One of Tether’s Bank Partners Caught Up in Assets Seizure

On the surface, Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer in the world, might appear to be a formidable force in global finance. It owns more than $100 billion in U.S. Treasury bills, mostly held at Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment bank formerly led by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick.

But a U.S. government seizure of bank accounts held in the name of an obscure company based in Sacramento, Calif., in recent weeks shows how Tether still relies on a web of sometimes unstable intermediaries to facilitate transactions, thanks to challenges it has faced opening accounts directly at major U.S. banks. And that has exposed Tether to problems at those intermediaries.