Tether CEO protests S&P downgrade... "We are proud of your (traditional finance's) disdain"

Paolo Ardoino, Tether (USDT) chief executive officer (CEO), has pushed back against the rating assessment by international credit rater Standard & Poor's (S&P).

Ardoino said on the 27th (local time) via X (X), "We are proud of your (traditional finance's) disdain." Ardoino said, "Traditional credit-rating models were built for existing financial institutions," and added, "Ultimately those firms collapsed and made regulators worldwide question such models and the independence and objectivity of major credit-rating firms."

Ardoino emphasized, "The propaganda machine of traditional finance gets anxious when someone tries to escape the gravity of a broken financial system." Ardoino said, "Tether has built the financial industry's first 'overcapitalized' company with no toxic assets at all," and "that is why it is currently maintaining very high profitability." He went on to say, "Tether is living proof of how broken the traditional financial system is."

Earlier, S&P downgraded Tether's stablecoin stability rating on the 26th from 'constrained' to the lowest, category 5 'vulnerable.' S&P evaluates each stablecoin on a 1~5 scale based on how stably each stablecoin can be linked to real-world assets. Tether is the largest stablecoin currently in circulation, with an issuance of 184 billion dollars (approximately 270 trillion won).