Author: Clow
In 2024, a company called Tether delivered a stunning report card that left Wall Street in shock.
Net profit of 13 billion dollars, with about 150 employees.
Revenue per employee of about 85.62 million dollars, nearly 300 times that of Goldman Sachs, and 85 times that of Nvidia.
This is not an AI unicorn, nor a top hedge fund. It is simply a stablecoin issuer—the company that issues USDT.
When these numbers circulated in the financial circle, many people's first reaction was: how is this possible?
But if you understand Tether's business model, you'll find that this is not just possible, it is even inevitable.
01 The Most Profitable Business in the World
The logic behind Tether's profitability is referred to in the industry as the "stablecoin float game."
The rules are simple: you give 1 dollar to Tether, and you receive 1 USDT in return. Tether takes your money and buys U.S. Treasury bonds.
U.S. Treasury yields have long remained above 5%, while USDT never pays any interest.
The difference in between is fully retained by Tether.
By the end of 2025, Tether's total exposure to U.S. Treasuries reached 141 billion dollars, making it the 17th largest holder of U.S. Treasuries in the world, surpassing the two sovereign nations of Germany and South Korea.
Just from U.S. Treasuries alone, Tether generates over 4 billion dollars in cash flow every year.
And this is just the first layer.
The second layer includes gold and Bitcoin. Tether holds approximately 17 billion dollars in gold and over 96,000 bitcoins. The sharp rise in gold prices in 2025 brought it an additional unrealized profit of over 5 billion dollars.
The third layer is liquidity premium. What do those who forgo 5% treasury interest receive? A digital dollar that can be used anytime in Turkey, Argentina, and Nigeria. For markets struggling with high inflation and foreign exchange controls, this type of liquidity is more valuable than a 5% annual return.
Tether is essentially a global "shadow bank" without branches, tellers, and operating hours, designed to capture the enormous profit margins that the traditional financial system overlooks due to inefficiencies.
02 Breaking Down the Walls of Traditional Payments
The SWIFT system was established in the 1970s, and half a century later, its core logic has not fundamentally changed: correspondent banks relay, multiple nodes take turns, taking at least 3 to 5 business days at best, with the most expensive total fee reaching 7%.
A payment sent from the United States to Nigeria goes through layers of correspondent, intermediary, and receiving banks, with each layer taking its own fees.
Moreover, these banks have business hours. A remittance initiated on Friday night will only start to "run" the following Monday.
In contrast, a USDT transfer can reach the recipient's wallet on the Tron network in under 30 seconds for less than 1 dollar, operating non-stop 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The cost difference is particularly staggering. Traditional B2B cross-border payments incur overall fees ranging from 1.5% to 7%, while personal remittances sometimes exceed 11%; however, the overall costs for stablecoin networks are typically only 0.5% to 2%.
The deeper impact lies in the "reach."
There are still hundreds of millions of adults globally without bank accounts. But with a mobile phone and internet access, they can create a crypto wallet and access global trade. In Africa and Latin America, USDT has become a common tool for small and medium-sized enterprises to pay international suppliers.
By 2025, a new generation of Web3 POS systems will start using NFC technology to enable "tap-to-pay," advancing crypto payments to retail store checkout counters.
This wall is being breached from multiple directions.
03 Pay-Fi: The Logic of Money is Being Redefined
Payments + Finance, this combination has a new name: Pay-Fi (Payment Finance).
Traditional payments address the problem of "moving money from A to B." Pay-Fi seeks to solve the issue of "how to earn interest while moving money from A to B."
Protocols represented by Huma Finance are working to tokenize companies' accounts receivable, providing instant financing through on-chain liquidity pools, alleviating the prepayment capital pressure in cross-border trade. By early 2026, the cumulative transaction volume of the Huma protocol surpassed 10 billion dollars, and its T+0 real-time settlement capability is attracting more attention from traditional financial institutions.
The war for underlying infrastructure is simultaneously underway. Ethereum L2 greatly reduces on-chain transaction costs through Rollup technology; Celestia and EigenDA further lower costs at the data storage layer, making large-scale micro payments possible. Meanwhile, the Tron network, with its large USDT supply and extremely low transfer fees, remains the busiest stablecoin settlement network globally.
The stablecoin market itself is also diversifying. USDT dominates offshore payments and emerging markets with about 59% market share; USDC has gained traction among U.S. licensed institutions through compliance and transparency, holding a significant portion in institutional-level and compliance-prioritized transfer/settlement scenarios. PayPal's PYUSD leverages its merchant network to penetrate the retail side, while Ripple's RLUSD targets interbank large-sum settlements.
This market is no longer dominated by one, but is rapidly moving towards specialization and division of labor.
04 The Ambition Boundaries of Tether
Having made so much money, how does Tether plan to use it?
Buy mining farms. In Uruguay, Paraguay, and El Salvador, Tether has invested over 2 billion dollars to establish 15 energy and bitcoin mining sites, aiming to become the world's largest bitcoin miner.
Buy AI. Through channels like Northern Data Group, Tether's investment in AI computing infrastructure exceeds 1 billion dollars.
Buy robots. By the end of 2025, Tether invested 70 million euros in the Italian AI robotics startup Generative Bionics; at the same time, it is considering an investment of up to 1.15 billion dollars in the German robotics company Neura, aiming to produce 5 million humanoid robots by 2030.
The underlying logic is not hard to understand: In an economy operated independently by AI entities and robots, the exchange of value between them requires an instant, programmable digital currency. USDT has already become the most obvious candidate for this role.
On the regulatory side, this story is also gaining momentum. In July 2025, the U.S. "GENIUS Act" was officially signed into law, opening a legal channel for regulated institutions to issue stablecoins, explicitly excluding stablecoins from securities and commodities. The EU's MiCA framework fully rolled out in the same year, bringing stablecoins out of the "gray area" and into mainstream regulatory view.
The core circle of Wall Street has also begun to get involved. The primary dealer of U.S. Treasuries, Cantor Fitzgerald, holds approximately 5% of Tether's shares, and its CEO Howard Lutnick has publicly endorsed the authenticity of Tether's reserves multiple times. This deep binding means: Tether is no longer just a crypto project; it has quietly embedded itself into the interest network of traditional finance.
05 Conclusion
From a stablecoin issuer to one of the top 20 holders of U.S. Treasuries, and then to an investor in robotics factories—every step of Tether's expansion points in the same direction:
The definition of currency is quietly shifting from the printing presses of sovereign nations to digital networks that can provide higher efficiency and lower friction.
This process is not revolutionary, but rather infiltrative.
SWIFT continues to operate, banks are still open, and the Federal Reserve is still adjusting interest rates. But another system is rapidly growing in the gaps between them.
For anyone involved, it may be worth asking oneself a question:
In the next decade, which system will your money operate in?
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