Tether CEO alleges rivals aim to ‘kill’ USDT through legal and legislative channels

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino has voiced concerns that the company’s rivals are leveraging legal and regulatory tactics to destabilize the stablecoin issuer.

In a Feb. 25 post on X, Ardoino alleged that some stablecoin issuers in the US are using political lobbying and legislative efforts to target Tether’s operations.

According to him:

“While our competitors business model should be to build a better product and even bigger distribution network, their real intent is ‘Kill Tether.’ Every single business or political meeting that they have culminates with this intent.”

Ardoino noted that while his claims might be perceived as an “overstatement,” he argued that it was:

“A fact and it’s being reported independently by hundreds of people inside and outside the digital assets industry in touch with the US administration.”

The Tether CEO emphasized that the firm’s USDT has established itself as the largest USD-backed stablecoin, enabling people in developing economies to access the US dollar through USDT. He noted:

“USDt helps more than 400M people currently and grows at the pace of 35M new wallets per quarter, focusing on developing countries, while strengthening the US Dollar.”

He warned that these rivals’ actions could affect Tether and negatively impact users in developing countries who rely on USDT for financial stability and access to dollar-based transactions.

Ardoino concluded:

“Tether won’t stand still and we won’t let these attacks succeed. We can’t allow it. We’ll stand strong to protect the hundreds of millions of people around the world that are left behind by the traditional financial system, to help them accessing to the US Dollar via USDt.”

US regulations

These comments come as the US government continues developing stablecoin regulations that could reportedly prevent offshore stablecoin issuers from accessing US Treasury bills.

Vance Spencer, a venture capitalist, highlighted that these legislative efforts could amount to regulatory capture, favoring US-based stablecoin issuers at the expense of international competition. He added that such restrictions could also threaten the long-term dominance of the US dollar.

He wrote:

“The soon-to-be revealed stablecoin markup apparently has requirements to shut off access to the treasury market to centralized international stablecoin issuers – which is straight up batshit crazy.”

Tether, which currently holds over $115 billion in US Treasuries and ranks as the 18th largest holder, may need to divest these holdings if the proposed laws are implemented.

Considering this, Spencer stated:

“The future of stablecoins can be US dollar based only if we allow a broader competitive set of stablecoin issuers to flourish and deny gatekeeping/gaslighting by those interested in regulatory capture.”

This development comes less than a few weeks after speculations emerged that Tether may be forced to sell some of its Bitcoin holdings to comply with upcoming US stablecoin regulations.

However, Tether rejected such concerns, arguing that it holds excess assets that allow it to adapt to changing regulations even under the most restrictive scenarios.

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