The Cantor Fitzgerald-led process is the first time Tether has opened its cap table meaningfully since founding. The asking price would make the stablecoin issuer worth more than every US bank except JPMorgan Chase — and investors have until late April to decide.
Tether has given prospective investors until late April to commit to its $500 billion private capital raise, a deadline the stablecoin issuer set to force a decision on a fundraise that has been stalling since last autumn. The Cantor Fitzgerald-led process is the first time Tether has opened its cap table meaningfully to outside capital since the company's founding, and the asking price would make it worth more than every US bank except JPMorgan Chase. It would also make it the most expensive private company in the world at a valuation multiple of roughly 50 times 2025 net profit.
The raise has been difficult from the start. Investors are being asked to accept a price — around 2.7 percent of assets under management — that public peers would struggle to justify. Circle, Tether's closest comparable, trades at lower book multiples. BlackRock trades at lower book multiples. And Tether has no IPO plans, which means there is no stated exit path for primary investors willing to write a cheque at this level. The company and its advisors — Cantor Fitzgerald and Clear Street, with Los Angeles-based Arcadian Capital handling some introductions — have been working the deal since September 2025 and have struggled to close the book.
The new deadline is a forcing function. Tether's executives have told prospective investors that the raise will either close by late April at the announced price or be restructured. Earlier reporting suggested the company was open to cutting the target from an initial $15-20 billion down to as little as $5 billion if demand failed to materialise. Whether that represents a genuine softening or a negotiating posture is the question every allocator on the receiving end is trying to answer.
What Tether has going for it is cash flow. The company disclosed more than $10 billion in net profit for 2025, following the record $6.2 billion it reported for 2024. Most of that income is earned on the Treasury bill yield generated by the $184 billion of USDT currently in circulation. In a world where the Fed funds rate is still above 4 percent, a stablecoin issuer is effectively running a money-market fund with a marketing budget — and Tether's marketing budget has been effective enough to dominate the category outside the United States. USDC, its closest competitor, has around $63 billion in circulation. The rest of the field — USDP, PYUSD, the new USDS product — measures in single-digit billions each.
What Tether does not have is transparency, at least not yet. The company has hired KPMG to conduct its first full financial audit, with PwC assisting in preparing internal systems for the work. Both appointments were disclosed in March. A completed audit would resolve one of the longest-running criticisms of the business — that Tether's reserve attestations, issued quarterly by BDO Italia, fall short of the scrutiny a full audit would apply. For institutional investors being asked to commit hundreds of millions to a $500 billion valuation, the audit timeline is not a nice-to-have; it is the gating condition.
The strategic pitch around the raise is that Tether will deploy the fresh capital beyond its core stablecoin business. The company has been explicit about plans to expand into AI compute, commodity trading desks, and media assets. It already owns stakes in Bitdeer, a bitcoin mining firm, and a handful of Latin American payments infrastructure companies. The theory is that the $500 billion valuation is not really a stablecoin valuation at all — it is a conglomerate valuation that prices in the optionality of the next five years of acquisitions. Whether that theory survives contact with an institutional cap table is the question the 14-day window is designed to answer.
The GENIUS Act, which Trump signed into law in July 2025, has changed the competitive picture. The law established a federal stablecoin licensing regime and pushed several US banks — including JPMorgan, Citi and Bank of America — into preliminary work on their own dollar tokens. Those issuers will not match Tether's offshore reach, but they will make the domestic market crowded enough that Tether's growth trajectory inside the United States is effectively capped. That has not stopped the company from applying for a US-regulated stablecoin subsidiary under the new framework, and those plans are part of the pitch to prospective investors.
If the April deadline passes without a close, the likely outcome is a lower price, not no deal. Tether has too much cash flow and too much institutional curiosity around it to walk away empty. But a down-round is the clearest signal yet that the market has drawn a line somewhere short of the valuation Tether wants — and that even a business generating $10 billion a year in profit cannot simply pick its own number and expect allocators to accept it.
