Part IThe Story
The inventory has the precision of a confession. In 1995, officers of the Guardia di Finanza in Milan closed an investigation coordinated by the public prosecutor Enrica Manfredini and listed what they had seized: 24,124 floppy disks loaded with Microsoft software. 1,906 Microsoft user manuals. Sheets of Microsoft-branded stickers. Printing machines. Hundreds of computers the investigators said were stolen. The master disks, the dischetti matrice, from which the copies were struck. And eighty-four certificates of authenticity, none of them authentic.
A certificate of authenticity is a small object with one job, which is to be believed. It does nothing for the software. It does not speed up a hard drive or prevent a crash. It asserts that the thing in your hand is what it claims to be, and it asks you to extend to the asserter a confidence you cannot verify yourself. The forty-four people named in the case were accused, according to documents later reviewed by Il Fatto Quotidiano and the European Investigative Collaborations network, of forming a criminal association that counterfeited and fenced Microsoft software across northern Italy. The assets seized were valued at 5.1 billion lire, about €2.5 million. Investigators estimated the group had already earned roughly another 5 billion lire. One of the people investigators described as a leading figure ran a hardware distributor called Point G Srl, which they said had moved counterfeit software "in large quantities" and traded computer hardware to the men who supplied it.
He was a doctor, or had been. He settled. In 1996, according to Il Fatto, he paid 100 million lire to close the matter, roughly €50,000 in today's money. Decades later, when the Financial Times asked about the episode, the company he by then ran explained that he "had unintentionally loaded unlicensed Microsoft software on the computers he sold, after trusting the assurances of a supplier, and had collaborated with the authorities after the investigation was started." Antonio Zonca, his business partner at the time, recalls it more simply. "He always denied everything," Zonca told the regional desk of the Italian broadcaster RAI. "He got out of it, yes. By paying."
Thirty-one years after the seizure, in March 2026, Forbes recalculated its real-time billionaires list on the strength of a new valuation for a company called Tether, and Giancarlo Devasini of Casale Monferrato became the richest person in Italy. His estimated fortune of $89.3 billion was nearly double that of Giovanni Ferrero, the Nutella heir, a fellow Piedmontese whose family had held or contested the top of that list for most of two decades. It placed him in the low twenties among all the living rich, in a range where the rankings shift by a place or two from one week's publication to the next. It made him, by a wide margin, the wealthiest former plastic surgeon on earth.
The asset under nearly all of that money is a token called USDT, a digital dollar. Its value depends, as the Wall Street Journal put it with admirable plainness in 2023, on a simple notion: that "Tether the company will swap $1 for one tether, or one tether for $1." It is a promise of equivalence. It is, in the most literal sense, a certificate that the thing in your hand is what it claims to be. More than $180 billion of these promises now circulate. Tether has never released the results of a full audit of the reserves behind them.
Devasini does not give interviews. He has no social media presence to speak of. The Swiss daily Le Temps asked him for an interview in early 2025 and noted, without apparent surprise, that it was no exception to his rule. An Italian business magazine summarized the public record of his face and voice in six words: Nessuna intervista. Nessuna foto ufficiale. In the chat rooms of early bitcoin, he went by Merlin.
By the Numbers
The Arithmetic of a Promise
$89.3BDevasini's estimated net worth, Forbes, 2026
~45%Reported stake in Tether (estimates range from 40% to 47%)
$13BTether net profit in 2024
$113BU.S. Treasuries Tether reported holding at end of 2024
119,756Bitcoins stolen from Bitfinex in August 2016
$850MBitfinex funds lost at Crypto Capital Corp.
24,124Counterfeit-software floppy disks seized in the 1995 Microsoft case
The Exploitation of a Whim
He was born in Turin in 1964, but the town that formed him was Casale Monferrato, an hour east in the wine hills of Piedmont, where he attended the liceo Palli and where, by the account of the people who stayed behind, he was rarely seen again after the 1990s. His father was a gynecologist. The son followed him into medicine, took a degree from the University of Milan in 1990, and specialized in plastic surgery. He practiced for about two years.
What he said about leaving is one of the very few things he has said in public at all, preserved in the Italian press from what Money.it calls "a rare interview": Tutto il mio lavoro mi sembrava un imbroglio, lo sfruttamento di un capriccio. All my work seemed to me a swindle, the exploitation of a whim.
It is a remarkable sentence for a future billionaire to have let slip, and it repays reading twice. Imbroglio is not quite "fraud" in the legal sense; it is closer to a con, a muddle, a deceit that both parties are half in on. A patient arrives with a whim, a dissatisfaction with a nose, and the surgeon converts that whim into revenue by producing an appearance. The body underneath is unchanged in every respect that matters to its function. The young doctor, by his own account, found this distasteful enough to walk away from the most lucrative specialty his profession offered. The official version, written into his Bitfinex biography in 2018, is more decorous: he "soon found himself disillusioned with the quandaries of his specialty and left his practice to pursue a career more congruent with his passion for technology."
Both accounts agree on the timing. They disagree, quietly, on everything else, which will become a pattern.
The Bitfinex biography has him leaving medicine, traveling to the Far East "seeking entrepreneurial opportunities in the booming computer hardware business," and returning to Milan in 1992 to found Point-G Srl, importing parts from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan for distribution across Europe. Italian reporters tell it differently. RAI's investigative program Farwest rewound the tape to the mid-1980s, when, it reported, a twenty-year-old Giancarlo Devasini was already importing computer components. Zonca, who was there, places the hardware business in Casale in the 1980s, in a room he describes as being "in the middle of the cats," where his friend "had the right intuitions." If the reporters are right, the medical student and the parts importer were the same young man, working the same years, and the surgeon who found his craft a swindle had been running a trading business on the side the whole time.
I cannot settle the chronology from the record available. It is the kind of gap that, in another biography, would be trivial. In this one it is the subject.
Out of Spec
The business that made Devasini his first real money was built on a category of product the semiconductor industry calls "out of spec": memory chips that come off the line failing to meet the manufacturer's stated tolerances. Not dead. Not counterfeit. Merely less than they were supposed to be. Solo SpA, which Devasini founded in 1997, specialized, in the words of his corporate biography, in "sorting, rating and reselling factory 'out of specs lots' from DRAM giants Micron Technology and Taiwan Semiconductor." It bought the rejects in bulk, tested them, graded them, and sold them to buyers who needed memory that worked well enough.
It is an honest trade and a clever one, a business of arbitrage between what a thing claims to be and what it actually is, and of knowing precisely where the difference stops mattering. It grew. Solo became the parent of a small constellation: Compass Srl in 1999, Alcosto SpA in 2000, Freshbit SpA in 2002, Acme SpA in 2004. There was also, at some point, a food-delivery venture called Delitzia, which ran a blog about organic food, a detail so incongruous that it reads like a misprint until one remembers that every hardware distributor in Lombardy in the early 2000s was trying to become something else. By the corporate biography's count, the Solo group reached more than one hundred employees and €113 million in annual revenue.
Then the stories diverge again.
In the Bitfinex version: "Shortly before the financial crisis hit in 2008, Giancarlo sold Solo and retired. Several months later, Giancarlo realised that he was unfit for retirement."
In the version assembled by Italian business press: in 2008, a fire of uncertain origin destroyed the headquarters of his companies on the outskirts of Milan. The balance sheets closed in the red. The companies were liquidated. Swiss and Italian reporting describes, more broadly, "an anthology of companies opened and closed," and Italian Wikipedia's summary is brisk: several of his companies later went bankrupt.
These are not necessarily contradictory. A man can sell the parent and watch the subsidiaries burn. But the official account has the elegance of a well-graded chip, every flaw sorted out of the lot before it reaches the customer, and the reported one has the char of a real building. What survives both versions is a man in his mid-forties, wealthy enough not to work, unwilling to stop, standing in the ashes of a business built on knowing exactly how far a product could fall short of its label before anyone minded.
— Antonio Zonca, Devasini's former business partner, to RAI (translated from Italian)Why is he so reserved? Because he's shrewd. He's not an idiot like me.
Zonca's interview with RAI's Piedmont desk in February 2025 is the closest thing in the public record to a view of Devasini from the inside of his early life, and it is notable mostly for its tenderness. The two men were partners and friends, Zonca said, "before a divergence of views that separated us." The divergence was the Microsoft case. "We didn't know anything; we were stunned," he said of the partners. "Trust failed." He still calls Devasini "a very capable person." When asked when he last saw him, he hesitated over the answer. "I think I glimpsed him at his mother's funeral," he said. "But we didn't speak."
Merlin, Transfixed
"When Giancarlo accidentally discovered bitcoin in early 2012," the biography says, "he was transfixed and quickly realised that bitcoin is where his future lay." The word accidentally is doing a good deal of work. Later accounts describe forum posts from that year in which he offered CDs and DVDs for sale in exchange for bitcoin, which would make him, at the very least, one of the few people in the history of the currency to have entered it as a merchant rather than a speculator, a man looking for a new rail on which to move goods.
The rail he found was Bitfinex. In late 2012 he met Raphael Nicolle, an IT technician from Paris who had assembled an exchange out of the code and wreckage of Bitcoinica, an earlier trading platform that had collapsed. Nicolle was a builder, not a businessman. He would stay on as a developer until early 2017 and then recede from the story almost completely, the way founders of crypto infrastructure tend to recede, his name surviving mainly in footnotes. Bitfinex launched in December 2012 as a peer-to-peer margin-lending platform for bitcoin, designed for high-volume professional trading, one of the first venues of its kind. Devasini became a partner and its chief financial officer. Its later CEO, Jean-Louis van der Velde, a self-described "technologist and serial entrepreneur," would be credited as a co-founder as of 2013.
What Devasini brought, according to the company's own account, was this: he "was instrumental in establishing banking relationships, attracting key personnel and re-domiciling the exchange." Each of those three phrases would later become a chapter of the company's crisis history. Banking relationships would be the thing it could not keep. Personnel would be the small, close circle that would end up owning nearly all of it. Re-domiciling, the art of choosing which country your company lives in, would become a near-permanent condition, a migration from the British Virgin Islands to Hong Kong to Zug to Lugano to San Salvador.
The other piece arrived in 2014. In July of that year, a Santa Monica startup called Realcoin launched a dollar-pegged token on the Omni protocol, a layer built atop bitcoin. Its co-founders were Reeve Collins, Craig Sellars, and Brock Pierce, a former child actor who had gone into online gaming and then crypto, and who would later run for president of the United States. In November, Realcoin rebranded as Tether, "to better reflect its mission of 'tethering' digital tokens to real-world currency value," and announced a partnership with Bitfinex.
The partnership was a marriage of ownership, not commerce. The Paradise Papers, the 2017 leak of records from the offshore law firm Appleby, showed that Appleby had helped Devasini and Phil Potter, Bitfinex's chief strategy officer, establish Tether in the British Virgin Islands in 2014. Potter was listed as a director, Devasini as a shareholder. By the time the leak surfaced, both companies had spent years insisting they were separate entities. They had common shareholders and common management. A later Bitfinex ownership table would list Devasini at 43 percent of the exchange. His stake in Tether has been reported at between 40 and 47 percent.
The company's own history is unusually candid about what the token was for. Tether, it says, "began as a simple yet revolutionary idea: to enable seamless arbitrage between crypto exchanges with USD₮, overcoming the banking system's inefficiencies." The phrase is worth unpacking. Moving real dollars between crypto exchanges in 2014 meant international wires, compliance reviews, correspondent banks, days of delay, and the ever-present risk that a bank would simply decline to deal with you. A token that stood in for a dollar could cross that distance in minutes. It did not need the banking system to cooperate. It needed only to be believed.
For Pierce and his co-founders, Realcoin had been one venture among many. For Devasini it became the venture. The man who had sorted out-of-spec memory by the lot, who had once traded hardware for software of uncertain provenance, now controlled, alongside his partners, both an exchange and the currency its customers used to trade on it.
The Haircut
The first breach was small enough to survive without comment. In May 2015, hackers took 1,500 bitcoins from Bitfinex, then worth about $400,000. A year later, in June 2016, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission fined the exchange $75,000 for offering illegal off-exchange financed commodity transactions and for failing to register as a futures commission merchant. These were the ordinary costs of doing business offshore in an industry that had not yet decided what it was.
On August 2, 2016, someone walked out of Bitfinex with 119,756 bitcoins. At the time they were worth about $72 million. The coins had been held in segregated customer wallets secured with BitGo, a Palo Alto custody firm whose multiple-signature technology was supposed to make exactly this impossible. Bitcoin's price dropped 20 percent. Bitfinex halted all trading and withdrawals.
What happened next is the most instructive decision in the company's early history, and probably the most characteristic. Rather than declaring bankruptcy, as Mt. Gox had done two years earlier, and rather than absorbing the loss only in the accounts that had been robbed, Bitfinex spread the damage across every customer on the platform. Every account balance was cut by 36 percent, including the balances of customers whose wallets had never been touched. In exchange, each customer received a new instrument, a BFX token, one for each dollar lost: an IOU, tradable, with the implicit promise that the company would redeem it.
It is worth sitting with the audacity of this. The exchange converted a theft into a debt, the debt into a security, and the security into a market. Customers who believed in Bitfinex could hold their BFX and wait. Customers who did not could sell to those who did, at a discount. Some BFX holders were later offered conversion into shares of iFinex, the parent company. And in April 2017, eight months after the hack, Bitfinex announced that every remaining BFX token had been redeemed in full.
The loss, in other words, had been socialized, tokenized, and repaid, and the exchange had emerged with its customer base largely intact. It was a demonstration of a principle that would recur for the next decade: in a market whose currency is belief, the first thing to protect is not the balance sheet but the continuity of belief.
The coda arrived six years later and was so strange that it reads like satire. On February 8, 2022, federal agents arrested a New York couple, Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, and seized bitcoin linked to the hack, by then worth $3.6 billion. Morgan, it emerged, had a parallel career as a rapper under the name Razzlekhan, describing her persona in terms the Guardian quoted with evident relish: "sexy horror comedy." In August 2023, both pleaded guilty. Lichtenstein admitted he had been the original hacker. Reuters summarized their methods in a headline that could have been the title of a short story: "Buried gold, burning trash." The stolen coins had grown to be worth some $4.5 billion. The commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, Charles Rettig, called it "the largest single financial seizure recorded by the federal government." In November 2024, Lichtenstein was sentenced to five years; Morgan to eighteen months.
Bitfinex had prepared for that day too. In 2019 it had issued a new token, UNUS SED LEO, and promised that if the stolen funds were ever recovered, it would use them to repurchase and burn outstanding LEO within eighteen months. When the arrests were announced, LEO jumped more than 50 percent. A theft had become, through two successive acts of financial engineering, a call option.
No Bank on Earth
The trouble that nearly ended everything did not arrive through a hacker's terminal. It arrived through a fax machine at a bank in San Francisco.
In April 2017, Wells Fargo stopped processing wire transfers for Bitfinex's Taiwanese banks, which had been relaying the exchange's dollars to the rest of the world. Shortly afterward, Bitfinex said, the Taiwanese banks cut off all its international wires. The exchange's U.S. dollar withdrawals slowed and then seized. Customers could not get their money out through ordinary channels. Bitfinex began moving between banks in other countries without telling customers where their money was held. Noble Bank International of San Juan, Puerto Rico, reportedly handled some of its dollar business in 2017 and 2018, until Noble ran into financial trouble of its own and the relationship ended in September 2018.
The man who had been "instrumental in establishing banking relationships" was now managing their serial collapse. The New York Attorney General would later allege that starting no later than mid-2017, Tether had no access to banking services anywhere in the world, even as it continued to say that every token was backed by a dollar.
And yet 2017 was the most profitable year either company had seen. Bitfinex later reported $333.5 million in gross profit that year against $6.8 million in expenses: $326 million in net profit, of which $246 million was paid out in dividends. A Bloomberg headline put it as "a 97% profit." Bitcoin went on a tear in the second half of the year, and the supply of tethers grew alongside it. In June 2018, academic researchers argued that price manipulation of bitcoin on Bitfinex using tethers accounted for about half of bitcoin's price increase in late 2017. Tether rejected the suggestion. The paper has been argued over ever since.
Critics multiplied. On November 19, 2017, $31 million in tethers were removed from the Tether treasury wallet in what the company described as a hack, and it executed a hard fork to isolate the funds. Bitfinex tweeted: "Bitfinex is solvent and both fiat and crypto withdrawals are functioning as normal." Tether had promised regular audits; in January 2018, it confirmed that its relationship with its auditor, Friedman LLP, had "dissolved" without one. Phil Potter, the chief strategy officer who had co-registered Tether with Devasini four years earlier, left on June 22, 2018. In October 2018, Bitfinex paused fiat deposits for some customers, and the company found it necessary to issue a sentence that no healthy financial institution has ever needed to write: "Bitfinex is not insolvent."
What the public did not yet know was where the money had actually gone.
Unable to hold a normal bank account, Bitfinex had deposited more than $1 billion with a Panamanian payment processor called Crypto Capital Corp., which moved money for crypto firms through a web of accounts held in other names. According to the New York Attorney General's later filing, no contract was ever signed with Crypto Capital. Not a thin contract. None. By 2018, roughly $850 million of Bitfinex's money had become unrecoverable. The Attorney General alleged that Bitfinex knew or suspected the money was gone and did not tell its customers, and that to cover the shortfall it moved hundreds of millions of dollars out of Tether's reserves, the dollars that were supposed to stand behind every token.
The man who shared a stake in the exchange and the stablecoin, who held the CFO title at both, had been on both sides of the loan.
The Crypto Capital story would produce its own baroque supporting cast. On April 30, 2019, federal prosecutors indicted Reggie Fowler, a former NFL team owner, for running an unlicensed money-transmitting business connected to Crypto Capital; he was believed to have failed to return about $850 million to an unnamed client. When investigators searched his office, they found $14,000 in counterfeit currency. A man who had held, through a chain of intermediaries, nearly a billion of Bitfinex's real dollars kept a drawer of fake ones.
One does not need to draw the line back to the eighty-four certificates of authenticity in a Milan evidence room. The line draws itself.
The Attorney General, Letitia James, went public with her inquiry in April 2019. The Financial Times' Izabella Kaminska titled her column "We all become MF Global eventually, Tether edition." Tether acknowledged that USDT was no longer backed only by cash, and that by its own disclosure, cash and equivalents covered roughly 74 percent of tokens in circulation. The market did not run. It wobbled, and then it kept trading.
Settlement came on February 23, 2021: iFinex agreed to pay $18.5 million, without admitting wrongdoing, and to stop trading with New Yorkers. In October 2021, the CFTC fined Tether $41 million for misleading statements about its reserves, and Bitfinex $1.5 million. The commission's sample of the period from June 2016 to February 2019 found Tether holding sufficient fiat reserves to back its tokens only 27.6 percent of the time.
Against $326 million in net profit in a single year, $61 million in penalties across three regulators was not a reckoning. It was a cost of goods sold.
Failure Modes
The English Wikipedia entry for the word tether, before it says anything about money, defines it as "a cord, fixture, or flexible attachment that characteristically anchors something movable to something fixed." It goes on, with the deadpan tone of an engineering manual, to note that "failure modes for tethers are considered in their design." Some safety lanyards, it explains, have "break-away stitching designed into it to prevent material failure and regulate deceleration." And then this, which might be the most precise description of the company's public communications ever written by accident: "A signal tether is a system in which a constant signal designates a positive condition, and its interruption, whether by discontinuation or jamming, conveys a failure."
For years, Tether's constant signal was that it was still there. Every quarter it published an attestation, a snapshot of reserves signed off by an accounting firm, eventually BDO Italia, which is a narrower thing than an audit. An attestation says: on this date, these assets existed. It does not say how they got there, where they were the day before, or whether they will be there tomorrow. It is, if you are being uncharitable, a certificate of authenticity. If you are being fair, it is the most a company can offer when no bank will hold its money and no Big Four firm will audit its books. Tether's chief executive told Reuters in March 2025 that the company was in talks with a Big Four firm about a full reserve audit. As of this writing, none has been published.
The real test came in 2022, and it is the part of the story that the skeptics, who were right about so much, have the most trouble accounting for.
In May of that year, TerraUSD, an algorithmic stablecoin with no dollar reserves at all, collapsed in a few days and took tens of billions of dollars with it. Panic spread to every token that called itself stable. On May 12, USDT traded as low as 95.6 cents. In November, as FTX imploded, it hit 97.7 cents. Holders redeemed in enormous volume, and tethers in circulation fell from a peak of about $83 billion to roughly $68 billion. Tether paid them out, something like $15 billion in dollars, while the industry around it burned. Its exposure was not trivial: a court-appointed examiner in the Celsius bankruptcy later reported that in May 2021 Tether had lent the crypto lender $1.8 billion in tethers against $2.6 billion of collateral, while owning 7.73 percent of its equity. That loan was liquidated. Tether survived. Celsius did not.
The peg held. The break-away stitching worked.
A year later, in August 2023, Chief Judge Laura Taylor Swain of the Southern District of New York dismissed a class action against Tether and Bitfinex, finding that the plaintiff lacked "plausible allegations of injury" because there was no evidence that "USDT had a diminished actual value." It was, in its way, the perfect judicial epitaph for the Tether controversy: whatever had or had not been behind the token, the token itself had kept being worth a dollar.
Then the Federal Reserve raised interest rates from near zero to above five percent, and the business changed shape entirely.
A stablecoin issuer takes in dollars and issues tokens. It pays nothing to the people holding the tokens. It invests the dollars. When short-term U.S. Treasury bills yield nothing, this is a utility. When they yield five percent and you hold $100 billion of them, it is one of the most profitable businesses ever conceived. By the end of 2024, Tether reported holding $113 billion in U.S. Treasuries, directly and indirectly, making it a larger buyer of American government debt than Saudi Arabia or South Korea. Its net profit for 2024 was $13 billion. It employed, by most accounts, somewhere between 200 and 300 people. In 2025 it reported more than $10 billion in profit and, according to Reuters, paid $10.9 billion in dividends.
The custodian of most of those Treasuries was Cantor Fitzgerald, whose former chief executive, Howard Lutnick, became U.S. Commerce Secretary in 2025. According to the Wall Street Journal, Cantor had acquired rights to 5 percent of Tether in 2024, a stake that the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists later estimated could be worth $10 billion. Tether has not confirmed it.
The money that had once moved through a Panamanian processor with no contract now sat with a primary dealer of the U.S. Treasury, run until recently by a member of the President's cabinet. The movable thing had been anchored to the most fixed thing in global finance.
— Renée Jones, Boston College law professor, to the International Consortium of Investigative JournalistsIt's a concern to have that much wealth and power built up within a small group of people with so little disclosure.
An Unusual Crew
In February 2023, the Wall Street Journal published a story based on a cache of documents showing that a group of four men had controlled 86 percent of Tether Holdings. The headline described them as "the unusual crew behind Tether." The adjective was earned. These are not men who came up through the Federal Reserve or Goldman Sachs. Each of them arrived at the center of the world's dollar plumbing from somewhere off to the side, and each of their stories rhymes, in some register, with Devasini's own.
Paolo Ardoino was a computer-science researcher at the University of Genoa earning, by one Italian account, about €800 a month when a job offer from London arrived in 2009. He grew up summering on his grandparents' farm in the province of Savona, and when Fortune visited him he brightened at the memory: "We grew the best tomatoes and asparagus in my region." There were violet asparagus, he said, "very rare and insanely good." He keeps weights and a gym bag in his office. He came into Devasini's orbit in the mid-2010s, became CTO of Bitfinex and Tether in 2017, and in October 2023 succeeded van der Velde as Tether's chief executive. He has been the company's voice ever since: on X, on podcasts, on conference stages, at congressional-adjacent events in Washington. He is the face Devasini declines to have. Forbes estimated his fortune at $3.9 billion in 2024. It is considerably larger now.
Jean-Louis van der Velde, Bitfinex's chief executive and for years Tether's, holds a reported 15 percent of the exchange and was described in Tether materials as a technologist and serial entrepreneur. The public record contains almost nothing else about him. He is the kind of chief executive who appears in filings and almost never in photographs, which in this company counts as conventional.
Stuart Hoegner, general counsel to both companies, holds another reported 15 percent of the exchange and, as of 2023, a Tether stake valued at about $1.2 billion. He is the lawyer who negotiated the settlements, the man who converts each crisis into a sum.
Christopher Harborne, a British-Thai billionaire, holds approximately 12 percent. The Guardian described him in December 2025 as an "intensely private" mega-donor bankrolling Reform UK, Nigel Farage's party. That is the fourth chair at the table: an aviation-fuel investor who quietly funds an insurgent populist movement in British politics.
Around them, at various distances: Brock Pierce, the child actor turned crypto founder who conceived Realcoin and then drifted away from it. Raphael Nicolle, the Paris technician who wrote the exchange. Phil Potter, the strategist who signed the BVI papers and left in 2018. Claudia Lagorio, who joined Bitfinex in 2015 and rose to chief operating officer of both companies. Leonardo Real, a former anti-money-laundering manager at the Bank of Montreal, hired as Tether's chief compliance officer in 2018, the year the company most needed one. Simon McWilliams, appointed CFO in March 2025 when Devasini moved up to chairman. Bo Hines, a former Trump administration official, named in September 2025 to run Tether's U.S. arm and its new American stablecoin, USAT.
What unites the core of this group is not credentials but a shared position: outsiders to institutional finance who built, from a series of offshore registrations and a single persistent promise, an institution that institutional finance now relies upon. Ardoino has articulated where he thinks that institution sits in history, and his vision is not reassuring.
— Paolo Ardoino, Tether CEO, to FortuneOf course, I wish the world would go toward a better place. But the reality is that entire economies—emerging markets, developing countries—are failing.
The point of a dollar token, in this framing, is that it does not depend on any particular country's competence. The thing that made Tether suspect in 2018, its total independence from the banking system, became the thing that made it indispensable in Lagos and Buenos Aires and Istanbul, where people who could not open a dollar account at a local bank could hold USDT on a phone. "People ask for Tether by name," Matt Walsh, of the venture firm Castle Island, told Fortune of his portfolio companies in Africa. "It's become a verb." Tether's own history, with the soft focus of corporate memoir, describes USDT during the pandemic as "a lifeline for millions." Its critics describe the same token, with equal conviction, as the preferred settlement instrument of industrial-scale scam centers in Southeast Asia. Both descriptions, the ICIJ has documented, are accurate.
Ardoino talks about the company. Devasini owns it. In the ICIJ's 2025 reconstruction of Tether's capitalization table, the investigators found "indications that one Tether executive, Giancarlo Devasini, may have recently increased his control over the firm."
Two Piedmontese
There is a particular way that a fortune becomes real in Italy, and it has less to do with money than with lists. For most of the twenty-first century, the top of the Italian rich list was a kind of national family portrait: Ferrero, of Alba, who made chocolate out of Piedmontese hazelnuts; Del Vecchio, who made eyeglasses; Armani, who made suits; the Berlusconi heirs; the Agnelli-Elkanns, who made Fiat and owned Juventus. These were fortunes you could touch. Their products sat on breakfast tables.
Devasini appeared on Forbes' list in April 2024 with $9.2 billion, ranked 270th in the world and fourth in Italy. The Corriere della Sera's Turin edition noted that he had passed Piero Ferrari, son of Enzo, and that his fortune was three times that of John Elkann, head of the Agnelli family's holding company. The headline writers did not quite know what to do with him. Sky TG24 wrote that he had "invented" Tether, which he had not, and that he had entered crypto in 1992, sixteen years before bitcoin existed. Errors of this kind are what happens when the press must profile a man who will not answer the phone.
A year later, in April 2025, his estimate stood at $22.4 billion: third in Italy, behind only Ferrero and Andrea Pignataro, the former Salomon Brothers bond trader who founded ION Group, and ahead of Giorgio Armani. Bilan named him the richest man in the canton of Ticino. Then came the talks, reported in September 2025, to raise $15 to $20 billion from strategic investors for roughly 3 percent of Tether, implying a valuation near $500 billion. By March 2026, Forbes had absorbed that number into its calculations, and the former surgeon passed Pignataro and then Ferrero, becoming the first person outside the confectionery-and-luxury pantheon to top the Italian list in nearly two decades. Corriere Torino ran the story under the headline "Two Piedmontese are the richest in Italy." The paper pointed out that he had roots in Monferrato.
It was not lost on anyone that the two richest men in the country came from neighboring provinces of the same region, or that one had built his fortune from hazelnuts and the other from a promise. Ferrero's product could be audited down to the gram.
By then, Devasini had also bought into the most Piedmontese institution of all. Through Tether, he had acquired roughly 10 percent of Juventus, the Turin football club controlled for a century by the Agnelli family, for about €135 million, according to Il Fatto Quotidiano. Later reports put the stake at around 11.5 percent, making Tether the club's second-largest shareholder, behind Exor, the Agnelli holding company that Elkann runs. The stake carried the stamp of Consob, Italy's securities regulator, a form of official legibility his companies had rarely enjoyed. RAI's regional reporter described it as a suggello, a seal, on "an ascent not free of controversial passages."
Tether bought other Italian things. A 30.4 percent stake in Be Water, the media group founded by the financier Guido Brera, which controls the podcast company Chora Media and the youth-news outlet Will Media. Outside Italy: a $775 million investment in Rumble, the video platform popular with the American right, in December 2024; Bitcoin mining operations in Uruguay; a $610 million credit facility to Northern Data, the Frankfurt-listed computing company; a $100 million stake in the miner Bitdeer; satellites, farmland, telecommunications. On January 1, 2026, Ardoino announced that Tether had bought 8,888 bitcoins, worth about $790 million. In April 2026, Devasini personally disclosed an 8.2 percent stake in Antalpha, a Nasdaq-listed crypto lender. The surplus from the Treasury machine was being converted, steadily and in many currencies at once, into position.
The legal weather never cleared entirely. In October 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported that federal investigators were examining Tether's compliance controls; Tether called the report "based on pure speculation." In December 2025, OffshoreAlert reported that Swan Bitcoin, the firm run by the outspoken Bitcoin investor Cory Klippsten, intended to sue Devasini and van der Velde over alleged self-dealing. In late September 2026, U.S. authorities seized accounts at EQIBank and at a Montana firm linked to Tether; Tether said its exposure was under $64 million. Each time, the signal tether held. Each time, the statement went out that the company was still there.
What Lugano Built
Between 2017 and 2023, the years of the banking collapse, the Crypto Capital loss, the New York investigation, the settlements, the 2022 run and the rate windfall that followed it, Giancarlo Devasini lived in Lugano, on the shore of Lake Lugano in Italian-speaking Switzerland, close enough to Casale to drive in a few hours, far enough to be in another country's tax system. One Italian outlet reported that he ran his billion-dollar business from an office above a sports bar. He made contacts with local politicians. His corporate biography, which still claimed in 2018 that he split his time between London and the French Riviera, did not mention it.
In 2022, the city of Lugano signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding with Tether to promote bitcoin and blockchain technology, an initiative called Plan ₿. Shops began accepting cryptocurrency. An orange, capsule-shaped balloon bearing the program's emblem floated over the town. Not everyone was charmed. A Swiss-German newspaper ran a story about the partnership in April 2025 under the headline "Lugano and 'Plan B': Money for Gelato, Terror and Drugs," and RAI's Farwest found residents worried, in the most practical terms, that Tether might not have enough liquidity to honor every request to swap tokens back into the dollars that had bought them. The company's CEO answered their questions on camera. The chairman did not.
By January 2025, the company had moved its domicile again, to El Salvador, the first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender, where it would be regulated under a digital-asset law written for firms like it. Its executives announced that they would establish residence there too. Property deeds reviewed by the Salvadoran outlet El Faro showed that Devasini co-owns a $2 million house on Tecana Street in San Salvador, holding a half share with Valentina Picozzi, an artist known for her bitcoin-themed work, and that he had registered roughly fifteen Salvadoran companies, some of which reportedly bought real estate in the center of the capital. The anthology of companies opened and closed, which began in a room in Casale among the cats, had found another country to continue in.
He left something in Lugano before he went.
According to RAI, Devasini's partner made a statue for the city, and it stands there now: a figure of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of bitcoin, a man no journalist, no prosecutor, no court, and no rich list has ever identified, who published a nine-page paper in 2008 under a name that is almost certainly not his own, mined a fortune he never spent, and then stopped answering emails. A public monument to a person nobody has seen, commissioned into the landscape of a Swiss lake town by the household of a man who gives no interviews and has no official photograph, whose fortune rests on a token that is worth exactly what everyone agrees it is worth.
It is, in its way, a certificate of authenticity. People stop in front of it and take pictures.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is not an endorsement. Devasini's record includes a counterfeit-software prosecution settled by payment, a regulatory finding that his stablecoin was fully backed barely a quarter of the time during a three-year window, and an allegation, settled without admission, that customer reserves were used to plug a hole of $850 million. The principles below are drawn from what worked, commercially, and from what nearly didn't. Several are cautionary. All of them are evidence that structure, position, and the management of belief can matter more than product quality, and an operator who studies this story should come away more alert to those forces, not more willing to exploit them.
The principles
- 1.Own the rail, not the cargo.
- 2.Find the float and wait for the rate.
- 3.Socialize the loss, then tokenize the debt.
- 4.Treat banking access as the binding constraint.
- 5.Never hold money with a counterparty you cannot sue.
- 6.Separate the owner from the voice.
- 7.Keep the cap table in the room.
- 8.Run a giant on a skeleton crew.
- 9.Treat jurisdiction as a product decision.
- 10.Become a verb before you become legitimate.
- 11.Convert monetary surplus into position.
- 12.Know exactly what kind of trust you are selling.
Principle 1
Own the rail, not the cargo
Devasini never had to be right about bitcoin's price. That is the single most important fact about his fortune. Bitfinex earned when customers traded, whichever direction they traded. Tether earned when customers needed a stable unit to park in between trades, which they needed most when markets were most violent. The company's founding rationale, in its own words, was "to enable seamless arbitrage between crypto exchanges," which is to say, to sell the road that every speculator had to drive on.
The pattern predates crypto. Solo SpA did not make memory chips; it sat between the chipmakers and the buyers, grading rejects, taking a margin on the gap between specification and reality. Point G sat between Asian manufacturers and European resellers. In every phase of his career, Devasini positioned himself at the junction where value moved from one form into another, where the toll is collected regardless of who wins on either side.
Tactic: Before building a product that bets on an outcome, ask whether you can build the infrastructure that every participant needs regardless of the outcome, and charge for passage.
Principle 2
Find the float and wait for the rate
Tether's business model is a bank's without the bank's obligations: take in deposits, pay nothing on them, invest them. For most of its first decade this was barely profitable, because short-term Treasuries yielded close to nothing. The model did not change in 2022 and 2023. The rate environment did. With roughly $113 billion in Treasuries and the Federal Reserve's policy rate above five percent, Tether produced $13 billion in net profit in 2024 on a few hundred employees.
The lesson is structural patience. A float-based business can look mediocre for years, a utility, a cost center, and then become extraordinary when a single exogenous variable moves. The owners who survive to that moment collect. Devasini held his stake through hacks, bank runs, prosecutions, and a depeg; the payoff came from a decision made at the Federal Reserve that had nothing to do with him.
Tactic: If your business holds customer money, model your profitability across the full range of interest-rate regimes, and make survival through the low-rate years a deliberate strategy rather than an accident.
After the August 2016 hack, Bitfinex could have gone bankrupt, or it could have absorbed the theft only in the accounts that were hit. It chose a third path: a 36 percent haircut on every account, offset by BFX tokens representing the debt. The tokens traded. Believers held; doubters sold to believers. Eight months later every token was redeemed, and the exchange's customer base remained intact.
The genius of the mechanism was psychological as much as financial. A haircut with no instrument is a confiscation. A haircut with a tradable claim is an investment the customer did not choose but can choose to keep. The company turned a moment of maximum distrust into a market in its own future solvency, and then honored that market ahead of the likely timeline. It repeated the trick with LEO, pre-committing recovered hack proceeds to token buybacks, so that when the Justice Department found the bitcoin in 2022, the news became a rally.
Note the shadow side: imposing losses on customers whose own accounts were never breached is a choice a regulated institution could not make. It worked because Bitfinex then repaid in full. Without the repayment, it would be remembered as something else.
Tactic: If you must impose a loss on stakeholders, give them a transferable claim on your recovery, set a credible path to redemption, and then beat it.
Principle 4
Treat banking access as the binding constraint
Devasini's original value to Bitfinex was "establishing banking relationships." The company's near-death experience in 2017 and 2018 came not from hackers but from Wells Fargo cutting off wires to its Taiwanese correspondent banks, and from the cascade that followed: Noble Bank in Puerto Rico, then Crypto Capital in Panama, then, by the New York Attorney General's account, no bank anywhere. Every subsequent controversy traces back to that single dependency.
It is the classic lesson of any business that moves money: the product is downstream of the counterparty. Tether's eventual security came not from better code or better marketing but from relocating its reserves to Cantor Fitzgerald, a primary dealer embedded in the U.S. Treasury market. The anchor became fixed when the bank became unimpeachable.
Tactic: List every institution whose withdrawal would halt your business within a week, and spend disproportionate effort making each of those relationships redundant before you need it.
Principle 5
Never hold money with a counterparty you cannot sue
This is the cautionary principle at the center of the story. Bitfinex placed more than $1 billion with Crypto Capital Corp. and, according to the New York Attorney General, never signed a contract. Roughly $850 million became unrecoverable. One of the men tied to that operation, when his office was searched, had $14,000 in counterfeit currency on hand.
Desperation explains the decision; it does not excuse it. A company without a bank will take any rail it can find, and the rails available to the desperate are, by definition, the ones that better-capitalized counterparties have rejected. The resulting loss nearly destroyed the exchange, generated the allegations that led to the 2021 settlement, and produced the reputational shadow that still follows the company.
Tactic: When the only available counterparty is one you would not choose in good times, treat that fact itself as a signal to shrink the business rather than to concentrate your capital with them.
Principle 6
Separate the owner from the voice
Devasini owns the largest stake. Ardoino does the talking. This division of labor is the most distinctive organizational choice in the company. The owner gives no interviews, posts nothing, appears in no official photograph. The CEO is ubiquitous, telegenic, fluent in the vocabulary of freedom and financial inclusion, and willing to answer hostile questions on Italian television. The result is that the company has a public face that can absorb criticism while the person with the most at stake remains almost entirely unreadable.
The cost of this arrangement is that someone else writes your biography. In the absence of Devasini's own account, the public record of his life consists of a corporate bio and investigative reporting that frequently contradict each other.
M
Two Versions of One Life
Where the official Bitfinex biography and the reported record diverge.
| Episode | Official account (Bitfinex, 2018) | Reported account |
|---|---|---|
| Leaving medicine | "Disillusioned with the quandaries of his specialty." | "All my work seemed to me a swindle, the exploitation of a whim." |
| Entering hardware | Founded Point-G in Milan in 1992. | Importing components in Casale as early as the mid-1980s (Farwest, RAI). |
| Microsoft case | Not mentioned. | Accused in 1995 alongside 43 others; settled for 100 million lire. |
| End of Solo group | "Sold Solo and retired" before the 2008 crisis. | A 2008 fire destroyed headquarters; companies liquidated. |
| Residence | "Splits his time between London and the French Riviera." | Lived in Lugano, 2017–2023; property in San Salvador. |
Tactic: If you choose to stay silent, choose it deliberately and early, but understand that silence does not prevent a narrative; it only surrenders control of it to whoever is willing to dig.
Principle 7
Keep the cap table in the room
For most of its history, Tether took no venture capital. Four men controlled 86 percent of Tether Holdings, according to documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. Devasini alone held something like 43 percent of Bitfinex and an estimated 40 to 47 percent of Tether. When the company finally discussed outside capital, in 2025, it was for roughly 3 percent at a valuation near $500 billion: a token dilution priced at the summit.
Concentrated ownership let the company make decisions, like the 36 percent haircut, the Crypto Capital deposits, the relocations, that no board with outside investors would have approved quickly, or perhaps at all. That speed was both its survival mechanism and its exposure. There was no one in the room to say no.
Tactic: Retain control as long as your business can fund itself, but install, voluntarily, at least one person with real authority whose job is to say no to the founders.
Principle 8
Run a giant on a skeleton crew
Tether reported $13 billion in net profit in 2024 with a workforce variously estimated at 200 to 300 people. Bitfinex earned $326 million in 2017 on $6.8 million in expenses. These are not technology-company margins; they are the margins of a toll booth that collects automatically.
A small team keeps information tight, decisions fast, and overhead negligible. It also means that compliance, controls, and governance are perpetually understaffed relative to the money flowing through. The ICIJ's reporting on scam-center use of USDT and the Wall Street Journal's 2024 report on federal scrutiny of compliance controls are, in part, the natural consequence of a few hundred people overseeing a currency used by millions.
Tactic: Keep headcount lean in the functions that generate revenue, and deliberately overinvest in the functions that protect it, because those are the ones that fail silently.
Principle 9
Treat jurisdiction as a product decision
The companies have lived in the British Virgin Islands, Hong Kong, Zug, Lugano, and San Salvador. Devasini's founding contribution to Bitfinex included "re-domiciling the exchange." Each move bought something specific: tax treatment, regulatory latitude, server security, a cooperative city government, a national digital-asset law written for firms like Tether.
The modern finale, a U.S.-regulated stablecoin called USAT and an American subsidiary run by a former White House official, shows the arc completing: from the edges of the system to a negotiated position inside its largest market, once that market's rules changed.
T
The Migration and the Crises
A decade of relocations, breakdowns, and recoveries.
2012
Bitfinex launches from the remains of Bitcoinica; Devasini becomes partner and CFO.
2014
Appleby helps establish Tether in the British Virgin Islands; Realcoin rebrands as Tether.
2016
119,756 bitcoins stolen; 36% haircut on all accounts; BFX tokens issued.
2017
Wells Fargo cuts wires; BFX tokens fully redeemed; Bitfinex earns $326M net.
2018
Servers move to Zug; Crypto Capital loss; "Bitfinex is not insolvent."
2021
$18.5M NYAG settlement; $41M CFTC fine for Tether, $1.5M for Bitfinex.
2022
USDT dips to 95.6 cents; roughly $15B redeemed; Lugano Plan ₿ signed.
2024
$13B profit; $113B in Treasuries; $775M into Rumble.
2025
Domicile moves to El Salvador; Devasini becomes chairman; USAT announced.
2026
Devasini becomes Italy's richest person, at $89.3B.
Tactic: Choose where your company legally lives with the same rigor you apply to pricing, and revisit the choice whenever a jurisdiction's rules move faster than your product does.
Principle 10
Become a verb before you become legitimate
USDT's dominance does not rest on transparency, regulatory approval, or a clean history; it had none of the three for most of its life. It rests on first-mover liquidity. Every exchange listed it, so every trader used it, so every exchange had to list it. By early 2026 its market capitalization and daily volume exceeded those of all competing stablecoins combined. In parts of Africa, "people ask for Tether by name."
Network effects in money are uniquely sticky, because the value of a currency is almost entirely the number of others who will accept it. Once Tether reached that threshold, scandals that would have killed a younger competitor merely dented it. Legitimacy, in the form of Cantor custody, Salvadoran licenses, and a U.S. subsidiary, arrived afterward and was purchased with profits that ubiquity had already produced.
Tactic: In markets with strong network effects, prioritize distribution and acceptance above polish, but recognize that the reputational debt you incur in the race will eventually be called.
Principle 11
Convert monetary surplus into position
Tether has spent its windfall not on dividends alone but on things that confer standing: roughly 11.5 percent of Juventus, the Agnelli family's club; 30.4 percent of an Italian media group; $775 million in Rumble; Bitcoin mining in Uruguay; a partnership with the city of Lugano; government memoranda in Georgia and Uzbekistan; a headquarters in a country that made bitcoin legal tender.
Each investment buys something cash cannot: a seat at a table, a relationship with a government, a presence in a culture. For a man who began as an outsider from Casale and spent decades in offshore registries, the Juventus stake in particular is legible as more than a trade. It places a Tether logo inside the institution that most completely represents old Piedmontese power.
Tactic: When your core business produces more cash than it can absorb, spend a portion buying durable relationships and institutional standing, which will protect the core business in ways capital alone cannot.
Principle 12
Know exactly what kind of trust you are selling
Tether sells a single claim: one token equals one dollar. Everything else is commentary. For years it backed that claim with attestations rather than audits, snapshots rather than histories. The CFTC found the claim fully true only 27.6 percent of the time in its sample period. And yet in 2022, under the most severe stress the industry has known, the company redeemed something like $15 billion and held the peg, and in 2023 a federal judge found no evidence that USDT "had a diminished actual value."
The gap between what is promised and what can be verified is, in a sense, the entire business, and the entire risk. Devasini's career, from out-of-spec memory chips onward, has been an extended negotiation with that gap: knowing how far a product can fall short of its label before the customer stops accepting it. That is a dangerous skill to cultivate. The more productive lesson for operators is the opposite one: decide in advance what level of verification you will submit to, and submit to it before you are compelled.
≈
Conventional Wisdom vs. the Tether Approach
How the company's choices compare with standard financial-services practice, and where they carried risk.
| Conventional practice | Tether / Bitfinex approach | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Full independent audit of reserves. | Quarterly attestations; audit long promised, not published. | Risk |
| Raise outside capital to scale. | Self-funded; four men controlled 86%. | Scale |
| Absorb hack losses or file for bankruptcy. | 36% haircut, tradable debt token, full repayment. | Try |
| Deposit only with regulated banks. | $1B+ with an uncontracted Panamanian processor. | Risk |
| Large compliance staff. | Few hundred employees; $13B profit. | Scan |
| Founder as public face. | Owner silent; CEO speaks. | Try |
Tactic: Write down, in one sentence, the claim your customers are trusting you on, and then identify the strongest form of external verification you could offer for it and offer that one.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Giancarlo Devasini, on leaving plastic surgery, as quoted in the Italian press (translated from Italian)All my work seemed to me a swindle, the exploitation of a whim.
— Bitfinex corporate biography of Giancarlo Devasini, March 2018Several months later, Giancarlo realised that he was unfit for retirement. When Giancarlo accidentally discovered bitcoin in early 2012, he was transfixed and quickly realised that bitcoin is where his future lay.
— Tether, 'Our Story'Tether began as a simple yet revolutionary idea: to enable seamless arbitrage between crypto exchanges with USD₮, overcoming the banking system's inefficiencies.
— Bitfinex, public statement, October 2018Bitfinex is not insolvent.
— Tether, explaining the 1990s Microsoft case to the Financial TimesDevasini had unintentionally loaded unlicensed Microsoft software on the computers he sold, after trusting the assurances of a supplier, and had collaborated with the authorities after the investigation was started.
Maxims
- Sell the road, not the destination. The most durable fortunes sit at the junction every participant must cross, regardless of who wins.
- Float is a slow fuse. A business that holds other people's money can be dull for a decade and then extraordinary when rates move; survive the dull years.
- A loss with a claim attached is a market. Give the people you hurt an instrument that rewards their faith, then redeem it early.
- Your bank is your business. The counterparty that holds your money can end you faster than any competitor.
- No contract, no deposit. Desperation will offer you counterparties that better times would never accept; refuse them anyway.
- Silence is a strategy, not a shield. Saying nothing keeps you private but hands your biography to whoever is willing to dig.
- Control buys speed and removes brakes. A founder-held cap table moves fast precisely because no one is there to stop it.
- Ubiquity outruns legitimacy. In network businesses, being everywhere first can survive scandals that would kill a cleaner latecomer, though the bill arrives eventually.
- Turn surplus into standing. Cash buys assets; patient investment in institutions buys protection.
- Know the gap between the label and the thing. Every promise of equivalence has a tolerance; the operator who never tests it is safer than the one who learns exactly where it lies.
Socialize the loss, then tokenize the debt