Tether has become one of the most powerful companies in cryptocurrency without becoming one of the most transparent.
Its USDT stablecoin is now deeply embedded in global crypto markets and is increasingly used as a dollar-like instrument for moving money across borders. Yet behind that enormous financial footprint sits a privately held company whose complete ownership structure has never been publicly disclosed.
That is the mystery the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) set out to investigate.
Using public records, corporate filings and previously unavailable internal company documents, ICIJ attempted to reconstruct who has owned Tether, how those stakes have changed and who may currently exercise control over the company. The investigation describes Tether as a private company potentially worth around $200 billion — a valuation that would put it among the world's most valuable private businesses.
And the ownership trail is anything but straightforward.
A company too big to remain invisible
Tether's core business is deceptively simple.
The company issues USDT, a stablecoin designed to maintain a value of approximately one U.S. dollar.
Unlike Bitcoin, whose price can fluctuate substantially, USDT is intended to provide users with a digital asset that behaves more like dollars while retaining the speed and global reach of blockchain networks.
That has turned Tether into a crucial piece of the cryptocurrency economy.
ICIJ describes USDT as underpinning a parallel financial system that reaches across borders. The token is used by legitimate businesses, traders and investors, but it has also become attractive to criminals involved in money laundering and large-scale scams.
Tether has also become a major participant in traditional finance, including through its large holdings of U.S. government debt.
That creates an unusual contradiction:
A company operating infrastructure with global financial significance remains privately held and difficult for outsiders to examine.
Most companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars are publicly traded. Public listing generally brings extensive disclosure requirements, including information about major shareholders.
Tether doesn't face that same level of public scrutiny.
The trail begins with Giancarlo Devasini
One of the central figures in Tether's ownership story is Giancarlo Devasini, an Italian businessman and former plastic surgeon who became closely associated with Tether and the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange.
ICIJ's investigation examined records from the Paradise Papers and other documents.
According to those records, in early 2016 Devasini owned 100% of Tether Holdings, the British Virgin Islands company identified as Tether's parent.
Then the ownership structure changed dramatically.
Tether representatives arranged for documents transferring at least 55% of Devasini's shares to Jean-Louis van der Velde, another important figure in the Bitfinex-Tether ecosystem.
Another portion went to DigFinex Inc.
But the arrangement did not remain in place.
By approximately 2018, the records examined by ICIJ showed Devasini back as the company's largest individual shareholder, with approximately 43%, while van der Velde's stake had fallen to around 15%.
Corporate-governance experts consulted by ICIJ described such dramatic transfers between business partners as unusual, although they emphasized that unusual ownership movements do not automatically prove wrongdoing.
That distinction is important.
The investigation is about transparency and control, not an assertion that the ownership changes themselves constituted illegal conduct.
The CEO's stake adds another layer
Tether's current CEO, Paolo Ardoino, also appears in the historical ownership records.
Documents reviewed by ICIJ indicate that Ardoino owned approximately 3.5% of Tether around 2018.
But that may no longer represent his position.
Forbes has estimated that Ardoino now owns approximately 20% of Tether. ICIJ emphasizes that this is an estimate rather than a company-confirmed disclosure.
Another name appears in the 2018 records: Kristian Hansen, who was listed as holding approximately 6.6%.
ICIJ was unable to establish whether Hansen still owns that stake.
If he did, ICIJ calculated that it would now potentially be worth more than $13 billion, based on Forbes' valuation of Tether.
The historical records also included other major shareholders, including Christopher Harborne and Stuart Hoegner, but ICIJ said it could not determine their current ownership positions.
And Tether did not respond to ICIJ's questions about the ownership figures.
The 50% clue
Perhaps the most consequential part of ICIJ's investigation involves Devasini's potential control of Tether.
ICIJ examined U.S. securities filings that Tether is required to submit when it invests in publicly traded companies.
In the middle of 2024, Devasini and van der Velde appeared together in these filings.
Then van der Velde disappeared from them.
Around the same period, a new statement began appearing in the filings saying that:
Devasini had more than 50% voting interest in Tether.
That wording matters.
According to law professor Ann Lipton, cited by ICIJ, such a statement would ordinarily indicate that the person has control of the company.
If the filings accurately reflect Tether's voting structure, they point toward a significant consolidation of power around Devasini.
But there is an important caveat: Tether did not answer ICIJ's questions about the change.
And the Salvadoran corporate filings reviewed by ICIJ did not provide a clear picture of Tether's current ownership.
So the public still does not have a definitive, company-published shareholder register.
How valuable is Devasini's position?
The financial implications are extraordinary.
Forbes has estimated Devasini's personal fortune at approximately $89.3 billion, ranking him among the world's wealthiest people.
If Tether is indeed worth around $200 billion, even relatively small ownership percentages translate into enormous amounts of money.
A 5% stake, for example, would theoretically correspond to around $10 billion at that valuation.
That brings us to another controversial piece of the ownership puzzle.
The Cantor Fitzgerald connection
In 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that Cantor Fitzgerald acquired rights to approximately 5% of Tether.
ICIJ estimates that such a stake could now be worth roughly $10 billion based on Tether's estimated valuation.
But once again, the crucial detail is that the ownership has not been publicly confirmed by Tether itself.
The relationship is particularly notable because Cantor Fitzgerald has been an important financial partner for Tether, including in relation to the company's holdings of U.S. Treasury securities.
Cantor Fitzgerald's former chairman and CEO, Howard Lutnick, later became U.S. Commerce Secretary, bringing the Tether relationship into the wider conversation about cryptocurrency, Wall Street and Washington.
ICIJ reported that senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden raised questions about Tether's relationship with Lutnick and his family.
Again, the existence of these relationships does not by itself establish misconduct.
But it illustrates how Tether has moved far beyond the world of cryptocurrency exchanges.
From offshore company to global financial player
Tether was originally incorporated in the British Virgin Islands.
The ICIJ Offshore Leaks database identifies Tether Holdings Limited as a BVI company incorporated in September 2014, with Appleby listed as its agent in the Paradise Papers data. The database also identifies Devasini as a shareholder in the historical records.
Tether has since moved its headquarters to El Salvador.
But according to ICIJ's review, the Salvadoran corporate records it examined did not reveal Tether's current ownership structure.
That means jurisdictional movement has not necessarily translated into greater public visibility over who controls the company.
The bigger issue isn't just Tether
The most important question raised by the investigation isn't simply:
"Who owns Tether?"
It is:
"How much financial power can a private company accumulate before the public has a legitimate interest in knowing who controls it?"
Tether is no longer a small cryptocurrency startup.
Its USDT token is used globally.
The company has become a major buyer of U.S. government debt.
It has developed relationships with major financial institutions.
Law-enforcement agencies increasingly rely on Tether's ability to freeze tokens connected to investigations.
And yet the company's ultimate ownership remains considerably harder to establish than that of many publicly traded corporations worth far less.
That creates a governance problem.
The public can watch USDT transactions move across blockchains. Researchers can analyze wallets. Regulators can examine selected filings.
But that doesn't necessarily tell the public who ultimately controls the corporation issuing the tokens.
And transparency goes beyond ownership
Tether's transparency debate isn't limited to shareholders.
The company has also faced years of questions about the assets backing USDT.
In 2021, Tether agreed to pay $41 million to settle allegations by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission that it had made misleading statements about the reserves backing its stablecoin.
Tether has subsequently provided reports about its reserves and has emphasized its holdings of U.S. Treasury securities and other assets.
But ICIJ notes that the company had not released the results of a complete audit of its reserves at the time of its investigation.
That creates two separate transparency questions:
Who owns Tether?
And:
Exactly what stands behind the enormous amount of USDT circulating around the world?
Both questions matter because Tether's importance has expanded dramatically.
USDT and the dark side of global finance
The ownership investigation comes amid another ICIJ investigation into Tether's historical customers.
ICIJ reported that internal Tether documents covering 2019 and 2020 identified customers who purchased large quantities of newly issued USDT and were later implicated in financial crimes.
Among the cases examined were entities later associated with money laundering networks connected to North Korean hackers and the Sinaloa Cartel.
There is an important limitation here.
The transactions occurred years before some of the individuals or companies were publicly identified or sanctioned for criminal activity.
Therefore, the later allegations do not automatically establish that Tether knowingly facilitated those crimes.
Tether also points to its cooperation with law enforcement and its ability to freeze illicit funds as evidence of its role in combating crypto crime.
Nevertheless, the records raise questions about how effectively the company vetted some customers during its rapid expansion.
The irony of cryptocurrency
There is a deeper irony here.
Cryptocurrency emerged partly from dissatisfaction with centralized financial institutions.
Bitcoin's architecture was designed around decentralized transactions that could operate without relying on a traditional bank.
But Tether represents another direction.
Instead of a decentralized currency controlled by no single company, USDT is issued by a private corporation.
That corporation has accumulated enormous financial influence while remaining privately held.
And its users can move the company's digital dollars across borders without the same friction associated with traditional banking.
This doesn't make Tether inherently illegitimate.
But it does create a new kind of financial power.
Private money can now operate at global scale.
And the institution creating that money doesn't necessarily have to disclose its ownership in the same way a publicly traded financial institution would.
The unanswered question
ICIJ's investigation doesn't produce a neat shareholder table showing exactly who owns every percentage of Tether today.
In some respects, that's the point.
The investigation demonstrates how difficult it is to establish the ownership of one of the world's most financially consequential private companies.
Historical records provide pieces of the puzzle.
Regulatory filings provide other pieces.
Internal documents provide more.
Corporate records provide additional clues.
But there is still no simple public document answering the question:
Who owns Tether today, and exactly how much does each person own?
That lack of clarity becomes increasingly significant as the company's influence grows.
A $200 billion private company can no longer easily be dismissed as a niche crypto experiment.
Tether has become part of the plumbing of global digital finance.
And perhaps the most important lesson from the ICIJ investigation is not that one particular billionaire may control a huge cryptocurrency empire.
It is that the financial system is changing faster than traditional transparency rules were designed to handle.
The old model was relatively straightforward: if a company became enormous and wanted ordinary investors to own its shares, it went public and disclosed extensive information.
The new model can be different.
A company can remain private, grow to extraordinary size, issue an asset used around the world and accumulate billions in profits — while outsiders struggle to establish exactly who owns the company.
Tether may therefore be more than a story about cryptocurrency. It could be a preview of what happens when private financial infrastructure becomes too important to remain private.
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