The U.S. Treasury market is changing buyers, and Tether wants to be the one to take the baton
Background: In June, Japan, China, and the UK — three traditional major buyers of U.S. Treasuries — all reduced their holdings at the same time, with foreign investors buying about $72 billion less in total that month; meanwhile, U.S. federal debt broke through $40 trillion, and the yield on the 30-year Treasury auction surged to 5.216%, the highest since 2001. As traditional buyers step back, the Treasury does indeed need a new source of funding to fill the gap.
Against this backdrop, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said the company’s goal is to break into the top five buyers of U.S. Treasuries; right now it ranks around 16th or 17th. There is also a policy basis for this: the GENIUS Act, which took effect last year, requires stablecoin issuers to hold highly liquid assets such as short-term Treasuries as reserves, effectively locking in demand for Treasury purchases at the policy level; the Senate is also set to vote on the CLARITY Act on September 15, so Washington is clearly pushing this line forward. The Aspen Economic Strategy Group has also published a report discussing how stablecoins could create meaningful incremental demand for short-term Treasuries.
Foreign investors reducing holdings, Treasury yields surging, and the GENIUS Act requiring reserves to be allocated to Treasuries — these are all hard facts that can be verified from independent data sources. But specific figures like "currently ranked in the top five" and "able to distribute holdings to 650 million people to reduce the risk of selling" are numbers Ardoino himself gave in interviews.
USDT’s market cap is now about $183.4 billion, and its scale is indeed more than twice that of USDC (about $74.5 billion); this supply gap is real. On the flip side, the more Treasuries Tether buys, the more USDT’s stability becomes tied to the liquidity of the Treasury market and short-end interest rate policy — if Treasury auctions were ever to soften or rates were to shift abruptly, this would not be a pure positive; it could become a new risk exposure.
If Tether really does break into the top five buyers of U.S. Treasuries, do you think that marks the maturation of the stablecoin industry, or does it mean USDT is becoming a "too big to fail" systemic player that regulators must watch closely?
#Tether #USDT #美债 #稳定币 #GENIUS法案 v