Former Tether CIO Richard Heathcote seeks to sell part of 1.26% stake as USDT faces MiCA pressure

Richard Heathcote, Tether’s former chief investment officer, is looking to sell part of his 1.26% stake in the stablecoin issuer, according to a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the matter. For anyone tracking stablecoin ownership, or the parts of the market where USDT still clears and where it no longer does, that is the more interesting bit than the headline.

1. Heathcote stepped down as Tether’s chief investment officer in March and moved into an advisory role after overseeing the company’s investment portfolio. Bloomberg said the planned transaction would cover only part of his 1.26% ownership stake.
2. Tether issues USDt (USDT), the world’s largest stablecoin by market capitalization. DefiLlama data cited in the report puts USDT’s circulating supply at roughly $184 billion, which is about 59% of the stablecoin market.
3. The planned sale could provide a rare look at ownership in Tether, which remains privately held even as it has become one of crypto’s most profitable companies. In practice, that means any ownership move gets attention because there is no public equity market to give you a clean read on who owns what.
4. The timing also matters because Tether is under regulatory pressure in Europe. USDT has been delisted by a growing number of MiCA-authorized platforms after Tether chose not to comply with the European Union’s crypto framework, and Revolut said this month that it will remove the stablecoin from its platform.
5. Elsewhere in crypto, the IPO talk continues, but with a lot of footnotes. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino has said the company does not need to go public, while Kraken has taken several steps toward a listing, including a confidential draft registration statement filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed IPO in November 2025. Bloomberg later reported that Kraken’s IPO plans could be pushed back until 2027 after layoffs tied to the company’s expanding use of artificial intelligence. Bithumb, meanwhile, said in April that it is delaying its IPO until after 2028.