Tether, the world’s largest issuer of stablecoin USDT, had a net profit of US$6.2 billion last year, surpassing asset management giant BlackRock’s US$5.5 billion. However, a special article in the Wall Street Journal this week pointed out that while USDT successfully broke into the financial system, it also disrupted the global sanctions system. (Preliminary summary: Tether enters the food industry! It invested US$100 million in South American agricultural giant Adecoagro and became the third largest shareholder) (Background supplement: Tether earns US$30 million per day, but USDT may still be out for one reason?) USDT, the world’s largest stable currency Issuer Tether released its second quarter 2024 financial report on July 31, stating that Tether's net profit in the first half of this year reached a record high of US$5.2 billion. Among them, the second quarter (April to June) operating net profit reached 1.3 billion US dollars, a new high, which can be said to be full of cash. Last year's net profit surpassed BlackRock. Looking back at last year, Tether's net profit in 2023 reached US$6.2 billion, reaching 78% of Goldman Sachs's net profit (US$7.9 billion); Morgan Stanley's net profit (US$8.5 billion). 72% of US dollars), and exceeded the net profit of asset management giant BlackRock (BlackRock) by US$5.5 billion. It is worth mentioning that Tether is a company with only about 100 employees, which means that for the entire year of 2023, each Tether employee brought an average net profit of $62 million to the company. In comparison, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and BlackRock have 45,000, 80,000 and 20,000 employees respectively. It can be seen that the ability of Tether employees to bring wealth to the company far exceeds that of traditional financial institutions. Although the Tether wallet is making a lot of money, the Wall Street Journal published a long article on the 10th titled "The Shadow Dollar Weaving the Underground Financial World - Tether", describing the stability of Tether's issuance. How the currency USDT successfully broke into the global financial system, but at the same time disrupted the global sanctions system. The article begins by saying that USDT is an unregulated and large-scale currency that is undermining the United States’ fight against arms dealers, sanctions violators, and fraudsters, and the currency’s daily transaction volume is as high as 190 billion U.S. dollars due to USDT and The U.S. dollar is pegged 1:1 and can operate without supervision by U.S. law enforcement agencies. Therefore, it is used as a trading tool by many illegal and sanctioned individuals.In addition, in areas where the U.S. government restricts the use of the U.S. dollar system, such as Iran, Venezuela, and Russia, USDT has achieved great growth as a stealth dollar and is often used for cross-border fund transfers. Although European and American countries are currently planning to take many measures to limit the wild growth of USDT, such as Europe's crypto-asset law "Mica"; the United States' "Stable Currency Act", and Tether will also cooperate with the United States OFCA to freeze the Specially Designated Nationals List (SDN) Related wallets. However, it remains to be seen whether these moves can shake USDT’s underground financial status. S&P's rating of Tether is approaching the most dangerous level. On the other hand, the American consumer protection organization Consumers' Research also issued a warning to stablecoin issuer Tether in a report released yesterday (12th), accusing Tether of a lack of U.S. dollar reserves. Transparency, the report notes, is that this lack of transparency is similar to what led to FTX’s collapse. The report also mentioned that S&P Global Ratings, one of the three major credit rating agencies, rated USDT as level 4 (level 1 is the most stable and level 5 is the least stable) in the 2023 "Stablecoin Stability Assessment". The reason is that USDT reserves are not transparent. S&P analysts noted: Tether is currently not explicitly regulated by any authority, and there are no specific regulations on how or where its reserves can be invested. Extended reading: S&P rated stablecoins for the first time. USDC received a level 2 rating, while USDT was only rated level 4. "Limited" due to transparency issues. Finally, the report accused Tether of doing business with criminals and failed to effectively prevent illegal institutions from using USDT to evade the international community. sanctions. Tether Transparency Progress Although USDT has indeed been abused by criminals, Tether has also recently made improvements to address these issues: Tether hired former Chainalysis chief economist Philip Gradwell in July this year to strengthen transparency and create USDT Usage reports. These reports will be provided to U.S. regulators and investors to help reveal the actual uses of stablecoins. Then in August, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino announced that since 2014, the company had assisted more than 145 law enforcement agencies in recovering $108.8 million in USDT related to illegal activities. In the first half of September, Tether also announced that it would cooperate with Tron to establish a financial crimes unit. The new agency, called the “T3 Financial Crimes Unit,” will focus on identifying and freezing illegal USDT transactions on the Tron network, which is the blockchain platform with the largest USDT transaction volume. Related reports Flipster announces cooperation with Tether! Tether Gold (XAUt) is on the shelves, and two limited-time reward activities have begun. TRON, Tether and TRM Labs have jointly established the T3 Alliance to jointly fight against blockchain financial crimes. Tether, which is full of cash, has entered AI and challenges Google, Microsoft and Amazon head-on. WSJ: Tether is the king of underground finance, disrupting global sanctions operations, and S&P ratings USDT is approaching the most danger> This article was first published in BlockTempo "DongZu DongTen - the most influential blockchain news media".

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