Weekly Newsletter, 27 September 2025

Tether at half a trillion dollars

Tether is reportedly in talks to raise up to $20 billion in fresh equity, valuing the company at half a trillion dollars. At that size, the world’s biggest stablecoin issuer would sit alongside OpenAI and SpaceX as one of the most valuable private companies on the planet.

This may come as a surprise to some. After all, Tether has no app, no front end, and no real consumer brand. But it does run a global financial rail: USDT, its dollar-pegged stablecoin, has more than $170 billion in circulation and facilitates a significant portion of crypto’s daily liquidity, powering everything from spot exchanges to DeFi protocols to cross-border payments.

Tether’s business model is simple: mint digital dollars in exchange for traditional dollars, invest the latter (mostly in U.S. Treasuries), and keep the yield. It’s now doing this on an unprecedented scale, booking (self-reported) over $13 billion in profit last year. Not bad for a company of barely 150 people. It uses blockchain rails to issue, redeem, and transfer tokens globally. But that revenue engine is now being reinvested into an expanding empire. Tether is now launching a US-compliant stablecoin, tokenized gold, joining our VCs in backing new infrastructure like Plasma (a stablecoin-focused blockchain that launched yesterday at a $10bln valuation), and pushing into verticals like data centers, energy, and even AI chips.

Tether has come a long way, especially considering its opaque early years. For the first years Tether was almost a side project of the Bitfinex exchange and was barely making money. It was small and murky, people didn’t know if the reserves were real, banks avoided them and there were repeated scandals. Tether paid an $18.5 million settlement in 2021 over charges concerning misstated reserves, without admitting wrongdoing. Over the years we’ve received more questions about Tether than anything else. In the industry, there is even a name for it: ‘Tether FUD’ and for several years it reared its head every time a journalist dug up the company’s troubling history. Those days are now in all likelihood behind us as Tether seems to have its house (and backing) firmly in order. In a sign of this evolution, they even brought on Bo Hines, the Trump Administration’s Strategic Advisor for Digital Assets to lead their US efforts. And as one of the largest buyers of treasuries

, the connection between Tether and the U.S. administration is likely to deepen.

What we’re seeing is the emergence of a new kind of financial conglomerate: one built not on banking licenses, but on blockchain-native rails. The stablecoin is just the wedge: the ambition is to become a vertically integrated empire, powered by its own money printer.

Also this week

Relevant financial updates

Bless*, a global network that enables users to automatically contribute compute power to websites, services, and applications directly through the browser, earning rewards in return, had its TGE and is now trading at a $427mln FDV.
0G*, an AI-focused Layer 1 blockchain for storage, compute, and scale, had its TGE and is now trading at a $3.8bln FDV
Plasma*, a high-throughput, scalable blockchain purpose-built for stablecoins, whose transactions settle on Bitcoin, had its TGE and is now trading at a $8.6bln FDV
Shield*, a crypto company offering solutions for Discord and Telegram community protection, and certification audits for project trustworthiness, has raised $5mln in a Seed funding round with investments from Andreessen Horowitz, Factor Capital, First Check Ventures, Global Millennial Capital and Giant Ventures.
Coop Records*, a blockchain-based music launchpad, has raised $4.50mln in a Seed funding round with investments from Coinbase Ventures, 1kx, Mask Network, Variant, Nascent and 10 others
Fnality International, a financial technology company that aims to enable peer-to-peer settlement in the global wholesale financial markets, has raised $136mln in a Series C funding round with investments from Goldman Sachs, Citi, Temasek, Barclays, Nasdaq Ventures and 11 others
Zero Hash, a company that offers API-first technology and turnkey regulatory infrastructure to help businesses seamlessly launch cryptocurrency products, has raised $104mln in an Extended Series D funding round with investments from Jump Crypto, Liberty City Ventures, Nyca Partners, IMC Trading, Morgan Stanley and 6 others
Cloudburst*, a company providing real-time monitoring solutions and cyber threat intelligence tools to track and analyze fraud in the cryptocurrency market, has raised $7mln in a Series A funding round with investments from Coinbase Ventures, Borderless Capital, CoinFund, Bloccelerate VC, Strategic Cyber Ventures and 1 other
BULK*, a trading platform that provides an environment for executing crypto trades, has raised $8mln in a Seed funding round with investments from Big Brain Holdings, Robot Ventures, Mirana Ventures, 6th Man Ventures, Wintermute and 8 others.
Bastion*, a blockchain company that enables companies to issue digital dollars without coding or their own regulatory licenses, has raised $14.60mln in a funding round with investments from Coinbase Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, HASHED, Sony and Samsung
RedotPay, a Hong Kong-based crypto payment company offering cryptocurrency payment cards and an app, has raised $47mln in a Strategic funding round with investments from Coinbase Ventures, Galaxy Ventures and Vertex Ventures.
Divine, a company that develops and operates an automated credit system using stablecoins, has raised $6mln in a Seed funding round with investments from Paradigm
Raiku*, a coordination layer and infrastructure protocol built on Solana that enhances network performance, reliability, and scalability, has raised $11.25mln in a Seed funding round with investments from Hashkey Capital, Pantera Capital, Jump Crypto, Faction VC, Reciprocal Ventures and 3 others

*Underlying TBV portfolio position | Prices as per 26/09

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