If you doubt their attestation, it is more reasonable to doubt their claimed total assets before worrying about the breakdown of their investments.
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.
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.
> 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.
Isnt the whole idea this is a stable coin?
Luckily for the crypto people, Tether makes it near impossible to turn their fantasy money into real money
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...
A huge understatement, don't you think? ;)
They may have somewhat sketchily put money into bitcoin at times though.
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 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
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/10/nx-s1-5565181/trilemma-treasu...
https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/11/25/commerce-nominee-howar...
https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/wall-street-firm-over...
Explanation: Tether is not holding a stack of paper bonds in a safe. They must use some broker (or similar) to operate and hold the treasuries for them. And they are hiding how this is working. So the parent's question is who do they (Tether) hold it (treasuries) through (as in what broker/investment bank/whatever).
My answer is nobody outside Tether knows. And they are one of the dodgiest companies out there. We are totally audited, bro, trust me. They could be doing leveraged investments. Or they could just be Madoff 2.0. Nobody really knows. And the US government seems to be looking the other way because they are desperate for any buyers of treasuries.
USDC by contrast are open in their holdings, through Blackrock.
Large invisible "dark matter" financial holdings are the sort of thing that blow up badly during a financial crisis.
Tether banks with Cantor Fitzgerald, a primary dealer with the Federal Reserve. From 2023: https://www.wsj.com/finance/currencies/wall-street-firm-over...
Every quarter, BDO confirms Tether's assets by going to Tether's banking partners directly.