Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said the stablecoin giant now holds around 150,000 Bitcoin, worth roughly $11.5 billion at current prices, a figure that exceeds what the company's own reserve disclosures imply by some 50,000 coins.

"We have give or take 150,000 bitcoin ourselves. It's not much, but it's honest work," Ardoino said during a keynote at the Plan ₿ Forum in Lugano, Switzerland, the city where Tether has run a Bitcoin and stablecoin adoption program since 2022.

The claim is notable because it doesn't square neatly with the paper trail. Tether's third-quarter reserve attestation, which covers the assets backing its USDT stablecoin, lists $8.37 billion of Bitcoin valued at $83,621 per coin, implying roughly 100,060 BTC.

That leaves about 50,000 coins, worth close to $3.8 billion, that its public filings do not yet account for. Ardoino did not say where the additional Bitcoin is held or when it was acquired, so his comment doesn't indicate a fresh purchase of that size, and Tether has long maintained that its corporate Bitcoin investments sit separately from the reserves supporting USDT.

The stablecoin issuer has been accumulating Bitcoin for years. In May 2023, Tether said it would funnel up to 15% of its net realized operating profits into Bitcoin, and that it would custody the coins itself rather than rely on third-party custodians.

The strategy has been fueled by staggering profits: the company reported $1.5 billion in net operating profit in the third quarter alone, and it has posted billion-dollar quarterly profits throughout the year while its USDT supply has kept growing.

The broader reserve picture, as laid out in the Q3 report, shows $191.45 billion in assets against $183.50 billion in liabilities, leaving an excess cushion of $7.95 billion, nearly double the $4.11 billion buffer it reported in June. U.S. Treasury bills remain the bulk of reserves at about $132.4 billion.

The transparency gap is a sensitive subject for Tether, which has faced years of scrutiny over whether USDT is fully backed. The company began its first full financial audit with KPMG this year, a long-awaited step toward addressing those doubts.

Ardoino also used the Lugano stage to tout Tether's scale, saying the company now serves more than 730 million users worldwide and is adding roughly 30 million wallets a quarter, as he pitched a suite of open-source technologies funded by its profits.