Tether

Tether is a private company that creates USDT, a token designed to stay worth one US dollar, and holds the assets meant to back it. Its terms name the issuer as Tether International, S.A. de C.V., formerly Tether International Limited, which has redomiciled from the British Virgin Islands to El Salvador. The tether.to site itself is run by Tether Operations, S.A. de C.V. Paolo Ardoino is chief executive, and Simon McWilliams is the chief financial officer quoted in the company's audit announcement.

USDT is the product most people mean when they search for Tether, but the company issues other tokens too. Its integration guide lists XAU₮, a token tied to physical gold, and MXN₮, a Mexican peso token. It has wound down its euro token, EUR₮, and says it will stop accepting redemptions of its offshore yuan token, CNH₮, from 20 February 2027. Separately, Tether has grown an investment arm that announces stakes in mining, payments and computing companies; its October 2026 news page covers a bitcoin mining software kit, a Bolivian payments start-up and an AI chip maker.

Tether does not publish a headcount or a street address for the issuer on its legal pages. In August 2026 it said USDT had more than 650 million users across emerging markets, a company figure with no published method behind it.

New USDT is created when a verified Tether customer sends dollars to Tether and receives tokens; it is destroyed when a customer sends tokens back and receives dollars. Almost nobody who holds USDT does this. Most people buy and sell it on exchanges, where its price is set by trading, and only large firms such as exchanges and trading desks deal with Tether directly.

Tether's fee page sets the terms for those who do. Opening a verified account costs a non-refundable 150 USDT, which the page says can count toward a later redemption. Every acquisition or redemption must be at least $100,000. Tether also says it approves or rejects accounts at its sole discretion and may set its own minimums.

Redemption pays out at one dollar per token, less fees, to a bank account in the customer's own name. Tether's terms say requests are reviewed individually and can take several days. If you hold a few thousand dollars of USDT, your exit is an exchange or broker, not Tether, and the price you get there depends on that venue's market.

Tether says every token is backed by its reserves and that the issuer's assets exceed its liabilities. Its public transparency feed, which it says is typically updated daily, showed on 29 October 2026 total assets of about $186.5 billion, liabilities of about $181.0 billion and shareholder equity of about $5.5 billion. Those are the company's own numbers.

For years the independent check on those numbers was a quarterly attestation by BDO Italia. An attestation confirms what an accountant found on a single reporting date. It says nothing about what happened between dates and is not an audit. Coverage of the second-quarter 2026 attestation, released on 31 July 2026, reported total assets of $187.75 billion against liabilities of $183.64 billion at 30 June, with the excess roughly half its level at the end of March. Those figures come from press reports of the BDO document, which we did not open.

On 13 August 2026 Tether announced that KPMG US had completed a full audit of Tether International's financial statements for the year to 31 December 2025 and issued an unqualified, or clean, opinion. The Block reported that KPMG confirmed issuing the opinion. Tether's announcement says reserves exceeded liabilities by $6.814 billion at year-end and that KPMG counted every gold bar Tether holds. It does not include the audited statements or the auditor's report, so outsiders still cannot read the income statement, the notes or the list of counterparties.

The reserve mix matters as much as its size. Reporting on the second-quarter attestation says most income came from US Treasury bills and repurchase agreements, and that Tether also held physical gold and bitcoin. Gold and bitcoin move in price, which is why the reported surplus can shrink in a quarter without any assets being sold. For background on why stablecoin reserves are now a mainstream policy question, see how stablecoins are becoming financial plumbing.

USDT exists as separate tokens on many networks, and Tether treats one USDT on any supported chain as equal to one on any other. Sending it on the wrong network is the most common way people lose it, because an exchange that only supports one version may not credit a transfer made on another.

Two networks hold almost all of it. On 29 October 2026 Tether's transparency data put about $92.3 billion in circulation on Tron and about $84.4 billion on Ethereum, with Solana a distant third at about $2.6 billion.

Tether's guide also warns developers that its Ethereum contract follows an older token standard whose transfer function returns no value, so custom contracts should use a safe-transfer library when they handle USDT.

Tether's terms state that it holds authorisation as a stablecoin issuer and digital asset service provider under El Salvador's rules and is supervised by that country's National Commission of Digital Assets. We could not open the commission's register to confirm the entry, so treat it as the company's statement. The same terms are still governed by British Virgin Islands law.

The terms bar several groups from dealing with Tether directly. They include US persons, apart from eligible contract participants Tether chooses to accept, as well as Canadian and Singaporean persons, the government of Venezuela, sanctioned persons, and residents of Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Crimea, the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and the Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. Holding USDT bought on a third-party exchange is a separate matter governed by that exchange's own rules.

For the US market Tether chose a different route. USA₮ launched in January 2026 and is issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A., a federally chartered bank supervised by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Anchorage's announcement states plainly that Tether Operations is not the issuer. USA₮ and USDT share branding but are different tokens with different issuers, and owning one gives you no claim on the other. Our news desk covered US scrutiny of the arrangement in a report on Senate questions about Tether and Cantor.

Yes. Tether's terms allow it to freeze or confiscate tokens linked to prohibited use, to blacklist any address that holds USDT, and to suspend access when it suspects a breach of its terms, all at its own discretion. A blacklisted address cannot send USDT, whoever controls it.

This is the trade-off built into every dollar stablecoin run by a company: the issuer can respond to theft, fraud and sanctions requests, and the same power can catch an innocent holder whose address received tainted funds. If USDT is frozen in an address you control, the only route is to contact Tether, and its terms promise no outcome.

Two settlements in 2021 shape how many people read Tether's statements today. In February 2021 the New York Attorney General said Tether's claim that USDT was fully backed by dollars at all times had been false, found that it lacked banking access from at least mid-2017, and secured $18.5 million from Tether and Bitfinex together. The settlement also required Tether to publish the categories of assets behind USDT, which is the origin of its regular reserve reports.

In October 2021 the Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined Tether $41 million. Its order found that from June 2016 to February 2019 Tether misled the market about its reserves, that over a 26-month sample it held enough fiat to back every token on only 27.6% of days, and that it had claimed to be audited when it was not. Neither settlement found that USDT holders lost money, and both concern a period before the BDO attestations and the KPMG audit.

The risks of holding USDT are about the issuer and about access, not about the token's code.

• Reserve risk: the backing is reported by Tether, checked quarterly by an attestation and, for 2025, by an audit whose statements are not public. Part of the reserve is gold and bitcoin, whose prices move.
• Redemption access: most holders cannot redeem with Tether and rely on exchanges. In a stressed market the exchange price can fall below one dollar even if the reserves are intact.
• Freezing: Tether can blacklist any address, with no court order required under its terms.
• Jurisdiction: the issuer sits in El Salvador under terms governed by British Virgin Islands law, so a holder's legal recourse is limited and unfamiliar to most users.
• Network mistakes: sending USDT on a network the recipient does not support can leave funds stranded.
• Concentration: USDT is the dominant dollar token on many exchanges, so a problem at Tether would reach far beyond its own customers. The main US-listed alternative is USDC from Circle, which carries its own issuer and freezing risks.

Most people get USDT on a crypto exchange or through a wallet's built-in swap. Before buying, check which network the platform uses for deposits and withdrawals, because fees differ widely: transfers on Tron and Ethereum need TRX or ETH for network fees, and an exchange may charge its own withdrawal fee on top. For how USDT compares with other stablecoins, see our separate rating card.

Getting out normally means selling USDT for dollars or another currency on an exchange and withdrawing to a bank, or swapping it for another stablecoin. Direct redemption with Tether is open only to verified customers who can move at least $100,000. If you hold USDT on one of the discontinued networks, Tether no longer redeems it there, so move it through a platform that still supports that network, if one does.

Tether's contact options run through its website and knowledge base at tether.to. Its official social accounts linked from that site are on X (@tether), Telegram (t.me/tether), LinkedIn and YouTube. Tether does not handle disputes over exchange trades, and it cannot reverse a transfer.

Scams that use the Tether name are common. Search data shows steady interest in phrases such as recovering scammed USDT and so-called flash USDT, which is a fake balance trick, not a Tether product. Treat any unsolicited offer to unfreeze, recover or sell USDT at a discount as a likely scam, and check that a site's address is tether.to before entering anything.

Tether's record is one of fast growth punctuated by disputes over its reserves.

• February 2021: settlement with the New York Attorney General over reserve statements.
• October 2021: CFTC civil penalty of $41 million.
• January 2025: Tether announced it would move its group to El Salvador after obtaining licences there; the issuer later redomiciled from the British Virgin Islands.
• September 2025: stopped issuing and redeeming USDT on Omni, Bitcoin Cash SLP, Kusama, EOS and Algorand.
• November 2025: stopped redeeming EUR₮.
• January 2026: USA₮ launched, issued by Anchorage Digital Bank for the US market.
• July 2026: second-quarter attestation released, prepared by BDO.
• August 2026: Tether announced KPMG's clean opinion on its 2025 financial statements.