Tether’s latest filing puts one number in focus: excess reserves dropped to $4.11 billion at the end of June. That’s about half what it was 3 months earlier, when the tally stood at $8.23 billion. Against roughly $183.64 billion in liabilities, Tether’s cushion is now about 2.2%, a much thinner margin, but still enough to keep assets ahead of outstanding stablecoins. This change comes down to declines in the marked value of assets like bitcoin and gold rather than new holes opening in core reserves.
The immediate market question is whether that accounting deterioration is already showing up as stress elsewhere in crypto plumbing. So far, the cleaner read from Ethereum-linked market structure is no.