At this point, it’s still two firms battling for market dominance, with a few others — including the issuer tied to President Donald Trump, World Liberty Financial — fighting it out for a very distant third place. Tether’s chief rival, U.S.-based Circle, has made more of an apparent effort to pre-comply with what U.S. regulations will soon require.
Meanwhile, Tether’s most recent disclosures suggest as much as a quarter of $USDT‘s reserves — the stockpile meant to ensure that those redeeming their coins will always be able to — were still plugged into assets that won’t meet $GENIUS Act standards, such as precious metals, lending and bitcoin BTC$64,348.58 holdings. $GENIUS requires that issuers are fully reserved in the most highly liquid and reliable assets — essentially cash and U.S. Treasuries.
“Tether will comply with the $GENIUS Act,” Ardoino told CoinDesk at the White House, in the moments after Trump signed $GENIUS a year ago. While the CEO indicated then that his company would pursue a separate U.S.-specific token, he said that $USDT would also be managed to meet the law’s foreign-issuer standards.
When asked multiple times for an update on its compliance stance in recent days, representatives of El Salvador-based Tether didn’t offer a response.
