E182 | Shadow Dollars and the New Financial Order: Inside Tether, the World’s Most Profitable Company per Employee
Summary
- Tether’s real “money printer” is not the roughly 1‰ fee charged on minting and redemption, but obtaining user funds at near-zero cost and investing them in U.S. Treasuries. It generated $13.7B in net profit in 2024, roughly 2x BlackRock’s, with only 150 employees—about $93M in profit per employee. Its model is neither a bank earning a deposit-lending spread nor Visa collecting transaction fees; it is closer to a “private central bank”: more than 80% of reserves were reportedly in Treasuries when the episode was recorded, with the returns accruing to the company and shareholders, though Tether also reinvests profits externally.
- USDT accounts for roughly 70% of the $200B stablecoin market, and its first moat is “liquidity brings liquidity.” Supply rose from roughly $91B at the end of 2023 to more than $140B, growing over 50% in 2024. Centralized exchanges turned USDT into the Schelling point for trading, making it difficult for even more compliant newcomers to migrate existing market depth. But the advantage does not replicate chain by chain: Solana has nearly $9B of USDC versus only about $2B of USDT, suggesting new users and DEXs can create new local liquidity centers.
- China’s 2017 “94” ban accidentally severed the RMB trading on-ramp and turned USDT into the common unit of account and funding rail for offshore exchanges. After exchanges such as Binance took off, Tron captured large USDT flows through early subsidies and low fees. Judicial cases and market rumors discussed on the show suggest that fraud, gambling, and underground FX favor Tron, but the guests rejected equating that with USDT’s mainstream demand. By December 2024, USDT issuance on Ethereum had overtaken Tron, more likely because gas costs fell and users valued asset safety—not because the token had simply been “laundered.”
- Tether survived its 2018 trust crisis, when USDT briefly fell to roughly $0.89, not through one perfect audit but through market structure, redemption arbitrage, and a gradually improving balance sheet. Its banking partners were unclear, reserve attestations were disputed, and the market suspected that new USDT issuance was being used to manipulate Bitcoin. But market makers with direct redemption access could buy USDT cheaply and redeem it for $1, with the resulting liquidity helping preserve the peg. Today, on-chain liabilities and most Treasuries are easier for regulators and key dealers to verify; Bitcoin, gold, loans, and other assets remain less transparent, fitting the closing line’s ironic assessment: “fake it till you make it.”
- The U.S. faces a contradiction with Tether: it may serve sanctioned actors, yet it holds roughly $110B of Treasuries—enough to rank among the world’s 20 largest holders. The DOJ and Treasury Department focus on uses involving drugs, terrorism, Hamas, and Russian arms dealers. But the guest noted that an institution issuing dollar cash cannot be held responsible for every drug dealer, and Tether is hardly uncooperative when it comes to blacklisting addresses. Cantor Fitzgerald both trades and custodies its Treasuries and has reportedly been positioned to own roughly 5% of Tether, creating an interest structure spanning regulation, dollar financing, and political ties that cannot be cut cleanly in one stroke.
- The stress test investors should really watch is not today’s high rates, but whether Tether resumes reaching for credit risk after rates fall. In 2021, nearly $30B of its roughly $70B supply was at one point invested in commercial paper. Rumors tied some of it to Evergrande, which Tether denied, while later disclosures still showed that it had held paper issued by Chinese banking institutions. Today, more than $7B of Bitcoin is buffered by more than $7B of shareholder equity, and roughly $8.1B of loans are reportedly fully collateralized. But if Treasury yields return to 1%–2%, the risk appetite behind reserve allocation and external investments could rise again.
- The endgame for stablecoins may not be another crypto asset, but on-chain infrastructure for the dollar, payments and settlement, and eventually securities markets. PayPal already issues PYUSD through Paxos, while JPMorgan and other banks settle large transactions on permissioned chains. If stablecoin legislation opens the door to banks, the current USDT-USDC order could be rewritten. The broader scenario is that “shadow dollars” automatically channel global capital into Treasuries and let self-custody wallets access on-chain U.S. stocks or an “on-chain Nasdaq,” sharply increasing the difficulty of capital controls. But the industry will still “take three steps forward, then two steps back”: FTX, Luna, and celebrity-issued tokens can all interrupt adoption.
Deep dive
1. Tether Makes Money on Zero-Cost Liabilities, Not Trading Fees
泓君 opens with the contrast: Tether earned $13.7B in 2024, roughly 2x BlackRock’s, yet had only 150 employees—about $93M in profit per employee. In the second quarter of 2024, USDT transaction volume was reportedly 2x Visa’s, while serving both underground finance and ordinary residents in high-inflation regions such as Venezuela.
杨民道 separates it from banking: deposits are liabilities on a bank’s balance sheet and require interest payments, while the bank takes on lending risk to earn maturity and credit spreads. Tether instead places the dollars users hand over when buying tokens with banks, invests more than 80% in U.S. Treasuries, and obtains what is effectively “zero-cost funding.”
刘锋’s intuitive analogy is that USDT is essentially an “IOU” or “casino chip” issued to users. Primary dealers pay roughly 1‰ on both minting and redemption, but fees are not the main profit source; as long as users hold USDT without redeeming it, Tether can keep earning returns on the underlying dollar assets. The returns ultimately accrue to the company and shareholders, though profits are also reinvested.
2. Issuance Growth and High Rates Combined to Produce $13.7B in Profit
On the show’s rough math, more than $130B of USDT earning 4%–5% on Treasuries could contribute roughly $7B a year. 杨民道 did not know the exact accounting basis for the $13.7B profit, and Tether also holds Bitcoin, gold, corporate bonds, and other assets, so the entire amount cannot be treated as risk-free interest income.
The larger increment came from balance-sheet expansion: USDT grew from roughly $91B at the end of 2023 to more than $140B at the time of recording, an increase of over 50% in 2024 alone. Meanwhile, Treasury yields have stayed high since 2022, amplifying profits from both scale and rates.
泓君 asked about sustainability after rate cuts. The guest did not sugarcoat the answer: “First of all, the returns definitely won’t be this high.” If rates return to 1%–2%, Tether’s profit will fall. It has arranged investments in other areas, but whether those can offset the lost spread income remains to be seen.
3. China’s “94” Ban Turned USDT Into the Common Language of Offshore Trading
刘锋 recalled that “94” refers to the September 4, 2017 order by seven ministries to shut down domestic ICOs. Ten days later, on September 14, regulators also required domestic crypto exchanges to exit and close out users by the end of that month. Chinese exchanges had previously used the RMB extensively as the unit of account; the two orders abruptly severed the existing fiat on-ramp.
Binance was founded in the first half of 2017 and rose rapidly into the global exchange tier within months of “94.” A key factor was that it did not accept RMB and used USDT as the funding and trading anchor. Huobi, OKEx, and others also lost their RMB channels, leaving a market where, for a time, “USDT was almost the only choice.”
USDT was initially issued on Bitcoin through the Omni protocol and later entered Ethereum. Tron then attracted transfers through subsidies and low fees, becoming the chain with the largest USDT supply for years. The show summarized Tether’s global rise as an unintuitive consequence: “It really was the Chinese government that single-handedly helped USDT take off.”
4. Tron’s Gray-Market Use Is Real, but It Does Not Explain All USDT Demand
泓君 asked why USDT on Tron was so large. 刘锋 cited market rumors and public cases from Chinese police and courts: online fraud, gambling, pyramid schemes, and illegal FX transactions frequently use USDT at the base layer, and are “most likely on Tron.” His explanation was that Ethereum has richer tracing tools, while Tron is relatively harder to track.
The host’s follow-up is worth preserving: “Where do the sources behind the media disclosures or judgments come from?” The guest did not produce a market-wide dataset, instead pointing to judicial cases and differences in tools across the two chains. Gray-market use should therefore be treated as an important phenomenon, not extrapolated into a complete user profile for Tron-based USDT.
杨民道 also corrected the idea that “stablecoins got started on illicit activity.” The real mainstream use early on was trading; gray demand was not sufficient to explain a 70% market share. “When every exchange has to choose USDT as the anchor for its trading pairs,” liquidity itself is the primary driver.
5. Ethereum Overtaking Tron Does Not Mean Tether Has Been “Laundered”
The turning point identified on the show was around December 2024, when USDT issuance on Ethereum surpassed Tron. 泓君 asked whether Tether was shifting from a gray-market route toward more legitimate uses. The guest explicitly rejected that interpretation: “You can’t understand it that way.”
The more direct mechanism was a rebalancing of cost and security. Ethereum gas had previously been too expensive for everyday small transfers; once gas fell materially, more users were willing to return to Ethereum, where the asset base and tooling are richer. The guest considered the security of holding USDT there “far better than on Tron.”
Tron itself is no longer synonymous with free transfers: its early zero-fee environment was heavily subsidy-driven, while transaction fees have risen rapidly over the past 2 years, making it one of the most profitable blockchains. Chain-share changes reflect fees, asset safety, and applications together; they cannot be read directly as a compliance indicator.
6. “Liquidity Brings Liquidity,” but Every Chain Can Have Its Own Winner
USDT stands at roughly $140B, or about 70% of the approximately $200B stablecoin market. 刘锋 called this lead a Schelling point: “Everyone always goes looking for the best liquidity.” Once every centralized exchange built depth around USDT, traders seeking liquidity had little choice but to keep using it.
Decentralized exchanges offer a counterexample: Solana has nearly $9B of USDC versus roughly $2B of USDT. Active meme-coin traders and the Trump token brought in large numbers of new users who did not inherit the USDT habits of the previous generation of centralized-exchange users.
泓君 briefly asked whether selling tokens on-chain and converting into USDC was a tax-avoidance strategy. The guest corrected her: the more direct purpose was simply to reduce asset volatility. The conclusion is not that USDT has lost its overall dominance, but that once DEXs emerge, the most liquid asset on a given chain can differ from the global leader.
7. Cantor Gave Tether Institutional Backing—and Created a Political Conflict of Interest
Cantor Fitzgerald is a U.S. primary dealer in Treasuries. According to reports relayed on the show, it buys, manages, and custodies large quantities of Treasuries for Tether, earning tens of millions of dollars a year. The reports also say the transactions may have left Cantor with roughly a 5% stake in Tether, though that ownership information came from anonymous sources and has not been fully confirmed.
Howard Lutnick, who runs Cantor, was not the company’s founder but rebuilt it after 9/11. Its offices occupied floors 101 through 105 of the North Tower; roughly 600–700 employees were reportedly killed, and the Treasury market was also disrupted. 刘锋 remembers the period vividly from his time working at Dow Jones.
Lutnick later joined Trump’s campaign and transition team and was nominated for Commerce Secretary. At the time of recording, the guest remained uncertain about the Senate confirmation status. Lutnick has publicly acknowledged managing Treasuries for Tether, describing his first reaction as: “Show me where your money is.” Cantor verified the funds before taking on the business, which was treated as an indirect reserve endorsement.
The personal ties between the two sides are also deep. Lutnick’s son Brandon interned in 2023 in the Swiss town where Tether executives live and even counted gold bars prepared for gold-backed tokens in a cave. Lutnick said he would exit the company’s business if he entered government, but the combination of political power, custody revenue, and potential ownership remains an interest structure to watch.
8. The Unconventional Founders Were a Source of Tether’s Risk Culture, Not Just Color
刘锋 described the team with the phrase “Don’t ask where heroes come from.” Tether had no typical Silicon Valley pedigree of elite universities, major technology companies, or marquee venture capital firms. Its participants included a child actor, a plastic surgeon, engineers, and a fuel trader. Their common trait was a willingness to take risk in markets without bank support and with ambiguous rules.
Brock Pierce helped propose the idea of a dollar stablecoin around 2013, when the early project was called Realcoin. He later exited and had his shares bought back. He had been an actor, the founder of Blockchain Capital, an early participant in public blockchains, and a business partner of Steve Bannon, who later became a Trump adviser.
The person who truly drove Tether and Bitfinex over the long term was the Italian Giancarlo Devasini. He moved from plastic surgery into DVD, CD, and electronics trading, claiming to have sold more than 20 million DVDs before investing the proceeds in Bitcoin. He later backed and acquired Bitfinex, bought back Tether’s early shares, and served as the most important long-term force behind both companies as CFO.
Another core figure, Paolo Ardoino, came from a purely technical background. He wrote software at a hedge fund, later served for years as CTO of Bitfinex and Tether, and became Tether’s CEO. He often stepped forward when market skepticism was at its fiercest. His side project Holepunch emphasizes peer-to-peer communications, no central servers, and privacy, leading 刘锋 to call him “pretty hardcore” as a technical geek.
9. Bitfinex’s Market Power Made Every New USDT Issue Look Like Manipulation
After Mt. Gox collapsed in 2014, Bitfinex became the most important offshore Bitcoin trading and market-making venue from 2014 through 2017 and into 2018—roughly the “Coinbase plus Binance” of its era. The same group also controlled USDT, so the overlap between the asset issuer and a major trading venue naturally raised suspicion.
The market spent years speculating over whether Bitfinex had issued USDT without full reserves and used it to buy Bitcoin and push prices higher. 泓君 cited data showing 91 USDT issuances between March 2017 and January 2018, with 48.8% of Bitcoin’s price gains occurring within 2 hours after an issuance. That is evidence of correlation, not a manipulation finding presented by the show.
After Bitfinex was hacked in 2016, Devasini compensated users through mechanisms including debt-to-equity conversions, turning some victims into Bitfinex shareholders. The show also noted that some early participants consequently held equity in Tether or Bitfinex. The companies later attempted to separate the two legally and operationally. The guest’s qualified conclusion was: “Before 2018, no one can answer whether USDT actually had 1-to-1 reserves.”
10. The $0.89 Crisis of 2018 Concentrated Four Layers of Distrust
The first layer was banking access. Tether initially used Taiwanese banks and routed dollars through Wells Fargo as an intermediary. After Wells Fargo cut ties, it struggled for years to find stable banking partners. The market later found that its partner may have been Noble Bank, which was seeking a sale for $5M–$10M.
泓君 cited materials saying that USDT supply had already exceeded $3B while Noble Bank’s Tether account reportedly held only $66.78. The mismatch made the market ask whether “the vault was empty.” As news of Noble’s bankruptcy spread, USDT fell below $0.90; the guest remembers a low of roughly $0.89.
The second layer was proof of reserves. Tether claimed that an independent firm had verified $2.55B in bank reserves, but the audit firm’s founder had close ties to Tether and its team, leaving the conflict of interest unresolved. 杨民道 argued that Tether could have produced a report running dozens or even hundreds of pages with detailed asset-by-asset breakdowns, but disclosed very little for years.
The third and fourth layers were its entanglement with Bitfinex and suspicions that issuance was linked to Bitcoin gains. Banks, audits, related-party transactions, and market statistics combined to make the 2018 depeg more than a liquidity event: it became a collective market vote on whether the assets existed at all.
11. Market-Maker Arbitrage and OTC Networks Held the Peg Better Than Bank Statements
The biggest structural difference between Tether and Circle is that ordinary users rarely have accounts with direct USDT minting and redemption rights; primary access is concentrated among a small number of market makers. Most fiat on- and off-ramps operate through OTC markets on platforms such as Binance and OK, where individuals and merchants exchange into local currency.
That closed structure created crisis arbitrage. If USDT fell to $0.90, a market maker with redemption rights could buy it and redeem it for $1, less roughly 1‰ or 2‰ in fees. 杨民道 even mentioned a market theory that some rumors may have been pushed by people capable of running the arbitrage, though the show did not treat this as established fact.
What ultimately kept USDT alive was that “too many people were willing to buy it for less than a dollar.” 杨民道 judged that in terms of counterparty count and liquidity depth, USDT’s price anchor may even be more robust than USDC’s—not because its reserves are more compliant, but because any discount brings in more buyers.
12. Tether Is More Transparent, but It Still Has Not Provided the Full Answer
The liability side is clearer today than in 2018: USDT supply can be observed directly on-chain. More than 80% of assets are U.S. Treasuries, and those Treasuries must be held and processed through primary dealers such as Cantor, making the main reserve pool impossible to hide from regulators. The bulk of reserves is therefore at least fully visible to key institutions.
The remaining roughly 20%—Bitcoin, gold, corporate assets, and loans—is still opaque. The show also remained skeptical of BDO’s attestations and disclosures: the number of pages and depth of asset classification are limited and cannot be equated with a full audit of a listed financial institution.
杨民道 said he had refused to hold any USDT for a long time and remained skeptical. 刘锋, by contrast, observed that Tether’s transparency and market trust had improved materially over the past 2 years. Tether has not washed away every doubt; it has gradually turned the fatal question of whether the money exists into a residual risk that can be priced.
13. Crypto’s Core Feature Is Not Absolute Decentralization, but Permissionlessness
杨民道 argued that “decentralization” spans nodes, governance, token distribution, and other dimensions, making it difficult to define uniformly even after a year of debate. The more important feature for stablecoins is “permissionlessness”: users can hold, transfer, and interact with applications on a global network without obtaining bank approval for each transaction.
USDT is clearly centralized, and Tether can blacklist addresses. But once the asset enters a DeFi pool, enforcing a blacklist becomes much more complicated. 杨民道 estimated that fewer than 1‰ of users treat “must never be blacklisted” as their top priority—an experiential judgment, not a market statistic.
Decentralized stablecoin DAI has a market cap of roughly $7B–$8B, versus more than $200B for the overall stablecoin market. Centralized stablecoins have won overwhelming adoption through dollar convertibility, on- and off-ramps, and FX stability, suggesting that users are not necessarily willing to sacrifice convenience for a purer ideology as long as permissionlessness is high enough.
Robinhood’s founder settling its crypto business over a weekend using stablecoins is the guest’s favorite example: the chain keeps working while banks are closed. Compared with a cross-border dollar transfer that requires verified accounts, business hours, and multiple layers of banks, the stablecoin’s core product value is first and foremost that “the network never stops, and settlement works at any time.”
14. The U.S. Will Not Easily Eliminate an Offshore Issuer That Sells Its Treasuries
泓君 laid out 2 regulatory tracks. The DOJ is investigating whether USDT is used for drugs, terrorism, and money laundering, while the Treasury Department focuses on sanctioned groups including Hamas and Russian arms dealers. She asked whether the eventual outcome would be fines, arrests, or an enforcement action severe enough to threaten the peg.
The guest’s counterquestion was whether an institution that issues dollar cash should be responsible for the end use when a drug dealer holds that cash. A stablecoin issuer and the person actually laundering money cannot automatically be treated as the same thing. The show also said Tether is “even more proactive than USDC” in freezing addresses at the request of U.S. agencies, so it cannot simply be described as refusing to cooperate.
The other side of the equation is roughly $110B in Treasuries. The show estimated that this is enough to place Tether among the world’s top 20 holders, near Mexico at roughly No. 19 with about $100B. “Stablecoins are actually promoting dollar hegemony—they are the vanguard,” 刘锋 concluded, making the prospect of the U.S. allowing Tether to disappear look remote. He even half-jokingly imagined a sovereign wealth fund taking a stake.
Regulatory scrutiny remains structurally inevitable. Bitfinex and Tether are legally separate, the parent is registered in Hong Kong, Tether is a fully offshore entity, its key figures operate across Europe, Switzerland, and Asia, and its founders avoid entering the United States. This is a company that has pushed financial globalization and cross-border regulatory arbitrage to the limit; it cannot earn the domestic trust enjoyed by USDC.
15. Rate Cuts May Test Reserve Allocation, Though the Old Commercial-Paper Risk May Not Return
At the time of recording, Tether held roughly $7.8B of Bitcoin, while shareholder equity stood at more than $7B. 刘锋 calculated that even if Bitcoin went to zero, the loss would not directly destroy USDT’s 1-to-1 backing. But that conclusion depends on the disclosed figures being accurate and does not mean the other assets are risk-free.
Loan balances stood at roughly $8.1B and were reportedly fully collateralized. The bigger unknown remains the 10-to-20 percentage points of assets outside Treasuries: collateral quality, corporate bonds, gold, and other investments are not disclosed to the public in real time the way on-chain USDT supply is.
The situation was more dangerous in 2021, when nearly $30B of roughly $70B in issuance was allocated to commercial paper. The market circulated rumors that the holdings included debt from Evergrande and other Chinese property developers. Tether denied this, saying its paper was rated A2 or above and diversified across global regions; the Evergrande crisis nonetheless triggered a brief depeg.
Later New York investigation documents showed that Tether had indeed held some Chinese corporate paper, though the institutions mentioned on the show were more likely Agricultural Bank of China, ICBC, and similar entities rather than property developers. By 2022, Tether had replaced all commercial paper with Treasuries. The guest believed criticism played a role, but higher rates were more important because even safe Treasuries offered attractive returns—making the next rate-cut cycle the real test.
16. “More Transaction Volume Than Visa” Does Not Mean Tether Does Visa’s Job
泓君 cited the figure that USDT transaction volume reached 2x Visa’s in the second quarter of 2024. 刘锋 immediately drew the commercial distinction: Tether only issues the asset; it does not clear every on-chain payment. Actual ledgering and final settlement are handled automatically by networks such as Ethereum and Tron.
His toy transaction makes the point. A buyer sends USDT directly from a wallet to a seller, and the seller delivers the toy; Tether does nothing throughout. A Visa card payment runs through a POS terminal, issuing bank, acquiring bank, and a complex clearing and settlement network that Visa must maintain.
杨民道 therefore places Tether further upstream. It is neither a commercial bank nor a card network, but a private central bank that “does currency wholesale.” On-chain infrastructure and downstream exchanges serve the end user, allowing 150 employees to manage hundreds of billions of dollars in liabilities. The operating leverage is enormous, while asset returns flow to the company and shareholders.
17. Stablecoins Will Rebuild Settlement First, Then Potentially Pressure Visa, Banks, and Securities Markets
泓君 used Walmart to illustrate merchant incentives. Walmart generates roughly $15.5B in annual net profit, while card fees could reach $10B; if payment costs disappeared, profits could theoretically rise by about 60%. 杨民道 expects stablecoins to replace SWIFT, FX, and bank clearing and settlement infrastructure first, with lighter wallet applications later putting pressure on Visa and Mastercard.
A mobile wallet connected to Solana or an Ethereum Layer 2 would not need to maintain the vast interface between card networks and banks worldwide. Visa is already actively testing stablecoin settlement between nodes. The conflict may not be USDT directly challenging Visa, but stablecoins becoming the base layer on which new payment applications compete alongside upgraded traditional networks.
Traditional institutions have already started experimenting. The show said JPMorgan’s internal blockchain system may now process more than $1T in settlement a day, while multiple banks are using consortium and permissioned chains to reduce costs and the time capital sits idle. The key step not yet taken is connecting closed bank networks to public chains; once that happens, the market will no longer be confined to banks.
The consumer-facing example is PayPal’s PYUSD, issued on Ethereum and Solana and transferable by PayPal users. Its issuer, Paxos, holds a New York regulatory license and previously issued BUSD for Binance. 杨民道 calls it “the Foxconn of stablecoins”: Paxos handles the banks, licenses, and compliance infrastructure, while the brand owner supplies the use case and users.
18. If Regulation Lets Banks Enter, Tether’s Lead Will Be Only the Starting Point of the New Order
杨民道 sees the stablecoin bill and committee led by the Trump administration and David Sacks as the most important variable. JPMorgan and other giants have not entered at scale, not because of technology but because of regulation. If a major bank is allowed to issue a product resembling USDC, the existing USDT-USDC structure could “change completely,” and the market would enter open warfare.
The more distant scenario comes from Larry Fink’s discussion of asset tokenization. Stablecoins are simply tokenized dollars; stocks and commodities also require splits, mergers, dividends, and shareholder voting. The more complex the functions, the more a unified on-chain ledger could reduce reconciliation across institutions. Even BlackRock must coordinate across institutions to collect proxy votes, while on-chain governance could record them directly.
The optimistic path is not linear. 杨民道 describes the industry as “taking three steps forward, then two steps back.” Luna and FTX made U.S. political and financial circles unwilling even to mention blockchain for a time, interrupting stablecoin adoption. Full permissionlessness accelerates innovation, but it also allows bad events to drag down the entire sector.
Trump and his wife’s tokens have also divided opinion. Fiat on-ramps such as Moonshot did bring in outside capital and can be called onboarding, but if newcomers buy near the top and suffer a major loss, they may never touch crypto again. The show quoted the joke: “China has excess industrial capacity, so influencers sell goods on livestreams; America has excess capital, so presidents’ families and celebrities issue tokens at the drop of a hat.”
19. Tether Is Converting Interest Profits Into Long-Term Bets on AI, Energy, and Content Platforms
Ardoino says Tether invests at least half its profits externally because “shareholders don’t need the money.” Smaller bets include a minority stake in Juventus, hydropower in Uruguay, geothermal energy and Bitcoin mining in El Salvador, and a possible headquarters move to El Salvador with a roughly 70-story building. It looks like Gilded Age spending, but the underlying logic still involves energy, payments, and local ecosystems.
The largest investment is German-listed Northern Data. Tether began buying shares in 2023 and then used an Irish subsidiary to spend $420M on 10,000 Nvidia H100s, followed by €570M in unsecured funding and more than €100M later for expansion. After several debt-to-equity rounds, Tether became the largest shareholder. Total investment reached roughly $1.2B–$1.3B, pushing a Bitcoin-mining company toward AI cloud computing.
Other technology bets include the $200M acquisition of Salt Lake City-based Blackrock Neurotech. The show said its brain-computer interface had received FDA breakthrough-device designation and aims to help patients with cerebral palsy regain movement; Peter Thiel had also invested. Tether has simultaneously previewed Tether Data, which aims to let AI run on its own servers and even locally on phones, with an emphasis on privacy. It has hired nearly 150 people—almost the size of the original company.
Another $775M investment went to right-wing video platform Rumble. Monthly active users were “apparently” no more than 70 million, but the platform drew rapid attention during Trump’s campaign and insists on building its own cloud rather than relying on Google or Amazon. After the investment, Rumble planned to buy Bitcoin and launch a wallet supporting BTC and USDT, along with creator tipping. The logic is coherent, but it also resembles FTX buying assets across the market when it was flush with cash; the risk is no longer the same as holding short-term Treasuries.
20. “Shadow Dollars” Could Turn Stablecoin Competition Into a Contest for Capital Among Nations
The show closed with a scenario from 郑迪: the stablecoin market is still only roughly $200B, but if it grows to $5T or $10T, issuers will automatically allocate global user funds into U.S. Treasuries. At that point, stablecoins would no longer be merely payment tools; “the whole world would effectively be lending money to the U.S. government.”
The show variously estimated Tether as the world’s top-20 or roughly No. 18 Treasury holder. If its existing scale disappeared, it could leave a demand gap of more than $100B and push financing costs up by several basis points. South Korean regulators therefore view dollar stablecoins as “shadow dollars,” while the EU’s push for euro stablecoins reflects the same competition over sovereign financing and monetary influence.
More disruptive still is the on-chain capital market. Traditional capital controls can tell IB, Tiger Brokers, or Futu not to open accounts for residents of certain regions, and can restrict CEXs and fiat gateways. But if U.S. stocks, commodities, and an “on-chain Nasdaq” exist on-chain, an open-source self-custody wallet could bypass those centralized entry points. “How do you investigate someone’s wallet?”
郑迪 believes that under a Trump administration that damages global coordination and emphasizes America First, the U.S. will welcome an on-chain economy that siphons global liquidity. 杨民道 remains conflicted about Tether’s hardest-to-swallow duality: he still does not trust it, but acknowledges that it “found its place in the Wild West.” 泓君 closed with the Silicon Valley maxim: “fake it till you make it.”