Tether is taking steps to become one of the best Bitcoin miners in the world. The $87 billion stablecoin company is making a major investment in an already highly competitive industry.
Tether Enters the Bitcoin Mining Industry
The company plans to spend about half a billion dollars in the next six months, both building its own mining facilities and acquiring shares in other companies, Paolo Ardoino, the company's new CEO, said in an interview.
The investment includes part of the $610 million loan facility Tether provided to publicly traded Bitcoin mining company Northern Data AG this month after purchasing shares of the Frankfurt-based firm in September.
Tether makes money from managing U.S. Treasury bills and other assets in USDT's $87 billion reserve and had accumulated about $3.2 billion in excess cash as of Sept. 30.
It used some of its profits to invest more than $800 million this year in various areas related to industry research, according to a quarterly report of its accounts published Oct. 31, including Bitcoin.
Ardoino said Tether is building Bitcoin mines in Uruguay, Paraguay and El Salvador, and the capacity of each site varies between 40 and 70 megawatts.
Stating that Tether's goal is to increase its share of the total computing power to run the Bitcoin network to 1%, Ardoino refused to specify a time frame to achieve this goal.
This compares with the largest publicly traded Bitcoin mining company, Marathon Digital Holdings, which has a share of about 4%.
*This is not investment advice.
