Tether closed Q1 with a billion in profit and a hundred ninety billion in reserves, a hundred seventeen of which sit in US Treasury bills. The talking point of the last decade was that crypto would drain dollar hegemony. The thing happened in the opposite direction.

A Salvadoran-incorporated issuer with no central bank charter, no Federal Reserve seat, no obligation to anyone outside its own redemption queue, became one of the largest marginal buyers of US sovereign debt on the planet. Every dollar held in a stablecoin overseas earns four percent for Tether and zero for whoever holds it. The float compounds, the reserves swell, the carry that the Fed manufactures gets harvested by a private actor whose user base is precisely the part of the global population the formal banking system declined to serve.

It is the most efficient eurodollar system ever built and nobody in Basel signed off on it. Capital did not ask. It routed around the regulator, picked up the yield, and rented back the infrastructure the regulator thought it controlled.