The issuer of the leading stablecoin USDT, Tether, made a historic move by temporarily displacing Ethereum from its position as the second-largest cryptocurrency. Tether's peak market capitalization reached $186.07 billion, surpassing Ethereum's figure, which stood at $185.58 billion at the time.

This phenomenon clearly reflects current sentiment in the crypto market. Amid overall turbulence and weakness in altcoins, market participants, including institutional players, prefer to park their funds in stablecoins. Users note that USDT has come to serve not just as a store of value, but as a primary tool for operational liquidity for settlements and trading, offering greater stability compared to volatile assets and even some national currencies.

The stablecoin's success is underpinned by strong fundamental financial performance and Tether's aggressive growth strategy. In the first quarter of 2026, the company's net profit exceeded $1 billion, while its reserve buffer reached a record $8.2 billion, with the U.S. Treasury bond portfolio amounting to $141 billion.

Over the past year, Tether has transformed from a niche issuer into a diversified technology conglomerate. The company launched the non-custodial wallet tether.wallet supporting Bitcoin and its proprietary tokens, upgraded its modular mining infrastructure, and unveiled a major update to the QVAC AI platform featuring local video generation and brain-computer interfaces. In addition, together with its partner Fasset, Tether issued a Visa card with cashback in tokenized gold XAUT.

Aiming to strengthen its position, Tether filed trademark applications in South Korea and hired around 150 new specialists, focusing on engineering, artificial intelligence, and regulatory matters. Concurrently, the company is streamlining its product lineup by shutting down the Alloy platform and discontinuing the aUSDT stablecoin, in order to focus all resources on developing its core assets — USDT and XAUT.