Tether, the issuer of the world’s largest stablecoin USDT, has reported US$2.85 billion in profits in the last quarter of 2023, the highest quarterly record for the company.
The company said around US$1 billion of the net profits came primarily from interests from the U.S. Treasuries, with the rest mostly coming from gold and Bitcoin reserves.
Tether’s USDT is a stablecoin pegged to the price of the U.S. dollar. It maintains its dollar parity by holding “cash and cash equivalent” equal to the amount of USDT in circulation. Tether guarantees customers can redeem USDT for fiat currencies on a 1:1 basis.
According to the firm’s Q4 attestation published on Wednesday, Tether now has US$5.4 billion in excess reserves after adding US$2.2 billion last quarter.
Tether is not only the world’s largest stablecoin, but it’s also the most traded cryptocurrency. In the past 24 hours, USDT recorded US$33.5 billion in trading volume to lead all cryptocurrencies.
Tether currently has a market capitalization of US$96 billion ranking it the third largest cryptocurrency and is on pace to become the first stablecoin to cross the US$100 billion mark.
USDC, the world’s second-largest stablecoin managed by Circle Internet Financial, has a US$26.78 billion market cap.
Circle filed for an initial public listing earlier this month as the company aims for a public listing. Circle previously planned to go public through a US$9 billion special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) deal but abandoned the plan in December 2022.
