Tether Holds 150,000 BTC, but Only 100,000 Back USDT

• Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino says the company holds roughly 150,000 Bitcoin across its balance sheet.
• Only about two-thirds of that amount appears in the latest USDT reserve attestation.
• Mining capacity built by Tether and its partners now exceeds 50 EH/s.
• Tether has not disclosed how much of that hashrate it owns outright.

Tether, the company that issues the USDT stablecoin, holds roughly 150,000 Bitcoin, CEO Paolo Ardoino told the audience at Lugano’s Plan ₿ Forum on October 23-24. At early-November prices that stash is worth between $11.5 billion and $12 billion, and it is close to 50,000 BTC larger than the Bitcoin listed in the company’s own reserve report. Ardoino also said that mining infrastructure developed by Tether and its partners has passed 50 exahashes per second (EH/s), the unit used to measure the computing power miners contribute to the Bitcoin network. Taken together, the two disclosures show a stablecoin issuer using its Treasury-bill income to build positions in both owning Bitcoin and producing it.

“We have give or take 150,000 bitcoin ourselves,” Ardoino said during his keynote, adding that “it’s not much, but it’s honest work.”

Tether CEO: Company Holds 150,000 BTC, Mining Hashrate Tops 50 EH/s

At Plan ₿ Forum 2026 in Lugano on October 23–24, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino @paoloardoino said the company holds 150,000 bitcoin. He said Tether has built one of the world’s largest mining operations with… pic.twitter.com/wGkgwYUBDt

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) November 6, 2026

The 50,000 BTC missing from the reserve report

The third-quarter attestation prepared by BDO, which Tether published on October 30, lists $8.37 billion of Bitcoin among the assets backing USDT as of September 30. At the $83,621 per coin valuation used in the report, that equals about 100,060 BTC, compared with roughly 98,930 BTC at the end of June. The reserve portfolio added only around 1,130 coins over the quarter, and most of the increase in dollar value came from Bitcoin’s price rising during those three months.

Source: Tether quarterly attestations prepared by BDO.

That leaves about 49,940 BTC that are included in Ardoino’s figure and missing from the attestation. The most likely explanation is Tether’s proprietary investment book, which the company funds from profits and excess capital and keeps separate from the assets that back the stablecoin. Ardoino did not say where those coins sit, when they were bought or how they are booked. His statement confirms an approximate total for the whole group, and readers should not take it as evidence of a recent 50,000 BTC purchase.

How T-bill income turns into Bitcoin

USDT holders earn no interest on their tokens. Tether places the dollars it receives in short-term US government debt and reverse repurchase agreements (overnight loans secured by Treasuries), and it keeps the yield. Its direct and indirect exposure to US Treasuries reached $132.4 billion at the end of September, and that income produced $1.5 billion of net operating profit in the third quarter and $4.5 billion over the first nine months of 2026. Total assets of $191.45 billion exceeded liabilities of $183.50 billion, and the $7.95 billion surplus is almost double the cushion reported in June.

Since May 2023 Tether has allocated up to 15% of its net realized operating profits to Bitcoin purchases, holding the coins in its own custody instead of with third-party custodians. At the current quarterly profit rate, that ceiling equals roughly $225 million of Bitcoin per quarter. One of its biggest disclosed purchases came on December 31, 2025, when Tether bought about 8,888 BTC worth around $780 million at the time.

What 50 EH/s means in block rewards

One EH/s equals one quintillion hash calculations per second, and 50 EH/s is well above the 28.1 EH/s that listed miner American Bitcoin reported owning after its March 2026 equipment expansion. The table below shows what that capacity could produce, using a simple illustration with a round network hashrate.

Illustration only, not a forecast of Tether’s mining revenue.

The network currently issues 450 new BTC a day through block subsidies (3.125 BTC per block across about 144 blocks), so a 5% share would add up to roughly 8,200 BTC over a year, about as much as Tether’s December 2025 purchase. That result depends on all 50 EH/s running continuously and belonging to Tether, which the company has not shown. Part of the capacity sits with partners, including the Tether-backed operator Elektron, and electricity prices, pool fees and changes in mining difficulty would all reduce the net figure.

Tether now designs the rigs as well

The mining push goes deeper than buying machines. In February 2026 Tether open-sourced its Mining OS (MOS), software that tracks machine performance, power draw and hardware health from a single small site up to facilities with hundreds of thousands of devices. On April 27 it released the Mining Development Kit, and a day later it unveiled modular mining systems developed with Canaan and ACME Swisstech. These systems split the hash boards that do the computing from the power supply, cooling and casing, and they are built mainly for immersion cooling, where hardware sits in a special liquid that carries heat away.

The practical gain is cheaper upgrades, because with a sealed rig the operator replaces the whole unit, while a modular setup lets it swap only the compute boards and keep the rest, which matters more as the 2028 halving approaches and the block subsidy drops to 1.5625 BTC. Canaan said it had received a follow-on order for these modules, to be deployed at a Tether-affiliated facility in South America. In Lugano, Ardoino added that 15 mining equipment manufacturers have signed memorandums of understanding to build on Tether’s framework.

Bitcoin’s price now moves the USDT buffer

Bitcoin is one of two volatile assets inside the USDT reserves, since the same BDO report also lists $19.08 billion of gold. A $10,000 change in Bitcoin’s price moves the value of the roughly 100,060 reserve coins by about $1 billion, which is a significant share of a $7.95 billion surplus. Across all 150,000 coins, the same move changes Tether’s mark-to-market position by about $1.5 billion. BDO’s engagement covers reserve figures at a single date, September 30, and it is not a full audit of Tether’s affiliated businesses, so the corporate Bitcoin and the mining assets remain outside independent verification.

For miners, Tether is both a competitor for hashrate and a supplier of the software and hardware designs that rival operators may adopt. Tether presents open-source tools as a way to make mining more accessible. The counterargument is concentration, as a single company would hold a large Bitcoin treasury, a growing slice of hashrate and a say in the equipment standards other miners adopt.

Tether’s fourth-quarter attestation, expected early in 2027, will show whether the reserve Bitcoin grows by more than price changes explain. Elektron and Tether’s other partners have not yet said whether the 50 EH/s refers to installed, operating or contracted machines, and that detail decides how much of the network Tether actually controls. At the same forum Ardoino also promoted Holepunch, Tether’s peer-to-peer framework, and Keet, a messaging app built on it that he said has passed several million downloads. Tether has placed both projects alongside its mining, self-custody, AI and energy investments, all of them sitting outside the USDT reserve report.