Stablecoin issuer Tether has north of $180 billion in its namesake stablecoin USDT is circulating, with comfortable assurances from one of the world’s most prominent financial companies that it has the funds it requires.
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Brandon Lutnick, the current chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald, told the audience at CoinDesk’s Consensus Toronto 2025 that he had personally verified Tether’s reserves.
“I personally checked many of their reserves and we proved many of those rumors wrong,” he said in May.
Cantor has been the custodian of Tether’s US Treasuries since at least 2021. Then-Chairman Howard Lutnick – now the US Secretary of Commerce – confirmed that his firm had provided services to the stablecoin issuer in December 2023.
In doing so, the Lutnicks and Cantor bestowed a new level of legitimacy and stability on the world’s largest stablecoin issuer, which had previously struggled to maintain banking relationships and assure the public that it was fully backed. Tether settled an inquiry with the New York Attorney General’s office in 2021 after Attorney General Letitia James alleged that the company was missing north of $800 million in assets covering its reserves.
As part of the settlement, Tether agreed to publish reserve distributions.
Tether continues to grow. It announced earlier this year that it would launch a new stablecoin specifically for the United States following this year’s passage of the GENIUS Act, with former White House official Bo Hines heading up this new division. Cantor will also manage that firm’s reserves.
The company’s growth — and Cantor’s reassurances — haven’t quieted all the critics: Last month, S&P Global Ratings downgraded USDT, citing concerns about how much of its reserves were made up of Bitcoin . A price drop in the world’s largest digital asset could lead to USDT being under-hedged, the report said.
Howard Lutnick defended his comments when testifying before Congress earlier this year, saying Cantor had not “conducted continuous due diligence on Tether’s accounts,” though he went on to say “Tether has every penny and it can produce liquidity on a moment’s notice.”
