Tether, the company behind the world’s most popular stablecoin USDT, acquired 1,529 bitcoin in the second quarter of 2023.
Paolo Ardoino, the company’s CTO, confirmed the purchase to Bitcoin Magazine. According to the executive, Tether paid roughly $45.4 million to add the BTC to its balance sheet.
The purchase confirms the company is following the plans it delineated earlier this year. Tether announced in May that it would start allocating up to 15% of quarterly profits to bitcoin, a move that could challenge popular bitcoin bull Michael Saylor, executive chairman of software intelligence firm MicroStrategy.
Nasdaq-listed MicroStrategy this week announced it acquired 467 BTC in July. Bitcoin has been hovering around the $30,000 mark for a couple months, and the stability seems to have prompted Saylor to pull the trigger and add $14.4 million worth of BTC to the company’s treasury. MicroStrategy currently holds 152,800 BTC, while Tether owns over 54,000 BTC with the Q2 buy.
Bitcoin’s nearly 76% jump year-to-date is renewing institutional interest in the digital currency, with the world’s largest asset manager filing for a spot bitcoin ETF in June. Many asset managers fast-followed $8.6 trillion BlackRock to re-file their previously denied applications.
While the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has denied plenty of similar filings in the past, Bloomberg’s senior ETF analysts yesterday coined a 65% chance that BlackRock’s filing receives the regulatory green light. Notably, BlackRock’s ETF applications have been denied only once, out of roughly 550 filings.
The eventual approval of a spot bitcoin ETF in the U.S. is broadly seen as bullish by the market, and companies such as Tether and MicroStrategy would be set to benefit the most from the assumed price appreciation of the coin. Coincidently, the deadline for the SEC to issue a decision on most of these ETF applications aligns closely with the Bitcoin halving – another event widely perceived as positive for the future of bitcoin’s price.
