At the beginning of 2025, stablecoin giant Tether announced an astonishing profit of US$13.7 billion for the whole year, once again bringing the profitability of the cryptocurrency industry into the public eye.
In the traditional financial field, institutions such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are often regarded as benchmarks for wealth creation, but the crypto world is rewriting the rules of business with unimaginable efficiency - a team of 165 people creates profits equivalent to that of an investment bank with 45,000 people. What kind of industry operating logic is hidden behind this disruptive efficiency?
1. Stablecoin Empire: Tether Reaches the Top Profit Throne
As the infrastructure of the crypto economy, stablecoin issuer Tether has an absolute dominant position with an annual profit of US$13.7 billion. Its core business model is to issue USDT anchored to the US dollar and invest the US dollars deposited by users in low-risk assets such as US Treasury bonds to earn interest rate spreads.
Currently, the circulation of USDT has exceeded 120 billion US dollars, covering more than 400 million users. This means that even if calculated only based on the annualized yield of 4% of US Treasury bonds, Tether can earn nearly 5 billion US dollars in interest income each year, and the actual income may be further amplified through higher-yield asset allocation.
What is more noteworthy is its operational efficiency: the team of 165 people has an average profit of $83.03 million per person, which is 267 times higher than the traditional financial giant Goldman Sachs (average profit of $310,000 per person). This is due to its light asset model - no physical outlets are required, compliance costs are diluted by scale effects, and the core team only needs to focus on fund management and technical maintenance.
2. Exchange camp: profit stratification under scale effect
In the trading track, the profitability of the leading platforms shows significant differentiation. Binance maintains its lead with an estimated profit of $5 billion (5,000 employees). Its advantage comes from its full range of trading services covering 250 million users, and its average daily trading volume has long been maintained at more than $30 billion. Despite regulatory pressure, the company has maintained a labor productivity level of approximately US$1 million through a global multi-hub operations strategy.
Coinbase demonstrated the commercial potential of the compliance path with a net profit of US$2.6 billion (3,772 employees). As a Nasdaq-listed company, its labor productivity of US$689,000 is lower than that of Binance, but it has built a more sustainable profit model through diversified income sources such as custody services and institutional clients. In 2024, its custody assets will exceed US$300 billion, and the proportion of institutional business revenue will increase to 45%.
The old exchange Kraken (profit of $380 million/2,500 employees) reflects the survival status of the second tier. The labor efficiency ratio of $152,000 exposes the operational difficulties of medium-sized platforms - they need to invest in compliance costs to deal with US regulations, and it is difficult to compete with the top in terms of user scale. Their revenue growth is highly dependent on the market bull and bear cycles.
3. The rise of emerging forces: Meme economy creates a wealth miracle
In this cycle, pump.fun has emerged as a dark horse with its Meme coin issuance platform positioning. This 15-person team will realize a profit of $337 million in 2024 by charging token issuance fees (about $2.3 per transaction) and transaction commissions, with an average profit of $22.47 million per person.
Its success stems from its accurate capture of retail speculative demand - reducing the threshold for token issuance to almost zero cost, and cooperating with social media to form a viral fission. Data shows that the platform launches more than 500 new tokens per day, and the highest daily trading volume exceeds 120 million US dollars.
This lightweight business model reveals the underlying logic of the crypto industry: by lowering the threshold for financial behavior, long-tail traffic can be converted into continuous cash flow. However, high volatility also brings hidden concerns - when the market turns bearish, the Meme coin craze may fade and its revenue may plummet.
IV. Institutional Participants: Gambling for Profits and Losses in Strategic Transformation
The case of the listed company MicroStrategy (now known as Strategy) provides a sample of traditional enterprises going all in on encryption. Despite holding Bitcoin worth more than $12 billion, its net profit in 2024 fell to $464 million, and operating expenses surged 693% to $1.1 billion.
This reflects the dilemma of institutional participation: although holding cryptocurrencies can gain asset appreciation, accounting treatment rules (Bitcoin is depreciated at cost) lead to a serious deviation between financial report performance and market value. Its $302,000 labor efficiency ratio is actually the friction cost of the traditional enterprise architecture and the particularity of crypto assets.
Another stablecoin issuer, Circle, has taken a differentiated approach. Although the circulation of USDC has recovered to $45 billion, the estimated profit scale of about $500 million (915 employees) is far behind Tether. The gap stems from strategic choices: Circle has invested a lot of resources in traditional financial structures such as bank cooperation and compliance audits. Although it has won the trust of institutional customers, it has also sacrificed the efficiency of fund use.
5. Industry Revelation: The Dominance of the Fee Economy
Looking at the seven major institutions, the most profitable ones all built their business models around the “transaction tax”:
1. The issuance of stablecoins is essentially a “toll” between legal currency and the crypto ecosystem. Tether obtains pricing power through scale monopoly;
2. Exchanges charge transaction fees and funding rates, and leading platforms rely on liquidity to form a moat;
3. The Meme platform precisely taxes speculative behavior, converting social enthusiasm into continuous cash flow.
The commonality of this business logic is that it does not rely on the rise and fall of asset prices, but obtains certain income through the status of infrastructure. Data shows that the combined profits of the above seven institutions exceeded US$23 billion, of which 80% came from transaction-related services, confirming the industry survival rule of "cash flow > valuation bubble".
6. Behind the Efficiency Revolution: Management Experiments of Decentralized Organizations
The miracle of human efficiency in crypto companies comes not only from technological dividends, but also from organizational innovation. Teams such as Tether and pump.fun highly modularize core functions (technology development, fund management) and reduce management losses through remote collaboration. Although Coinbase maintains the traditional corporate structure, it reduces the proportion of customer service staff to 8% through an automated trading system, which is far lower than the 30% level of traditional brokerages. This "minimalist" organizational model may provide an important reference for future corporate forms.
It is worth noting that efficiency improvement is accompanied by regulatory risks. Tether has been facing controversy over its reserve audit for many years, and pump.fun has been accused of encouraging speculation. How to strike a balance between efficiency and compliance will be the core proposition of the industry in the next stage.
The wealth creation myth of the crypto industry is essentially a reconstruction of the efficiency of the role of traditional financial intermediaries. When Tether manages the circulation of trillion-dollar currency with less than 200 people, and when the Meme platform turns the issuance of financial derivatives into "online self-service", what we see is not only technological iteration, but also a revolution in production relations. The end of this revolution may redefine what a "financial institution" is.
Disclaimer: The content of this article is for reference only and does not constitute any investment advice. Investors should view cryptocurrency investment rationally based on their own risk tolerance and investment goals, and should not blindly follow the trend.
