Tether

Tether publishes quarterly attestations from BDO Italia. It does not publish an audit, and after more than a decade as the largest issuer of dollar-denominated tokens that absence is the central fact about the company.

The distinction is not pedantry. An attestation reports what an accountant observed on a chosen date — these assets existed, this was their value. An audit examines a period: the controls, the movements between dates, whether what you saw on the date was representative or arranged. A company can pass every attestation it ever commissions and still be running something an audit would catch, because nothing between the snapshots is being looked at.

The comparison that makes it concrete is the one in the same market. Circle publishes monthly attestations from Deloitte and files audited financial statements with the SEC. Two issuers, the same product, and one of them submits to the examination the other has not.

What Tether does have is a decade of not breaking, enormous liquidity, and a business that visibly works. None of that is the same as verified, and the reason to keep saying so is that the argument for USDT is always framed as "it has never failed" — which is an observation about the past rather than evidence about the balance sheet.

In January 2026 Tether launched USAT, a stablecoin aimed solely at the American market, issued by Anchorage Digital Bank with Cantor Fitzgerald as custodian. The interesting part is the structure, not the launch.

Tether did not bring USDT into US regulatory scope. It created a second, separate token, issued by a federally chartered bank, with a US custodian — and left USDT exactly where it was. That is a revealed preference, and it says more about how the company views the cost of subjecting USDT to that supervision than any statement about transparency does.

For a holder the practical reading is simple: USAT and USDT are not the same instrument and do not carry the same assurances, and the name shared between them invites exactly the confusion that matters. If you hold USDT because you believed Tether had moved under US regulation, you are holding the token that did not.

Tether reported roughly $1.04bn in net profit for the first quarter of 2026, generated primarily by interest on the reserves backing USDT. There is nothing improper about this — it is how every stablecoin issuer makes money — and the scale of it is worth stating plainly, because it explains most of the company’s behaviour.

A holder of USDT lends Tether a dollar and receives a token. Tether invests the dollar and keeps the yield. At current rates on a float of that size, the issuer earns a bank’s interest margin with none of a bank’s capital requirements, deposit insurance obligations or supervision. That asymmetry, not the technology, is the actual product.

It also explains the incentive structure around disclosure. A company earning at this rate under its current arrangements has a great deal to lose from any change to them, and very little commercial pressure to volunteer scrutiny it is not required to accept. Reading Tether’s transparency posture as a policy choice rather than an oversight makes it considerably easier to predict.