As Tether’s Q1 profit more than doubles, USDT scripts a winning story in 2023

• About 85% of the company’s reserves were held in cash, cash equivalents, and other short-term deposits.
• USDT’s circulating supply increased by 24% on a year-to-date basis.

Leading stablecoin issuer Tether [USDT] reported a net profit of $1.48 billion in the first quarter of 2023, marking a whopping 110% growth on a quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) basis, according to its latest attestation report.

Realistic or not, here’s USDT’s market cap in BTC’s terms

The company behind world’s largest stablecoin by market cap also added that its excess USDT reserves reached an all-time high of $2.44 billion, reflecting an increase of $1.48 billion from Q4 2022.

Un’Tethered’

The report, prepared by accounting firm BDO Italia, provided a detailed breakdown of Tether’s assets as of 31 March, 2023.

Tether’s consolidated total assets at the end of the first quarter of 2023 were worth $81.83 billion. And the total liabilities equated to $79.39 billion. To put it simply, excess reserve is the difference between the total assets and total liabilities

The majority of the company’s reserves were held in cash, cash equivalents, and other short-term deposits. This included a higher percentage of allocation to U.S. Treasury Bils while Gold and Bitcoin [BTC] represented 4% and 2% of the total reserves, respectively.

Moreover, Tether also stated that it intends to use the Repo market rather than relying solely on conventional bank deposits to finance its operations.

USDT is a fiat-collateralized stablecoin which maintains a reserve of USD as collateral to assure the stablecoin’s value.

USDT’s dominance grows

USDT had a blockbuster run in 2023 with a sharp increase in the circulating supply over the last three months. As per Glassnode, more than 82 billion USDTs were in circulation at press time. This reflected a 24% gain on a year-to-date basis.

Furthermore, the increase in supply boosted the market value of the stablecoin as it was the third-highest ranked cryptocurrency by market cap, according to CoinMarketCap.

USDT was the most traded crypto currency in the market at press time with a 24-hour trading volume of more than $32 billion.

Source: Glassnode

A large part of the USDT’s success was due to the downfall of popular stablecoins like USD Coin [USDC] induced by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in March. USDT saw massive trade volumes as people migrated from USDC.

Hence, USDC’s market cap plunged from $43 billion to $30 billion at the time of writing, a decline of 31%.

Source: Glassnode