Tether Management Awards Themselves Major Dividends This Year, Suggesting They Believe Reports That U.S. Authorities Are About to Drop the Hammer on the World's Largest Stablecoin

Tether issued its latest quarterly 'attestation' of the reserve assets allegedly backing the $119.4 billion in issued USDT stablecoins as of September 30.

Tether management has paid themselves major dividends this year, suggesting they believe reports that U.S. authorities are about to drop the hammer on the world’s largest stablecoin.

On Wednesday, Tether disclosed that its market cap increased by $27.8 billion in the first nine months of 2024, reaching $96.4 billion. This surge is almost equivalent to the entire market cap of its closest competitor.

Tether’s Q3 attestation also revealed that its alleged T-bill stash ranks among the top 18 holders globally if it were classified as a country, putting it above Germany, Australia, and the UAE.

Tether supporters often use this stat to claim some kind of immunity to U.S. legal action, but Tether’s T-bills represent a mere 0.0027% of the total $36 billion in circulating T-bills, so maybe don’t throw away that criminal attorney’s business card just yet.

Tether’s Ardoino recently acknowledged his company’s vulnerability due to most of its apples being in Cantor Fitzgerald’s basket, admitting that “if the U.S. wanted to kill us, they can press a button and kill us everywhere.”

And yet it was only last year that Tether warned the market about “the risks stablecoin users face while holding a stablecoin that has a significant jurisdictional concentration in one country or banking system.”

That warning came after Circle nearly lost $3.3 billion via the failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), which held a good chunk of Circle’s cash reserves. Circle was ultimately saved when the U.S. federal government stepped in with a bail-out of SVB’s depositors, proving once again that there are no atheists in foxholes and no libertarians in financial holes of their own making.

In addition to rumors of Department of Justice (DoJ) indictments being prepared, U.S. Treasury meetings are showing renewed interest in bringing some regulatory order to the stablecoin market in the hopes of avoiding a repeat of the ‘wildcat banking’ era of the 19th century.

With Tether HQ looking like the Führerbunker circa April 1945, senior management is showing less compunction about dipping into Tether’s ‘excess reserves.’ The Q3 attestation shows dividend distributions topping $550 million so far this year, and hey, Christmas is coming, so let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Meanwhile, Tether’s self-aggrandizing promotional activities show no sign of letting up. The Q3 PR offered lofty proclamations of “transcending traditional financial boundaries,” including the boundaries imposed on the use of the U.S. dollar by the people that issue the U.S. dollar.

Tether also boasts about “enabling access to a stable financial system,” again ignoring that this stability was not built by Tether, nor was Tether ever given permission to enable access by pig butcherers, money launderers, and sanctions-dodgers.

As Bloomberg’s Matt Levine recently observed, the line Tether is walking here is a very fine one: “‘We are a way to send dollars without quite as much interference from the U.S. government’ is a good pitch, but not if the U.S. government hears it.”