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Tether Expands Empire With 140 Investments and $185B USDT

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Tether Expands Empire With 140 Investments and $185B USDT

Tether has built a portfolio of 140 investments spanning sectors from South American agriculture to a stake in Italian football club Juventus, according to a Financial Times report.

Summary

  • Tether holds 140 investments, from agriculture to Juventus, funded by USDT profits.
  • The stablecoin giant plans 150 new hires as it builds a global “freedom tech stack.”
  • Political ties and a $500B valuation push raise scrutiny over transparency and audits.

The world’s largest stablecoin issuer expanded its workforce to 300 employees and plans to add another 150 staff over the next 18 months, mostly engineers.

CEO Paolo Ardoino presented Tether’s vision at a recent San Salvador conference, describing plans for a “freedom tech stack” across finance, intelligence, communications and energy.

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USDT market value reached $185 billion from $5 billion in 2020, serving 500 million users as the main bridge between cryptocurrency and dollars.

The company generates tens of billions of dollars in annual profit from returns on assets backing USDT, which it retains rather than distributing to token holders.

Hiring spans AI filmmakers to regulatory affairs leads

Tether’s expansion extends beyond engineering roles. LinkedIn job listings show openings for AI filmmakers in Italy, venture investment associates in the United Arab Emirates, and regulatory affairs leads in Ghana and Brazil.

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The company registered in El Salvador with a base in Switzerland operates through a small executive circle that has shaped its direction.

A new London-based team now oversees finance and operations under chief financial officer Simon McWilliams. Employees work with limited visibility into other teams outside occasional gatherings in El Salvador or Lugano.

Conference exhibits displayed products including MOS bitcoin mining operating system, QVAC platform for AI agents, and WDK wallets enabling AI agents to accept Tether.

Investments include $775 million in Rumble, the right-leaning YouTube challenger that hosts Truth Social through its cloud service.

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Tether shifted headquarters to El Salvador last year, welcomed by pro-crypto president Nayib Bukele.

Previous bases included Isle of Man and British Virgin Islands. The company is building an office tower in El Salvador where executives maintain close relationships with the Bukele administration.

Trump administration ties raise scrutiny ahead of funding round

Tether maintains close ties to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose bank Cantor Fitzgerald serves as custodian for Tether’s US Treasury holdings and holds an investment in the company.

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Brandon Lutnick, who succeeded his father as bank chair, attended the El Salvador conference and called Ardoino “one of Cantor’s closest partners and a close personal friend.”

The company hired experienced American lobbyists and recruited former Trump administration members for its US expansion.

A $15 billion to $20 billion funding round targeting $500 billion valuation faced pushback from some investors.

Tether publishes quarterly attestations from accounting firm BDO Italia but does not provide full audits.

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A 2021 settlement with state and federal authorities addressed claims Tether misrepresented assets backing USDT’s dollar peg.

New York District Attorney and State Attorney General Letitia James sent a letter to Democratic lawmakers raising concerns that Tether provides law enforcement assistance only in limited circumstances.

Tether said it works closely with American enforcement agencies voluntarily despite lacking blanket legal obligations that bind US-regulated financial institutions.

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Aave V4 Launches on Ethereum Mainnet

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Aave V4 Launches on Ethereum Mainnet


Announced at EthCC in Cannes, the upgrade enables institution-specific borrowing environments, structured credit products, and RWA-backed lending within a unified liquidity system.

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Australia passes crypto regulation requiring exchanges to obtain financial services licenses

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Australia passes crypto regulation requiring exchanges to obtain financial services licenses

Australia passed legislation on Wednesday, creating its first comprehensive regulatory framework for digital assets that requires crypto exchanges and custody providers to obtain financial services licenses.

The Corporations Amendment (Digital Assets Framework) Bill 2025 cleared both houses on April 1, bringing firms that hold digital assets on behalf of customers into the existing Australian Financial Services Licence regime.

Australia’s bill creates two new regulated categories under the Corporations Act: digital asset platforms, which hold crypto on behalf of users, and tokenized custody platforms, which hold real-world assets and issue a corresponding digital token.

Operators of both must obtain an Australian Financial Services License from ASIC, bringing them under the same core rules as brokers or fund managers, including requirements to safeguard client assets, provide standardized disclosures, avoid misleading conduct, and maintain dispute resolution and compensation systems.

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Instead of regulating crypto itself, the law targets the companies in the middle that control customer funds, aiming to reduce risks like commingling, insolvency, and misuse of assets that have caused losses in past crypto failures.

Research from the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Center and industry groups estimates Australia could generate as much as A$24 billion annually from tokenized markets, payments, and digital assets, roughly 1% of GDP. Under the previous regulatory path, the country was on track to capture just A$1 Billion of that by 2030.

A Kraken spokesperson said the law provides a “top-down signal” that Australia is serious about digital assets, adding that clearer rules would give firms confidence to invest and expand locally.

Kate Cooper, CEO of OKX Australia and co-chair of the Digital Economy Council of Australia, called the bill a “pivotal moment,” saying it establishes a foundation for institutional participation and long-term capital allocation.

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Price of tungsten, sulfur and helium

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How the Iran war is squeezing metals markets and key industries

Almonty’s tungsten mine in Sangdong, South Korea, in March 2026.

Almonty

BEIJING — The Iran war is squeezing a global commodities market already pressured by China’s export controls and stockpiling efforts.

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Prices of three niche elements — tungsten, sulfur and helium — have climbed sharply in recent weeks.

While none of the commodities are traded as widely as oil, the surge indicates how ripple effects from the Middle East conflict could end up restricting production of the semiconductors that power artificial intelligence advances.

Tungsten, a metal nearly as hard as a diamond, creates the electrical connection in the core of a semiconductor chip. Sulfuric acid, a byproduct of sulfur, cleans chip wafers. Helium enables smooth production of semiconductors since the gas prevents unwanted chemical reactions in the manufacturing process.

Those are just some of the ways in which the three elements have become critical for modern manufacturing, including for defense.

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Beijing started to ramp up its control over the critical supplies even before the Iran war started on Feb. 28, partly as tensions with the U.S. escalated over the last few years.

China started restricting tungsten exports just over a year ago, and in December called for tighter limits on sulfuric acid exports. Helium, a gas that’s difficult to store, saw the volume of Chinese imports rise by 15.7% in 2025, after a nearly 65% surge in 2024, according to Wind Information.

The Iran war and the ensuing constraints on the Strait of Hormuz, a critical Middle East shipping route for energy and chemicals, has tipped some oversupply situations into undersupply, while exacerbating existing shortages.

How the Iran war is squeezing metals markets and key industries

Prices of the three commodities have jumped in some cases by more than oil. The widely used fossil fuel has climbed by more than 50% in March, putting Brent on track for a record month.

“While the Chinese supply chain is being viewed as more resilient than many peers, the risk of disruption in chemicals as raw materials for manufacturers in selected segments is higher than expected based on the feedback,” Goldman Sachs analysts said in a report late last week, citing nearly 40 commodity-related meetings and site visits in China.

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Tungsten

Tungsten hit a record high of over $3,000 late last week, marking a surge of well over 50% for the month and more than tripling in price since late December. That’s based on the industry benchmark called “ammonium para tungstate (APT)” in metric ton units, or MTU, from Fastmarket, as quoted by tungsten miner Almonty.

Almonty officially reopened a large tungsten mine in Sangdong, South Korea, earlier this month, and plans to start producing some tungsten this year at a project in the U.S. state of Montana.

The company’s CEO Lewis Black told CNBC that defense sector demand for tungsten has been “extremely strong” since the beginning of last year, but that there’s been no notable change despite the Iran war.

“There’s no material to stockpile. That’s probably the biggest change,” he said.

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Sulfur

The price of sulfuric acid in Africa is now at least 30% higher than it was prior to the war, and is still rising, the Goldman Sachs analysts said, citing a local Chinese miner in Africa.

Other assessments point to a milder rise in prices.

China sulfur prices, including cost and freight, climbed by about 13% from early March to $621 per tonne as of March 26, according to S&P Global Platts.

“A 2-3 month effective blockade would likely become a severe supply shock, especially as freight/insurance stay elevated and Middle East-origin cargoes become harder to execute,” Pan Yuya, lead analyst for sulfur and phosphate raw materials at S&P Global Energy, and Isaac Zhao, senior principal analyst, China fertilizers at S&P Global Energy, said in a March 20 note.

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The S&P analysts said that around 56% of China’s sulfur imports came from the Middle East in 2025.

“Even prior to the Middle East conflict, sulfur prices were rising sharply as the market tightened. With sulfur prices now at fresh record highs, the ‘super squeeze’ in this rather obscure commodity in supply warrants further examination,” HSBC analysts said in a March 16 report.

Helium

Helium prices have roughly doubled since the Iran war began, according to Fitch Ratings.

As most trading occurs through long-term private contracts between industrial gas suppliers and manufacturers, it is difficult to pinpoint industry-wide prices, said Shelley Jang, Fitch’s director of Asia-Pacific corporate ratings.

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Iranian missile attacks this month crippled a key industrial center in Qatar, which produces about one-third of the world’s helium.

That implies helium supply won’t be restored anytime soon, pointed out Christopher Ecclestone, principal and mining strategist at Hallgarten & Company.

In one indication of further market tightness, prices of helium in China’s Henan province have reversed a downturn this year to climb from a Feb. 28 low of 545 yuan ($78.85) a bottle to 600 yuan ($86.81), according to Wind Information.

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Shortages caused by the Iran war are the latest supply chain disruption to rock global markets, which faced similar shocks from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the Covid-19 pandemic. That’s pushed companies to diversify, and countries such as China to ramp up stockpiling plans.

“Access to supplies of certain physical materials where production and processing is concentrated in China will become more frequent topics of negotiations with Beijing,” Rhodium Group said in a March 24 report.

Limited price transparency also means the shortage could be worse than available numbers suggest.

Tungsten and helium prices have been surging, “but you don’t have anyone on the buy side saying, ‘oh my goodness, we don’t have enough product,’” Ecclestone said. “Defense contractors should have warehouses of tungsten, but they don’t.”

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“The world has got lazy. It thinks life is like a supermarket, the product is a pack of cornflakes or a few tons of sulfuric acid,” he said. “The supermarket of commodities has had a few of the aisles chopped down.”

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Valinor Raises $25M Seed Round to Bring Private Credit Onchain

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Valinor Raises $25M Seed Round to Bring Private Credit Onchain


The ex-Blackstone team wants to move beyond crypto-collateralized loans and into ‘real economy credit’ as the tokenized RWA sector continues to grow.

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Fidelity says Bitcoin’s Cycle Drawdown is the Mildest Yet

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Fidelity says Bitcoin’s Cycle Drawdown is the Mildest Yet

Bitcoin has declined by about 50% this market cycle, far less than in previous cycles, Fidelity Digital Assets said, adding this trend could continue over time. 

Bitcoin’s post-all-time-high drawdowns have historically been steep, at about 80% to 90%, but this cycle has been about 50%, Fidelity Digital Assets research analyst Zack Wainwright said Tuesday.

One can see the “diminishing returns” that have developed from cycle to cycle when looking at Bitcoin’s price performance from the perspective of the previous all-time high, he said.

“Each cycle has been less dramatic to the upside than the previous,” he said. “Downside risk has been less dramatic in 2026, the current cycle, as well,” he added. 

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Bitcoin’s price hit its current cycle low of just over $60,000 on Feb. 6, a decline of 52% from its Oct. 6 all-time high of about $126,000, according to TradingView. It is currently down 46% from its peak six months ago. 

The previous cycle saw a much larger decline of 77%, from the 2021 all-time high of $69,000 to a bear market low just below $16,000 in November 2022. 

Bitcoin may bottom in late September

Fidelity’s assessment that this Bitcoin cycle is notably shallower than prior cycles “indicates a maturing market with reduced volatility and stronger institutional confidence,” Nick Ruck, director of LVRG Research, told Cointelegraph on Wednesday. 

“This shift signals that Bitcoin is changing from a speculative asset toward a more stable store of value, potentially paving the way for greater adoption in the future.”

Related: Bitcoin’s $10K range expected to hold until spot traders show up: Data

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Meanwhile, Alphractal founder Joao Wedson observed Tuesday that Bitcoin’s top occurred 534 days after the last halving, a shorter span than in the previous cycle.

This “decaying pattern” across cycles suggests the historical bottom may occur between 912 and 922 days after the halving, which “points to a bottom in late September or early October 2026,” he said. 

BTC is below key daily moving averages 

Bitcoin remains below the key 50-day and 200-day exponential moving averages, two long-term trend indicators. 

It is hovering at the 200-week EMA, around $68,000, which has served as a key level of support during previous market downturns. 

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BTC remains below key daily moving averages. Source: TradingView

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