- Paolo Ardoino told an audience in Lugano that Tether owns “give or take 150,000 Bitcoin”.
- The company’s own third-quarter reserve report implies a holding of 100,060, roughly 50,000 fewer.
- At current prices the difference is worth about $4bn, and Tether has not published anything that reconciles the two numbers.
Tether’s business rests on one promise: that every it issues is backed by assets it actually holds. So when its chief executive stood on a stage in Lugano and put the company’s bitcoin pile at 150,000 coins, about 50,000 above its own published figure, the gap became the story.
USDT is the token most crypto trading is priced in, which means a lot of people hold it without ever really choosing to. Its value depends entirely on Tether having the assets to redeem it. A $4bn difference between what the company publishes and what its chief executive says out loud doesn’t mean anything is missing. It does mean both figures can’t be the current picture, and only one of them has an accountant’s name attached to it.
Attestation, not audit
Every quarter Tether publishes a report setting out what sits behind the tokens in circulation: treasury bills, cash, gold, bitcoin, secured loans and the rest. The third-quarter version doesn’t give a coin count directly. It gives a dollar value for the bitcoin, and dividing that by the price on the reporting date implies 100,060 coins.
That report is an attestation. An attestation is an accountant confirming that, on one named date, the figures a company handed them match the records that company showed them. It’s a photograph, and the company decides when the shutter opens.
An audit is a different job. It tests the numbers across a period rather than on a single day, chases where assets came from and whether they can actually be reached, and ends with an opinion the auditor is professionally liable for. Tether has talked about obtaining a full audit for years. It has not produced one, and its quarterly reports have been produced by the accountancy firm BDO.
This is why a remark from a stage can’t simply be added to the published number. The two sit on completely different foundations.
Where the extra 50,000 could have come from
Three layers are worth keeping apart here. The attestation confirms a figure on the quarter-end date. Ardoino asserted a different figure, in round terms, speaking at the Plan ₿ Forum. Everything beyond that is inference, including ours.
The most ordinary explanation is timing. The quarterly snapshot is taken on the last day of September; Ardoino was speaking weeks afterwards. Tether said back in 2023 that it would put 15% of its realised profits into bitcoin, so it buys regularly. But 50,000 coins is a very large purchase to make inside a few weeks, even for a company reporting the kind of profits Tether reports, so the timing explanation only holds if it has been spending unusually hard.
The other possibility is that coins sit in parts of the group the reserve report doesn’t cover, or that “give or take” was doing more work than the headlines have given it credit for. We can’t distinguish between these from the outside, and Tether hasn’t offered a breakdown that would let anyone else do so either.
One note on the sourcing. The quote above comes from Decrypt’s write-up of the Lugano event; we could not find a transcript, recording or company statement carrying the remark directly, so treat the wording as reported rather than verified.
Tether is an interested source on Tether
Reserve disclosures from any issuer are a company talking about itself, and Tether’s own communications channel has been busy lately, pushing out material on its gold business and on funds it says it helped freeze after an exchange hack. None of that is improper. It’s just a reminder of the category a company’s own numbers belong to.
The distinction the policy of any reasonable newsroom turns on is simple enough. “Tether says it holds 150,000 bitcoin” is reporting. “Tether holds 150,000 bitcoin” is repeating a press line, and in this case it would also contradict the firm’s own paperwork.
What it means if you hold USDT in the UK
Nothing about this changes the day-to-day: USDT has traded at a dollar throughout. The structural point is the one worth carrying around. No UK regulator vouches for Tether’s backing, the Financial Services Compensation Scheme does not cover , and the FCA’s proposed rules for stablecoin issuers are still working their way through consultation rather than being in force. If the backing ever failed, there is no compensation scheme behind it.
Moving USDT into your own wallet changes who holds the keys. It doesn’t change who holds the reserves.
What to watch
The fourth-quarter attestation, with its 31 December snapshot. If it shows something close to 150,000 bitcoin, the gap was timing and the story ends there. If it doesn’t, the spoken figure needs an explanation that nobody has yet asked Tether for in public.
And the audit. A full one would make conference-stage arithmetic irrelevant, which is why it keeps being asked about.