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Tether is undoubtedly one of the most successful financial firms of the last century.

It's grown from an idea in a few Mastercoin Foundation members' minds to a firm with $150 billion in circulating tokens.

In addition, it's invested in agriculture, satellites, encrypted messaging, video streaming, football, bitcoin mining, data centers, payment processing, and more.

Cash is 0.04% of Tether's assets

However, this unbelievable growth does leave those of us on the outside with questions from time to time.

Consider Tether's secured loans, a line of business it's been in for years, often extending these loans to other lenders like Celsius and Nexo.

At the end of 2022, when the industry was struggling, Tether announced that by the end of 2023, it would remove secured loans from its reserves.

However, it didn't remove them, instead declaring victory once its total claimed "excess reserves" became larger than the total amount of secured loans.

HTX prepares for dinner with Donald Trump

Since then the secured loans have continued to grow, and they now substantially exceed the "equity" (which is how Tether now describes the difference between assets and liabilities in its reserves). This means that despite Tether's insistence that by the end of 2023 it would remove secured loans, more than a year later, it has failed to do so.

This becomes especially strange when we consider that Tether says Tether makes huge profits, but so far, it has decided investing in Rumble is more important than living up to its public commitment.

I guess it's one of those things we need to accept about Tether's operations, like how it can manage its liquidity with less cash on hand than Circle, and somehow even less than the Paxos dollar.

— Bennett Tomlin