Morning Minute: Tether Prints $10 Billion in Profit

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. Analysis and opinions expressed are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. Subscribe to the morning minute on Substack.

GM!

Today’s big news:

💰 Tether prints 10 billion dollars in profit

Tether is the most profitable company that no one is talking about.

And the stablecoin giant just released numbers that would make most banks jealous.

📌 What happened

The latest from Tether Quarterly statement showed $1.1 billion profit for Q3 2025bringing its year-to-date total to around $10 billion – a number that rivals Goldman Sachs and dwarfs Coinbase.

Almost everything came from interest income on US Treasuries, where Tether now has $91B in reserves, more than countries like Brazil or Canada.

The company also confirmed new investments in Bitcoin mining and AI infrastructure, underlining its strategy to diversify profits beyond pure dollar reserves.

In the chain, the supply of USDT exceeds 122 billion, with almost 70% issued throne and about 18% on ethereum.

🗣️ What they say

“With this attestation, Tether once again proves its leadership and financial ability.” – Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether

🧠 Because it is important

Tether has led the growth of the stablecoin to become one of the most profitable companies in the world. On a per-employee basis, they are probably #1.

A few implications to look at:

• Too big to fail? With $120 B + USDT outstanding, Tether is now a critical global infrastructure. Any hiccup in redemption or regulation could ripple through every exchange and L1.
• Cash machine. At current Treasury rates, Tether earns about $25-30M per day – a funding expansion of the cash engine in AI, BTC mining, and energy.
• Regulatory optics. Wait for a renewed scrutiny. A private company making $10B off US debt with no US oversight will raise increasingly strong questions (especially from the left).

Expect the Tether empire to continue to grow, and any protocols or tokens adjacent to Tether to see a lot of demand (case in point, XPL).

And we’ll see if the rest of the stablecoin sector can ride their coattails…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Memes

A few Crypto and Web3 titles that caught my eye:

In Corporate Treasuries / ETFs

• The Bitcoin ETF saw $191.6M in net inflows on Friday, with ETH seeing $98.2M in outflows
• The Solana Bitwise ETF closed its first week with $197M in net flows

In Memes

💰 Token, Airdrop and Protocol Tracker

Here is a summary of the main token, protocol and airdrop news from the day:

• Zcash presented its Q4 roadmap, focus on improvements to privacy trade-offs and usability issues
• Fermentation is now in its allocation and reimbursement phase, where ICO bidders will find out how much they have received

🚚 What is happening in NFT?

Here is the list of other notable titles from the day in NFT:

• The leaders of the NFT they were red and continued a downtrend; Punks -3% to 37 ETH, Pudgy -4% to 5.9, BAYC -1% to 6.35 ETH; Hypurr’s -5% at 965 HYPE
• Good Vibes Club +17% to 0.435 ETH were a remarkable engine