‘What do you do with all that money?’ Tether plots its global expansion

Tether has expanded its eccentric venture capital portfolio and launched a hiring spree as it seeks to move beyond its roots as a secretive provider of crypto-financial plumbing and create a global conglomerate built around “freedom”.

The world’s largest stablecoin issuer has long been run by a small circle of executives, who manage its $185bn token USDT, which serves as the main bridge between crypto and dollars.

The group, registered in El Salvador but with a base in Switzerland, has begun to deploy its large profits to build a sprawling portfolio that now spans 140 investments from a South American agricultural producer to a stake in Italian football club Juventus.

It has also more recently expanded its headcount to about 300, with plans to add another 150 staff over the next 18 months, largely engineers.

Chief executive Paolo Ardoino took the stage at a conference Tether hosted recently in San Salvador to explain the burst of activity.

He clicked through AI-generated images of a “world descending into darkness” — thunderous clouds, stormy seas and a woman being devoured by metallic cables — and explained Tether’s mission to “bring stability” through a “freedom tech stack” in finance, intelligence, communications and energy.

Ardoino said the company was focused on creating peer-to-peer tools to counter Silicon Valley behemoths. “If we build everything with centralised technology, freedom will fall,” he said.

It is an ironic stance for the company that acts as the biggest centralised cog in the $2tn global crypto market.

Observers have been left baffled by the strategy behind Tether’s empire building, which is still shaped by the personal influence and ideology of a small group of executives who have forged close ties to members of the Trump administration.

“How much of this is marketing and how much is held belief?” said Austin Campbell, managing partner of crypto advisory firm Zero Knowledge Consulting.

“How do you square ‘the world is ending’ with ‘we’re reinventing tech and everything is going to be great’? . . . Internal consistency has never been a strength of the crypto space,” he added.

Tether was also diversifying its revenues beyond stablecoins as competition from rivals and traditional financial companies heats up, Campbell said.

Tether chief executive Paolo Ardoino © Camilo Freedman/Bloomberg

Beyond engineers, Tether also wants to hire AI filmmakers in Italy, venture investment associates in the United Arab Emirates and regulatory affairs leads in Ghana and Brazil, according to job listings on LinkedIn.

Tether, founded in 2014, has grown to 500mn users and expanded USDT’s market value from $5bn in 2020 to roughly $185bn. But it has still struggled to shake the secrecy, unorthodox governance and tensions with authorities that defined its first decade.

At the conference, employees sported name tags with only first names, which one member of the team said was for “privacy” reasons.

People close to Tether describe an internal drive to add corporate structures and financial discipline, with a focus on “profit and loss”.

A small team in London now oversees finance and operations under a new chief financial officer, Simon McWilliams. Employees have little visibility into the work of other teams, outside occasional gatherings in El Salvador or the Swiss city of Lugano.

Giancarlo Devasini, the intensely private Italian and former plastic surgeon who owns a large stake in the company and has for years been the driving force behind it, floated around the conference in all-white clothing. But he declined all interviews. “I don’t speak with journalists,” he said.

Giancarlo Devasini holds a large stake in Tether © Camilo Freedman/FT

Even as it seeks to expand in the US market under new regulations passed by the Trump administration, Tether last year shifted its headquarters to El Salvador, where it has been welcomed by the authoritarian, pro-crypto president, Nayib Bukele. Earlier bases include the Isle of Man and British Virgin Islands.

Its chief stablecoin rival Circle, by contrast, has its headquarters at One World Trade Center in lower Manhattan and went public in the US last year.

Tether’s effort to cement its financial credibility in the US with a $15bn-$20bn funding round has run into pushback from some investors, who object to its $500bn valuation target.

Stablecoins also face scrutiny for their use in illicit activity. Nearly all payments into entities and jurisdictions under sanctions were conducted using these tokens, with Russia’s stablecoin and Tether’s USDT making up the majority, a report by intelligence firm TRM Labs said.

A recent letter sent by the New York district attorney alongside state attorney-general Letitia James to Democratic lawmakers raised concerns that both Tether and Circle were not doing enough to assist in fraud investigations.

Tether provided assistance only in limited circumstances and “law enforcement has been left to [its] mercy”, the letter said.

Tether said it did not have a blanket legal obligation to comply with state-level civil or criminal processes in the way a US-regulated financial institution would, but it voluntarily works closely with American enforcement agencies.

Greater US scrutiny of Tether looms if Democrats retake control of either chamber of Congress in this year’s midterm election.

In 2021, Tether reached a multimillion-dollar settlement with state and federal US authorities over claims it lied about the assets that back the value of USDT to ensure it retains its 1-to-1 peg with the dollar.

Concerns about Tether’s reserves have not gone away. It publishes quarterly attestations of its assets from accounting firm BDO Italia, but still does not provide a full audit.

Ratings group S&P has expressed concern about the presence of gold, bitcoin and other risky assets in the reserves. Tether has rejected the analysis.

Tether has also increased its supply of more reliable assets, including as a large buyer of US debt, making it an important link between traditional finance and cryptocurrency. It has stockpiled land and gold to build a “fortress” to guard against societal collapse.

The returns on its trove of assets, which Tether keeps rather than paying to token holders as interest, has given it tens of billions of dollars in annual profit to fund its wider ambitions.

The Plan B Bitcoin Forum in San Salvador © Camilo Freedman/FT

The conference, hosted at the Sheraton Presidente and the Museum of Art of El Salvador, displayed the range of Tether’s connections and sprawling financial interests.

Booths featured Tether products with an alphabet soup of letters and names. Young employees pitched the company’s latest operating system for bitcoin mining (MOS), a platform that would run AI agents (“the QuantumVerse Automatic Computer” or QVAC), and wallets for those AI agents to accept Tether (WDK).

The company’s push into crypto-related software bets is mirrored by “moonshot” investments, including in robotics, AI and satellites.

One of Tether’s biggest public investments is the roughly $775mn it invested in Rumble, the right-leaning challenger to YouTube.

Rumble’s cloud also hosts Truth Social, the social media platform owned by the Trump family’s media company, TMTG. In El Salvador, Rumble’s founder Chris Pavlovski told attendees the company had worked with Tether to build a wallet that enabled users to tip creators with crypto.

Their relationship underscores Tether’s increasing alignment with rightwing political causes. One Rumble creator at the conference said he had left “Commie Canada” for the “free state of Florida” and complained that Canadians were among “the most propagandised in western civilisation”.

“They look at me and say, I’m the crazy one. I look at them and I say, no, you are all crazy ones,” he said.

Tether executives enjoy close relationships with the Bukele administration in El Salvador, where it is building a gleaming office tower. Ardoino missed one conference session after being summoned by the president, the event’s emcee said.

Tether’s push into crypto-related software bets is mirrored by investments in robotics, AI and satellites © Lam Yik/Bloomberg

Ardoino attributes much of Tether’s growth to increased use by people in countries with unstable local currencies, including in Venezuela.

Tether also has strong ties to the Trump administration, particularly commerce secretary Howard Lutnick. The bank Lutnick ran until taking office, Cantor Fitzgerald, serves as a custodian for Tether’s trove of US Treasuries and is an investor in Tether.

Brandon Lutnick, who took over from his father as chair of the bank, attended the conference in El Salvador. He has called Ardoino “one of Cantor’s closest partners and a close personal friend”.

For its US expansion, Tether has hired experienced American lobbyists and recruited former members of US President Donald Trump’s administration to join its ranks.

Even as Tether launches its products in the US, it envisions a much grander future. “The question is what do you do with all that money?” said one person familiar with Tether’s business. “Their ambitions are large. They see themselves as a decentralised central bank.”

Additional reporting by Kaye Wiggins