[Will Tether become the most influential miner in Bitcoin? 】

If you ask a typical Bitcoin supporter which company is the most influential in the Bitcoin mining industry, they will almost certainly mention Bitmain. The company is the dominant mining rig manufacturer in the world and manages numerous mining pools such as Antpool and its many offshoots. However, stablecoin giant Tether is quietly increasing its influence among Bitcoin miners around the world.

Tether recently invested $100 million in Bitdeer, a publicly traded company run by the co-founder of Bitmain and is one of the major investors in Blockstream, a leading Bitcoin developer. Partly funded by Tether, Blockstream operates a mining arm and a dedicated procurement unit that securitizes Bitmain’s mining rigs. Tether’s sister exchange Bitfinex is the trading platform for Blockstream mining notes.

In addition, Tether has invested in or funded the following projects:

・Bitcoin mining farm in Uruguay

・Swan Mining, which deployed over $330 million from Tether and other investors. Tether has also partnered with Swan to offer managed mining services

・German Bitcoin miner Northern Data AG, Tether bought a stake in the company and established a 575 million euro debt facility in November

・Bitcoin miner ZettaHash

・Tether also has a similar mining operation called Luganodes that focuses on the Tron blockchain

Overall, Tether appears to have delivered on its commitment to invest at least $500 million in Bitcoin mining over the past six months. If this pace of investment continues, Tether could become one of Bitcoin’s most influential mining companies.

The Bitcoin mining industry is limited in scale and does not attract more than a few billion dollars of investment each year. The annual revenue of Bitcoin miners as a whole is approximately $16 billion. The market capitalization of all mining companies is several times this revenue. The largest Bitcoin mining companies include Foundry, ViaBTC, CleanSpark, Marathon, Bitdeer, Riot, and MicroBT, with values ​​ranging from hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. The largest company is privately held Bitmain, which is valued at more than $40 billion.

Tether claims to be one of the most profitable companies per employee in the world. The company reported profits of $4.5 billion in the first quarter of 2024, a figure that topped the $4.3 billion in net income of Fannie Mae, the largest U.S. company by assets. Tether employs about 100 people, while Fannie Mae employs 8,100. Both companies expect to post tens of billions of dollars in profits this year.

Of course, Fannie Mae reported its $4.3 billion in profits using the term "net income" controlled by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), while Tether simply reported $4.5 billion in "profits" without adhering to any specific definition. . If the “profit” numbers for the two quarters were comparable, Tether claimed quarterly profits per employee of $45 million, compared to Fannie Mae’s $530,000.

In reality, interpreting Tether’s quarterly report is more of an art than a science. The company never issued audited financial statements, and its executives consistently used nonstandard words and phrases that did not comply with U.S. accounting standards. For example, all the information in Tether’s quarterly certificates “are not financial statements of Tether Holdings Limited” but are somehow “financial information extracted from its accounting records.”

Regardless, Tether generates staggering profits by generating significant interest income from its reserves backing USDT and other stablecoins. Since its stablecoin pays no interest to token holders, Tether simply retains all interest income as company profits. The company claims to hold over $112 billion in interest-bearing assets but does not pay any interest to token holders. This means that Tether has ample profits to invest in the Bitcoin mining industry.

#鴉快訊 @Tether USDT