Crypto company Tether, the issuer of the USDT stablecoin, forecasts a $700 million profit in Q1 2023, equalling the profits of Q4 last year.
 
This is according to Tether’s chief technology officer, Paolo Ardoino at Paris Blockchain Week 2023, Cointelegraph reports.
 
“I don’t have the final figures yet, but the profit of this quarter will probably match the last quarter of 2022,” Ardoino commented, going on to say that in the fourth quarter of last year, Tether generated $700 million of profits. He also said Tether has an “addition to that $950 million” as at 31 December 2022: “So it means that our company equity will grow to $1.5 billion or $1.7 billion that are on top of the reserves that we have that are backing 100% of the assets.”
 
The Tether chief technology officer went on to add that USDT is further becoming the “safest asset to hold in the world” as the firm is different to banks based on the fractional reserve model. He made specific reference to the US banking system and the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) due to this model.
 
Furthermore, Ardoino said he is a proponent of Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market cap, which is Tether’s hedge: “I love Bitcoin and that's our hedge and that's why we are in Bitcoin, because we don't trust those guys that they took so much risk on customer deposits.”
 
As Cointelegraph reported previously, Tether was reducing its commercial paper backing in 2022, lowering it to zero by the end of the year. As well as removing commercial paper from its reserves, Tether was replacing these investments with US Treasury Bills.
 
Furthermore, Tether is continuing to boost its market dominance. Since the end of February, USDT’s market capitalisation has added around $8 billion. USDT market value stands at $79 billion at the time of writing, the highest since May 2022, as per CoinGecko data.