Tether Earns $1.5 Billion in Q3 as Excess Reserves Nearly Double

Tether reported $1.5 billion in operating profit for the third quarter, and the company's excess reserves nearly doubled to $7.95 billion. The figures came with a new attestation from accounting firm BDO.

In June that cushion stood at $4.1 billion. In three months it grew by 94%.

$1.5 billion in a quarter and $4.5 billion in nine months

Tether's operating profit in the third quarter came to $1.5 billion. Over the first nine months of 2026 it added up to $4.5 billion, so the quarters are landing almost level. Multiply the latest result by four and you get roughly $6 billion a year, or about 3.1% of total assets. That is our own calculation, not a company statement.

Tether names the source of income without any mystery: US Treasury bills and reverse repo agreements. Users buy USDT with dollars, and the issuer puts those dollars into short-term government debt and keeps the interest.

Balance sheet: $191.5 billion in assets against $183.5 billion in liabilities

At the end of September Tether held $191.5 billion in assets against $183.5 billion in liabilities. The $7.95 billion gap is the excess reserve. It equals about 4.3% of liabilities, so every dollar of issued tokens has another four cents behind it.

The data comes from an attestation prepared by independent firm BDO. An attestation is not a full audit. It records the state of reserves on a given date and does not examine the whole set of financial statements.

$132.4 billion in Treasuries puts Tether next to nations

Tether's direct and indirect holdings of US Treasury bills reached $132.4 billion. That is about 69% of all assets. According to August data from the US Treasury Department, South Korea holds $134.2 billion of American government debt and the United Arab Emirates holds $116.1 billion.

So a stablecoin issuer sits next to individual countries by position size and ranks ahead of the Emirates. That is why regulators watch the makeup of reserves so closely. A mass redemption of USDT would force the company to sell bills in large blocks.

Bitcoin reserves: from $5.8 billion to $8.37 billion

Reserves in Bitcoin were valued at $8.37 billion at the end of September. In June the figure was about $5.8 billion, so the valuation rose 44%. Out of $191.5 billion in assets, that is around 4.4%.

The published numbers do not show how much of the gain came from new purchases and how much from price moves. Still, bitcoin has a visible weight in the reserves, and for a company earning from government paper it is a second big bet.

60% of the market and 700 million users

According to DefiLlama, USDT holds about 60% of the stablecoin market, which is valued at $297.3 billion. In dollars that is roughly $178 billion. CEO Paolo Ardoino wrote on X that USDT now has more than 700 million users, with the largest share in emerging markets.

For Ukrainians the report is not abstract either. A large part of P2P trading runs through USDT, so anyone planning to sell USDT for hryvnia has a reason to know what stands behind the token.

What to watch next

Interest on bills ties Tether's profit to rates. If rates fall, income shrinks. In August the company announced it had completed its first full audit by KPMG US, but the audited statements were not made public. Until they are, quarterly attestations remain the main reference. The next snapshot will show whether the cushion holds near $8 billion.