Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated that the company holds approximately 150,000 bitcoins, and at the same time, the company continues to invest in digital assets and financial infrastructure.
According to the keynote speech at Plan ₿ Forum held in Lugano, Switzerland by Ardoino, Tether holds "about 150,000 bitcoins" on the company's balance sheet. He mentioned this portion of its holdings when discussing the company's financial situation and its technological layout beyond stablecoin payments.
According to Ardoino, Tether serves over 730 million users globally, with approximately 30 million new wallets added each quarter. He stated that this expansion is part of the company's ongoing efforts to promote financial inclusion.
During the keynote speech, Ardoino also mentioned that Bitcoin is one of the assets that support Tether's long-term investment strategy.
The figure of nearly 150,000 BTC is an estimate of CEO's holdings in the company. He did not provide a separate wallet breakdown or purchase schedule during his speech.
Since Tether introduced a policy in May 2023, it has been purchasing Bitcoin and is about to allocate some of its profits to this cryptocurrency.
The company's latest financial disclosure also provides more information regarding the Bitcoin held in the assets of USDT.
In the third-quarter report, Tether valued its Bitcoin reserves as $8.37 billion as of September 30, compared to around $5.8 billion at the end of June.
This accounting report values the reserve assets as of the reporting date and does not provide a complete reconciliation for the company's overall Bitcoin estimate mentioned in Ardoino.
In addition to Bitcoin, the company's investments also include precious metals, government securities, and other financial assets.
When discussing energy, communications, and software development plans, Ardoino consistently describes Bitcoin and USDT as important components of the Tether business.
On October 30th, the financial situation of Tether saw another update, as the company released the third-quarter audit report prepared by BDO.
According to the official announcement, the company's total reserve assets amount to 191.45 billion US dollars, with liabilities of approximately 183.5 billion US dollars.
As of the end of September, the excess reserves reached $7.95 billion, higher than the $4.1 billion at the end of June.
According to previous reports by crypto.news, Tether achieved a net operating profit of $1.5 billion in the third quarter, with the cumulative total for the first nine months reaching $4.5 billion.
The direct holding of U.S. Treasury bills is approximately $122.84 billion. The overnight reverse repurchase agreements increased by $9.52 billion.
According to Tether, these two types of assets together constitute a direct and indirect exposure to US Treasury bills of approximately $132.4 billion.
The reserve report also separately lists $19.08 billion in gold and $14.18 billion in secured loans.
In the first nine months of 2026, the issuance volume of USDT remained around $184 billion, and the income related to treasury bonds contributed to the company's profits.
In addition to financial data, Ardoino has also launched a technical initiative named “Independence Stack”.
The project integrates multiple technologies, aiming to operate without being entirely dependent on centralized service providers.
His speech was inspired by Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series of novels, which depict the efforts to preserve knowledge during the decline of fictional civilizations.
Ardoino indicates that technology can help communities become more independent in areas such as financial services, energy, and communications.
The company has invested in solar powered kiosks that provide services to communities in Africa. According to Ardoino, approximately 5,000 of these kiosks serve 2 million users and support 30,000 female workers within the network.
He proposed a plan to expand the number of battery charging stations to 100,000 within five years, which could serve 200 million people by then.
Bitcoin mining is another part of this plan.
In October, Tether received support from 15 mining companies, manufacturers, and mining pools for its open-source Mining Development Kit.
The participating companies include Bitmain, Bitdeer, Canaan, MicroBT, Foundry Digital, and F2Pool.
The Independence Stack of Tether also includes Holepunch. This is a peer-to-peer communication system designed to support applications that do not require traditional centralized servers.
Its Wallet Development Kit provides software support for building self-hosted wallets across multiple blockchain networks.
In September, Tether and Shiga announced plans to launch wallet products for individuals and institutions in Africa and the Gulf Cooperation Council region.
The proposed product will support USDT, Bitcoin, and Tether Gold, but no launch date has been announced by either party.
Artificial intelligence is also part of this project, and the relevant platform is QVAC. Tether claims that it can directly run AI applications on personal devices.
The company released an offline speech recognition model in October, designed for smartphones, smart glasses, and robots.
In his speech in Lugano, Ardoino also introduced more models for medical assistance, translation, computer vision, and speech processing.
He said that the research on Tether includes translation tools covering 19 African languages, as well as medical AI models with parameter scales of 1.7 billion and 4 billion respectively.
Ardoino indicates that the technology being developed by the company should remain usable beyond the future business scope of Tether.
This executive stated that the profitability of Tether enables the company to fund these projects, including decentralized infrastructure and the development of AI software that runs locally.
