Canter Fitzgerald chairman Brandon Lutnick personally examined Tether’s reserves when he began his relationship with the Starbull Coin giant, he said Wednesday at Toronto Consensus 2025.
The 27-year-old said there were “many rumors” in the early days of Cantor Fitzgerald’s relationship with Tether, who had no assets he claimed to have. New York Attorney General Letitia James claimed in 2019 that Tether had nearly $1 billion in the book, but the regulator later settled these allegations with Tether and its sister company Bitfinex.
“I personally checked a lot of their reserves and we proved that many of those rumors were wrong,” Rutnick said. Tether claims it has been fully supported, at least since the settlement with New York.
Lutnick was appointed chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald, a private parent company that manages investment banks of the same name, the BCG Group, and the commercial real estate company Newmark Group.
Before he took the helm at Cantor Fitzgerald, Lutnick worked for the company in another executive role. He denied a report from Bloomberg that he interned with Tether at Lugano, Switzerland in 2023.
“Bloomberg actually reported that I was a tether intern, and that’s not true,” Rutnick said. “But I learned a lot about cryptography from the tether guys. They painted me orange.”
