Author: Schatong TechFlow
After becoming the world’s most profitable and cash-rich “atypical financial institution” through the issuance of USDT, Tether has finally taken its most crucial step toward moving from virtual to real.
On September 9, Tether partnered with London-based alternative asset manager Fasanara Capital to launch StableFund, a perpetual private credit fund with a maximum size of $3 billion. The two parties initially committed $400 million as seed capital and officially opened fundraising to external institutional investors.
This time, Tether is no longer targeting liquidity on cryptocurrency exchanges, but rather small and medium-sized enterprise lending and consumer credit spread across more than 60 countries. While Silicon Valley continues debating real-world use cases for cryptocurrencies, Tether—with its massive interest income from U.S. Treasuries—has quietly transformed into traditional finance’s most ambitious “on-chain shadow bank.”
Capital Flywheel: From Risk-Free Arbitrage to Wall Street’s “Scavengers”
Over the past two years, Tether’s business model has been extremely straightforward: it has absorbed demand for interest-free stablecoin minting while investing hundreds of billions of dollars in reserve assets into risk-free U.S. Treasury securities.
This "money-printing" model, which reliably generates interest spreads, enabled Tether to record approximately $1.5 billion in operating profit in the second quarter of this year.
However, as the global macro rate-cut cycle approaches, the window for earning risk-free spreads on gold is narrowing. Tether’s substantial profit reserves must seek the next reservoir capable of absorbing massive capital flows and offering greater yield elasticity.
Private credit has become the ideal destination.
Amid the balance sheet contraction of traditional commercial banks in Europe and the United States and a global SME financing gap reaching $5.7 trillion, Wall Street giants like Blackstone and Apollo have already established strong positions in this space. But unlike traditional Wall Street institutions, Tether brings a game-changing advantage: it doesn’t just provide capital—it also provides access.
In this $3 billion game, the funding channels have been completely restructured. Borrowers no longer receive wire-transferred U.S. dollars, which require multiple correspondent banks, take days to settle, and incur high fees—instead, they receive USDT, credited to their accounts in seconds.
Use USDT to bypass traditional banking lending channels
In this new vehicle called StableFund, Tether and Fasanara have a clearly defined division of labor, representing a classic "front store, back factory" model.
Headquartered in London, Fasanara acts as both "underwriter" and "risk officer." This specialized asset management firm, which oversees more than $6 billion in assets, has already established a lending network across more than 60 countries on fintech platforms. They are responsible for precisely channeling funds into short-duration, asset-backed small and medium enterprise and consumer credit strategies.
Tether serves as the most critical source of funds and settlement infrastructure. Tether’s CEO, Paolo Ardoino, maintains a highly restrained clarity on this: Tether does not directly engage in debt collection, but instead provides the stablecoin infrastructure that enables cross-border lending to function.
At this point, the narrative around USDT has undergone a fundamental shift. It is no longer merely a "trading pair" used by crypto traders to hedge against volatility, but has become a lending pump directly inserted into the real economies of emerging markets. Tether is transforming liquidity that was once confined to the crypto casino into a dollar alternative that reshapes the efficiency of global real-world corporate financing.
Dual-track博弈 between on-balance-sheet and off-balance-sheet activities, the deep water of shadow banking risk control
Entering physical lending means Tether has officially stepped into the risk management minefield that traditional banks fear most:
If the borrower can't repay, who pays first?
Under the current structure, the newly established StableFund is an off-balance-sheet fund. Theoretically, any credit default losses will be confined to the fund’s net asset value and the limited partners (LPs), thereby isolating them from the 1:1 reserve backing USDT.
But external scrutiny has never ceased, because within Tether’s own balance sheet, its lending business has long been a massive operation. As of the second quarter of this year, Tether’s reserve assets still included a staggering $13.45 billion in secured loans. In comparison, the new fund’s initial anchor capital of $400 million is merely a small test amount.
What truly alarms Wall Street and regulators is that when a stablecoin giant with inadequate transparency in its audits holds billions in on-balance-sheet collateralized lending and begins extending loans to small and medium-sized entities through fintech platforms in 60 countries off-balance-sheet, it effectively becomes a super shadow bank that evades all capital adequacy requirements.
Before reaching its $3 billion target, StableFund was merely a reconnaissance mission. But once Tether, leveraging its extremely low funding costs and the settlement advantages of USDT, truly breaks into the global private credit market, any widespread international loan default or collateral depreciation could evolve into a stress test for the entire foundation of crypto liquidity.
At that time, this unregulated, "unlicensed global central bank" will surely attract the strictest scrutiny from Washington.