Tether CEO Says USDT Adds Over 30 Million New Wallets Each Quarter

USDT News

Tether’s USDT is adding more than 30 million new wallets every quarter, chief executive Paolo Ardoino confirmed, as the world’s largest stablecoin pushes its market capitalization toward $190 billion. The company’s own figures put the USDT user base above 550 million people, with growth concentrated in developing economies where the token functions as dollar infrastructure rather than a trading instrument. Ardoino has said between 50% and 60% of USDT is used for cross-border trade and payments. At the current pace, the network is on track to add roughly 120 million wallets over the next twelve months — a total larger than the population of Japan, though wallet counts do not equal unique users.

The wallet surge has been visible on Tether’s balance sheet. After minting an additional $2 billion of USDT on Ethereum in tranches, the stablecoin’s market value climbed close to $190 billion and briefly overtook Ether itself. At the crossover point USDT reached roughly $186.06 billion against Ethereum’s $185.66 billion, making the dollar-pegged token the second-largest cryptocurrency for a short window before the two assets swapped places again. The episode underlined how far a fiat-backed altcoin substitute has traveled: a token designed purely to hold a dollar value momentarily eclipsed the largest smart-contract network by total market capitalization.

Tether’s profitability has kept pace with its expansion. An assurance report from accounting firm BDO showed the company generated approximately $1.04 billion in net profit for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, while its excess reserves climbed to a record $8.23 billion. The attestation, rather than a full audit, remains the primary public window into the issuer’s finances. Those excess reserves — the buffer held above the value of USDT in circulation — reached a fresh all-time high, reinforcing the balance-sheet cushion behind the peg. The company has said its second-quarter attestation and progress on a US-focused product line are the next disclosures worth watching.

The issuer has also continued accumulating Bitcoin for a dedicated reserve address. On-chain data shows Tether moved another 951 BTC into that wallet in April, lifting its holdings to 97,141 BTC and ranking it among the largest corporate Bitcoin reserves in existence. Alongside the treasury build-out, the company rolled out a consumer product in April called tether.wallet — a self-custodial application with human-readable addresses and no gas fees, aimed at the token’s hundreds of millions of users. Ardoino has signaled a significant push into the United States, including plans for a dollar stablecoin tailored specifically to the American market under a domestic regulatory perimeter.

In Europe, the regulatory picture is reshaping how USDT is handled. OKX Europe launched a one-way conversion feature that lets customers deposit USDT and swap it into USDC, offering a voluntary migration path as the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework restricts support for Tether’s token. The exchange, which serves customers across 30 EU and European Economic Area countries under a MiCA license, said conversions can be completed at the user’s discretion rather than by an imposed deadline. USDC is issued natively under compliance regimes and is increasingly tied to purpose-built rails such as the Arc blockchain, a stablecoin-native layer-1.

Despite the European headwinds, USDT remains the dominant stablecoin worldwide. Market data indicates Tether accounts for roughly 59% of the nearly $310 billion stablecoin market, with a capitalization near $184 billion against about $73 billion for Circle’s USDC. Tether has declined to seek MiCA authorization, with Ardoino arguing the framework’s reserve requirements — which force issuers to hold part of their backing with European banks — create unnecessary risk. The pressure is nonetheless mounting: digital-banking platform Revolut said it will stop supporting USDT across the EEA and Switzerland, giving users until Aug. 31 to sell or withdraw. Unlike algorithmic stablecoins, USDT is backed by reserves.

From our desk, USDT is a special case for COINOTAG’s proprietary 42-indicator composite scoring engine: as a fiat-backed token engineered to track $1, it carries no conventional support or resistance ladder — the relevant read is peg stability and reserve quality, both of which the latest attestation and on-chain flows leave intact. Our aggregate market data frames the backdrop: the Fear & Greed Index sits at 27/100 (Fear), Bitcoin dominance is elevated at 69.8%, and total crypto market capitalization stands near $1.84 trillion. In risk-off conditions like these, stablecoin demand typically rises as capital rotates out of volatile bear market exposure. The thesis inverts only if reserve transparency deteriorates or regulatory fragmentation splinters USDT’s liquidity across jurisdictions.