.S. Treasury bills remain the bulk of reserves at about $132.4 billion.

Transparency under scrutiny

The transparency gap is a sensitive subject for Tether, which has faced years of scrutiny over whether USDT is fully backed. The company began its first full financial audit with KPMG this year, a long-awaited step toward addressing those doubts. Future attestation reports and the audit itself are the publications through which any fuller accounting of the company's Bitcoin—reserve and corporate—could appear.

Ardoino also used the Lugano stage to tout Tether's scale, saying the company now serves more than 730 million users worldwide and is adding roughly 30 million wallets per quarter, as he pitched a suite of open-source technologies funded by its profits.

Source: Decrypt