Tether, the issuer of the USDT stablecoin, reported a net operating profit of $1.5 billion for the third quarter, the company disclosed in its latest attestation. The figure brings Tether's total operating profit for the first nine months of the year to $4.5 billion.
The company's reserve surplus, the excess of its assets over its liabilities, nearly doubled during the quarter, rising from $4.1 billion at the end of June to almost $8 billion at the end of September. Total assets stood at around $190 billion against liabilities of around $183 billion.
Tether said the earnings came mainly from US Treasury bonds and repo transactions. The company's direct and indirect holdings of US Treasury bonds reached almost $130 billion, a sum that now exceeds the $116 billion in Treasury holdings reported by the United Arab Emirates.
Tether's Bitcoin holdings also grew substantially over the period, rising in value from less than $6 billion at the end of June to over $8 billion at the end of September. USDT remains the dominant stablecoin by market share, accounting for around 60 percent of the sector.
A parallel bet on Bitcoin
Tether's growing Bitcoin position arrives alongside continued accumulation by Strategy, the US software company that has built its balance sheet around the asset. Strategy currently holds 848,517 BTC. Its founder, Michael Saylor, has said the firm has financing headroom of up to $30 billion for further purchases. Strategy separately reported a profit of $19.5 billion for the period.
For European observers, the scale of Tether's Treasury holdings underlines how deeply the stablecoin issuer is now woven into US government debt markets, with a position larger than that of a sovereign holder such as the UAE. The growth in both its reserve buffer and its Bitcoin exposure comes as regulators across the bloc continue to scrutinise stablecoin reserves under the Markets in Crypto-Assets framework, and as questions persist over the composition and risk profile of the assets backing the world's largest stablecoin.
