Tether Confirms USDT (USDT) Exposure at EQIBank Below 0.034% of Total Assets

Tether Confirms EQIBank Exposure

Tether (USDT) is the subject of a counterparty scare after the issuer acknowledged that part of its funds are stuck at EQIBank, an offshore banking partner now facing a liquidation threat. The freeze was set in motion by a United States asset-seizure action connected to the bank, and it has reignited scrutiny of how the Tether treasury manages banking-counterparty risk behind the world's largest stablecoin. According to the company, the exposure amounts to less than 0.034% of total assets — on its most recent attestation of roughly $190 billion in reserves, a slice that would sit in the tens of millions of dollars. Tether has not published a precise dollar figure and has not directly confirmed the underlying report, so the exact size of the deposit remains undisclosed as of this writing. The distinction matters for a token whose credibility rests on the promise that every USDT in any wallet can be redeemed one-for-one. The issuer has stressed that the bulk of its reserves sit in US Treasuries and money market funds, not deposits at small offshore institutions, and that a single bank holding 0.034% of assets is not, by itself, the risk. Yet the episode arrives at a delicate moment. The reserve cushion behind USDT has reportedly been narrowing even after a clean 2025 audit, and desks that rely on the token for settlement across spot trading and liquidity pools are asking whether the issuer could absorb several offshore shocks of this kind at once. Institutional users of USDT, still the dominant settlement asset across DeFi lending and exchange order books, tend to tolerate counterparty freezes only as long as they look isolated — and what the court record reveals about EQIBank's condition is what makes this one harder to dismiss.

The $89 Million Seizure Behind the Freeze

The court file fills in what the issuer will not. EQIBank, a digital bank licensed in Dominica, is seeking to recover approximately $89 million that US authorities seized from accounts linked to a payment processor named Capstone Ltd. The official filing in the case, docketed in the Eastern District of California, shows the frozen funds were held at Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase — and that the seizure removed roughly 80% of EQIBank's total monetary holdings. That scale explains why the bank has warned it could face liquidation, the backdrop against which Tether's deposits became trapped. Recovery of the money is possible but not assured while the case remains active. For our desk, the consequential number is the one nobody has published: the aggregate share of Tether's reserves parked with offshore banks of EQIBank's size. History says concentration at smaller institutions can turn a footnote into a run — several US crypto firms lost access to deposits when Silicon Valley Bank failed in 2023. The reserve model is already under regulatory pressure on both sides of the Atlantic. The ECB has urged the EU to scrap the MiCA 60% reserve rule that effectively kept Tether out of the bloc, while the Fed's stablecoin draft sets two-day redemption but leaves open who decides when issuers liquidate. USDT's role in off-rail settlement carries its own record, too — Orlen's Swiss unit lost 1.6 billion zloty on a USDT-paid Venezuela oil deal, a reminder that the token moves through corridors where recourse is thin. Against that backdrop, a single bank freeze at 0.034% of assets is manageable. What is not yet measurable is whether it is isolated. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Binance.

Two Disclosures Would Settle It

Our read of the docket is that the 0.034% figure is a floor, not the story. A freeze of this size is absorbable for an issuer holding reserves near $190 billion; an undisclosed aggregate offshore share is what would decide whether a repeat event pressures redemptions. Two disclosures would settle the question: a dollar figure for the EQIBank deposit, and a breakdown of offshore bank counterparties in the next attestation. Neither exists today. Until one appears, this remains a contained stress test of the reserve plumbing rather than a solvency question — and the active EQIBank case in California will show whether the frozen money comes back.