Structure and history
The company was founded in July 2014 by Brock Pierce, Reeve Collins, and Craig Sellars as Realcoin, renamed Tether in November 2014; the first tokens were issued in October 2014 on the Omni layer atop Bitcoin (covered in more detail in "History of Stablecoins"). Its legal structure spans several affiliated entities: Tether Limited was originally incorporated in Hong Kong, with the group's holding entities incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. On January 13, 2025, Tether announced it had obtained a Digital Asset Service Provider (DASP) licence and authorized stablecoin-issuer status in El Salvador from the national digital-assets commission (CNAD), relocating the group's headquarters to that jurisdiction. Tether remains affiliated with the Bitfinex exchange through a common ultimate beneficial owner, iFinex Inc.; this ownership structure was central to the 2021 enforcement actions described below. Its CEO since December 2023 is Paolo Ardoino, who is also Bitfinex's CTO.
Products
The core product is USDT (see the separate coin profile). The company also issues Tether Gold (XAUT), a token backed by physical gold held in Swiss vaults, and, since February 2026, USAT — a separate, US-regulated stablecoin issued through Anchorage Digital Bank under the GENIUS Act framework.
Regulation and audit
On February 23, 2021, the New York Attorney General settled an investigation opened in April 2019 into Tether and Bitfinex over the use of about $700 million of Tether's reserves to cover an $850 million shortfall at Bitfinex, caused by lost access to funds through the Panama-based payment processor Crypto Capital: a $18.5 million penalty, two years of mandated reserve-composition disclosure, and a ban on doing business with New York residents, with no admission of wrongdoing. On October 15, 2021, the CFTC imposed a separate $41 million fine over claims that USDT was fully backed by dollar reserves "at all times" when part of the reserves actually consisted of unsecured receivables. Since then the company has published quarterly reserve attestations (audited by BDO), and on August 13, 2026 it announced its first-ever full audit: KPMG US issued an unqualified opinion on Tether International, S.A. de C.V.'s FY2025 financial statements, physically counting the gold bars in its reserves. The audit is seen as a key asset for the company ahead of entering the US market under the GENIUS Act.
Economics
For Q2 2026, the group reported net operating profit of $1.5 billion against an excess-reserve buffer of $4.11 billion (down from $8.23 billion a quarter earlier) — the detailed reserve composition and revenue mechanics are covered in the USDT article and in the forthcoming "Issuer economics" article.