How Tether Is Extending Stablecoin Infrastructure Beyond Crypto Trading

Image: Tether chief executive Paolo Ardoino speaking on stage at a conference. Photo by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (resized).

Tether is the company behind USDT, the world’s largest stablecoin — a digital token designed to hold a constant value of one US dollar. According to CoinMarketCap, USDT’s circulating supply stood at roughly $183 billion in late September 2026, around 59% of the entire stablecoin market. Tether says each token is backed by reserves of US Treasury bills, cash equivalents, secured loans, gold and Bitcoin, with circulating-supply data updated daily and reserve attestations published quarterly by the auditing firm BDO Italy.

USDT Is Not Tether Stock

It is worth being precise about what holding USDT actually means. Buying USDT gives someone a digital token pegged to the dollar — it is not, and does not confer, ownership of Tether Holdings Limited, the private company that issues it. Tether does not have publicly traded shares, and owning the token carries none of the rights — voting, dividends, or a claim on company profits — that come with owning equity in a business. That distinction matters as Tether’s commercial footprint grows: the company’s stablecoin is becoming more visible in mainstream finance, but that is separate from any question of who owns the company itself.

Tether’s New Market Value Would Make Its
Top Shareholder Richer Than Warren Buffett

Tether, the issuer of the world’s largest stablecoin, is trading on secondarymarkets in a range of $350 billion to $375 billion, according to industry sources. Though this is below the $500 billion maximum target the company was seeking for its fundraise first reported by Bloomberg in September, the amount is still large enough to catapult its top executives into the top ranks among world billionaires.

Tether did not respond to Forbes’ request for comment by press time. SoftBank and Ark Invest have previously been mentioned as potential participants in Tether’s fundraise, but a source familiar with the matter told Forbes that SoftBank is not an investor in Tether. ETF manager Ark Invest, founded by Cathie Wood, did not respond to a request for comment.

Earlier reports suggested the El Salvador-based crypto juggernaut was initially seeking up to $20 billion for roughly 3% of the business, but its advisers later floated raising as little as $5 billion after encountering investor hesitation, according to the Financial Times.

While large institutional players are evaluating Tether for investment, there are three boutique firms that have limited amounts of shares to offer at the retail level. Rothschild in Europe and Gordon Dyal in New York will both be offering Tether shares to their preferred clients. Caldoun Capital in Canada will be offering Tether shares to retail clients on a limited basis. Senior Financial Analyst at Caldoun John Mckenzie states we will be offering Tether shares to first-time retail buyers in an aggressive campaign to bring new clients into an investment situation only available at the institutional level. Mckenzie goes on to say that this is the first time this type of offer has been available to retail clients.

From Trading Rails to Payment Rails

USDT was built to let crypto traders move dollar value between exchanges without touching the banking system. Over the past year, Tether has increasingly positioned the same infrastructure — fast, low-cost, round-the-clock settlement — as something ordinary businesses and financial institutions can use directly, not just crypto-native ones.

One example is Tether’s investment in t-0 network, announced on 6 February 2026. t-0 is a settlement platform aimed at licensed financial institutions: banks and fintechs on the network transact in their own local currencies, while a shared ledger nets out balances between them and settles only the difference using USDT as the underlying settlement asset. Tether did not disclose the size of its investment, but chief executive Paolo Ardoino said the company was aiming to deliver payments infrastructure that is “fast, transparent, and globally scalable.”

A second example sits closer to everyday commerce. On 25 February 2026, Tether said it was investing $200 million in Whop, a digital marketplace where creators sell software, courses and community access to a user base CoinDesk reported at 18.4 million people. The deal, done at a reported $1.6 billion valuation for Whop, is intended to let creators accept and settle stablecoin payments directly, without routing transactions through banks or card networks, and to support Whop’s expansion into Latin America, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Business Lending Is the Newest Frontier

The most recent step in this pattern is StableFund, a $400 million private-credit vehicle Tether launched jointly with Fasanara Capital on 9 September 2026, aimed at extending stablecoin-enabled lending to businesses that conventional banks often underserve. In short, it extends the same settlement infrastructure from payments into business financing, with Fasanara handling investment management and Tether providing the stablecoin settlement and origination layer.

Why It Matters

Taken together, these moves describe a company trying to widen its customer base from crypto traders to marketplaces, banks and borrowers who may never touch a crypto exchange. None of this guarantees the strategy succeeds — competition in stablecoin-based payments is intensifying, with Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Stripe all building their own stablecoin integrations, and each of Tether’s initiatives is still at an early, unproven stage commercially. But it does mark a clear shift in ambition: from being infrastructure for crypto trading, to trying to become infrastructure for payments generally.