By Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino expects his company to become a top-five buyer of U.S. Treasuries, potentially elevating the issuer of the world’s largest stablecoin into a class traditionally dominated by governments, banks and institutional investors. Speaking on The Wolf of All Streets podcast, Ardoino said Tether would become a top-10 and subsequently a top-five buyer of Treasuries as demand for USDT continues expanding.
He argued that Tether is already effectively among the top five buyers at three-month Treasury auctions when aggregated hedge-fund purchases routed through jurisdictions such as the Cayman Islands are excluded. The distinction is important. Tether has not been independently ranked as the fifth-largest Treasury buyer across every category. Ardoino’s broader top-five prediction remains forward-looking and depends heavily on continued USDT growth.
$141 Billion Treasury Portfolio Creates New Buyer
Tether’s scale nevertheless makes the prediction increasingly plausible. Its first-quarter 2026 attestation reported approximately $141 billion of direct and indirect exposure to U.S. Treasury bills as of March 31. That made Tether roughly the world’s 17th-largest holder of U.S. Treasuries when compared with countries in Treasury’s international rankings. USDT-related liabilities stood at approximately $183.4 billion, meaning short-duration government debt represents the core of the reserves supporting the stablecoin. The relationship creates an unusual mechanism for Treasury demand.
When additional USDT enters circulation, Tether receives assets backing those tokens and invests a substantial portion in highly liquid short-term government securities. Ardoino said Tether now serves approximately 650 million users, primarily across emerging markets. He argues this effectively distributes ownership of U.S. government debt among hundreds of millions of individuals rather than concentrating it in individual foreign governments. Tether’s Treasury accumulation has already been substantial. Recent estimates put its net Treasury purchases at $33.1 billion during 2024 and $28.2 billion during 2025, placing the company among the largest sources of incremental demand.
Stablecoins Could Generate $1 Trillion of Demand
Tether’s expansion forms part of a much larger shift in Treasury-market structure. The U.S. Treasury’s Borrowing Advisory Committee estimated in 2025 that stablecoin issuers held more than $120 billion of Treasury bills and modeled a scenario in which their holdings could approach $1 trillion by 2028. Standard Chartered similarly estimates that stablecoin market capitalization could reach $2 trillion by the end of 2028, potentially generating $800 billion to $1 trillion of additional T-bill demand. That matters because U.S. government borrowing requirements remain enormous. Treasury bills provide stablecoin issuers with a combination of liquidity, low credit risk and yield while allowing tokens to remain backed by dollar-denominated assets. The GENIUS Act has strengthened that connection by establishing reserve requirements centered on high-quality liquid assets for regulated payment stablecoins.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has described stablecoin growth as a potentially important source of demand for government debt. For Washington, that creates a strategic attraction: expanding dollar-backed stablecoins internationally can simultaneously extend dollar usage and generate additional demand for securities financing U.S. deficits. There are risks in the relationship. A sharp contraction in stablecoin supply could force issuers to sell Treasury bills to satisfy redemptions. As the sector becomes larger, those flows could become meaningful for short-term funding markets. For now, however, the direction is the opposite.
Tether’s Treasury exposure has risen from approximately $94.5 billion in direct T-bills at the end of 2024 to $141 billion of direct and indirect exposure by March 2026. Ardoino’s top-five prediction therefore illustrates how dramatically stablecoins have changed the profile of Treasury demand. A company created to issue blockchain-based dollars is becoming a major financier of the U.S. government — and if USDT continues expanding at its current scale, Tether could eventually compete with some of the world’s largest institutional and sovereign buyers of American debt.