The Pomp Podcast - Tether CEO on Bitcoin, Stablecoin Adoption, & More | Paolo Ardoino #1583

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Paolo Ardoino is the CEO of Tether. In this conversation we talk about bitcoin, the recent stablecoin regulation, Tether’s US strategy, macro environment, financial breakdown of how much money Tether makes, UDST vs domestic stablecoins, investments in AI, gold, the brain computer interface that Tether is funding, and what the future could look like. ========================Markets are at all-time highs. Public equities are outperforming. And individual investors are driving it all. It’s officially the rise of the retail investor. On September 12th in NYC, I’m hosting the Independent Investor Summit — a one-day event built exclusively for self-directed investors. We’re bringing together some of the smartest public market investors I know for a full day of macro insights, market predictions, one-on-one fireside chats, and actionable investment ideas from each investor. This is going to be an absolute banger event. Join us if you like markets and think retail is two steps ahead of Wall Street.TICKETS: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.independentinvestor.co⁠⁠⁠⁠/ (use promo code POMPYT25)========================Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit https://www.xapobank.com/pomp to join.========================Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/========================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 75+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $500 in rewards.=======================Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/=======================View 10k+ open startup jobs:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

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on guys today we've got an amazing episode with paulo ardaño he's the ceo of tether and in this conversation we went through it all we talked about the recent stablecoin regulation the u.s strategy tether's coming to america and he explains exactly what they're going to do we go through the macro environment the financial breakdown of how much money tether made in the first half of the year we talk about the difference between usdt and the domestic stablecoin that they want to launch and then we get into fun stuff like artificial intelligence and what tether's doing on that front, including the investments they're making. We talk about gold and why that's such a big focus for them. And then we talk about the brain-computer interface that Tether is funding because of what

they think that can mean for the future. This conversation goes very wide ranging, and it helps us better understand what Tether's doing, how much money they're making, and where that money is going. Hope you enjoy my latest conversation with Paulo. All right, Paulo, I thought a great place to start this conversation is Tether is coming to the United States. Historically, you guys have done a fantastic job of going to emerging markets, getting 400 plus million people onboarded to the US dollar and stable coins. But now when you come to the US, this is a whole new game. What is the plan for Tether in the United States? Well, first of all, something changed. That is the genius act that made it possible.

So we're very thankful to the president and all the administration, as well as the lawmakers to make it possible. Look, first of all, Tether is the company that created the first stablecoin in 2014. It's 11 years in the works. We are grateful and honored that the most powerful country in the world is looking at the technology that we created 11 years ago and now is regulated on it. So that is something that we were hoping because for any industry to become mature, you need proper regulations and interesting enough um you know the um the this new the genius act allows not only of course tether um to come and explore the united states but to create an even playing field also for all the other financial institutions that now feel more confident that

this is a technology that is an opportunity that will stay that will remain and will continue to grow we have been advocating for such a long time how stable coins and usdt in specific are the best allies for the united states you know uh in the latest station we disclosed that we had more than 127 billion dollars of u.s treasuries um that is more than south korea so we were able to pass south korea we passed germany and then south korea and then i know what is the next one but i'm pretty sure that maybe by the end of the year we will pass another one another nation It's crazy to compare ourselves to nations, but it is what it is. And after that, on top of that, we have been bringing the US dollar

to basically half a billion people in the emerging markets. So, yes, we are looking at the United States. We want to open up shop in the United States for one of our new business lines. But we feel that we have been probably the best ally, one of the best allies of the United States all along. Sometimes, it took a little bit of time to make it clear, maybe, but it's without doubt one of the best businesses out in the United States out there, especially in the trenches in emerging markets developing countries where maybe the U.S. presence is not that strong.

But you see BRICS presence and big competitors of the United States very, very active in trying to de-dollarize the world. And that's our plan. And now we can come to the United States and launch probably a domestic stablecoin very soon. Okay, let's explain to people in the emerging markets as kind of a lens to what could happen in the United States. I've seen a lot of pictures online over the last maybe six to nine months of people in South America or other geographies. Take a picture at a store and the store's prices for the goods they're selling are priced in USDT. So this whole idea of people are trying to drive adoption, not only as the individual users who want to pay for things or send money to their friends and family, but actually the store owners themselves are just using it as the pricing mechanism, which then incentivizes people to use USDT to purchase the goods. In the United States, we already price everything in dollars.

We already use US dollars. And so really, if you have a dollar, the rails on which it is seems to be the big innovation here, right? you have a cheaper, faster, more efficient way to actually do this. There are some hours of operations arbitrage with the traditional banks in terms of accessing your money versus USDT, et cetera. So how do you use the technology advantage you have, even though it is the same exact product that already has great adoption in the United States in terms of the dollar? What is the actual plan? Do you go partner with the banks? Do you go after a bottoms-up adoption strategy? How do you attack this? So that's a very good point. The way I try

to describe the difference between the united states and the emerging markets like pick an emerging market like nigeria um i would say that in nigeria the quality of financial transmission rails is between 10 and 20 percent right um in the united states it's 90 percent so almost like united states is almost perfection so if in nigeria you put um you put a stable coin in Nigeria, you would improve that financial rails from 10, 20 percent to 50 percent. So you get like a 30 percent gain. In the United States, you go from 90 percent to 95 percent. And so, of course, Tether always preferred to look at the emerging markets because that where the majority of the gain would happen, could happen. Now in the United States, you know, although there are less people

that are under-banked, much less people than anywhere else probably, and maybe not Switzerland, But, you know, almost anywhere else. And there is huge financial, there are almost perfect financial rails. The product has to be different, right? The product has to work in a different way. And so, yes, we are receiving, now that we announced that we are looking at the United States and we might, well, very probably launch a domestic stablecoin very, very soon. And our aim is by the end of the year, we have an enormous amount of financial institutions knocking on our door saying, oh, can we partner? Can we do something together? Can we build it together? And that is great because I think that with Terra's distribution channel, that we have both, or mainly the United States, if you will, already, but especially outside the United States, we can offer to every single financial institution that will work with us within the United States, enormous access, unprecedented access outside the United States.

That's the reason why these financial institutions are knocking on our door. So distribution is a huge selling point. It's not just the financial rails of it being more efficient. What these banks are looking at, one of my kind of frameworks for seeing why financial institutions, Wall Street, however you want to categorize them, is leaning so heavily in is they now realize they can make money, right? There's new customers, there's new assets, there's new revenue, there's new profit that are going to come from this industry.

It's coming from younger people. And also these younger people have assets now. And so they see this as a very long-term kind of growth center for them. What you're essentially showing up is saying, look, I have better rails, so I can do things cheaper and faster inside the United States. But also, if you partner with me, I can bring you to half a billion people globally that right now your bank or financial institution doesn't even know exists, let alone has any connectivity or potential of working with them. And so it's kind of the one-two punch of, yeah, penetrate in the US, but also actually help really export the financial services of these banks or financial institutions into these emerging markets using you guys as a distribution partner. That feels pretty powerful. that is we are going and exactly that we are going to open up the world and new huge new opportunities that we demonstrated were extremely valuable and are extremely valuable look until probably a couple of months ago people were like oh why are you working in the emerging markets

rather than working in the united states well look at our numbers that's a good answer now Now, that is what we can bring to the table. And that is the, you know, the reach we can bring to our partners. Now, what you've mentioned a couple times in this conversation, a domestic stablecoin, when I think of USDT, or any of the other stablecoin competitors, I think of them being something that is agnostic to geography, I can use them in the United States, if I lived in another geography, I could still access them with an internet connection and use them as I saw fit. What is the difference between the current version of USDT and what you're calling a domestic stablecoin? So I think that a domestic stablecoin would focus on, as I said, the very big difference between what is expected from a competitor also to all these fintech layers you have like Zelle, PayPal and Cash App and all that.

So the U.S. is a very, very efficient technological market. So we want to try a different offering. We want to redesign a few things that will be perfected for the United States. So I think that the foreign stablecoin and the international stablecoin that is designed for the emerging markets not necessarily will work the best inside the United States. And look, in the end, think about it. you know that is the western that they had a lot well you are you have already one stable coin now you have will have two well we have also that are gold so we have three right um and so in a certain

way you will double the number of u.s dollar stable coins that you have well kind of yes but keep in mind that there are there will be hundreds of stable coins in the u.s so there will be plenty of new stablecoins. So the only thing that matters is the user experience to move from one to another. What will matter is the distribution. The rest doesn't matter. If you have one that is one across the world, or you have two or three that are specific to the tradition, that doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is distribution and user experience. And that is what we believe our path is at. Now, one of the things that's interesting to me

is that Tether at different times has been popular on different blockchains. I think people a couple of years ago were very surprised to find that Tether's adoption on the Tron blockchain was very high because it was very cheap and people were using it across these emerging markets. I know at least one, maybe multiple projects that you all are either funding or backing and partnering with to create a stablecoin specific layer one blockchain to go and use this stuff. Can you talk about not just the stablecoin, but like this underlying infrastructure that these stablecoins are actually being used on in these blockchains? What do you think can be, you know, improved or innovated on at the blockchain level that could actually be better for stable coins? So, look, I think that, you know, you we have talked so many times now. So, you know, that I'm a big coin at heart and I am not a big fan of the rest of the crypto space. Shocker, shocker.

That is the headline. And so the other thing that clearly is a win in terms of application of blockchain technology is stablecoins. Now, I think that there is an opportunity to create blockchains that are settled and the cast fees are exactly in stablecoins. So because, again, everything is user experience, like user experience is the biggest limiting factor today still to the usage of blockchain. right you have to buy your token and then you have to basically use a wallet that so you have to load some ethereum in the wallet and then you can you can then send usdt uh but and you can it's a multi-step and for a person that does not know anything about blockchain is it's very problematic sure you can do a count up structure you can use many tricks but it will

never be as seamless as you know paying gas fees in in in a stable value um rather than having also fluctuating cost of these based on basically just the price of Ethereum, for example. And so that is a game changer, in my opinion, the fact that we are seeing a huge opportunity also with commodity traders. Commodity traders woke up and now they're all into stablecoins. They realize that the stablecoins are going to improve the efficiency and then the profitability of their portfolio and their balance sheet so if a commodity trader has 1 billion in their portfolio that they will make more money if they can turn that billion around

10 times more and with stable coins that is not um out of this world as a number because you can start moving um money in seconds rather than in hours or days or weeks and that is so powerful So even like commodity traders are very interested to not have to compete with dog coins or cat coins or something else, right? And all these tokens for blockchain space, they want to go where they know that there is more like institutional usage and they can use stable coins as a gas fee. But also they can also settle transactions among themselves, among their counterparties in a more institutional professional way. I think the Genius Act will bring that institutional level adoption and the blockchains that are going to solely focus on stablecoins and settlement, interbanking settlement, intercompany settlement will have a huge advantage. Now, I want to talk about what you guys are doing with all this profit. Last year, you guys did $13 billion in net income.

You've already posted a significant profit in the first half of 2025. I'm specifically interested in maybe three different things. There's artificial intelligence. There's a lot of stuff you guys are doing with gold. And then there's the brain-computer interface that you guys have been funding as well. But let's start with the artificial intelligence. This feels like a huge theme, not only in terms of you guys making investment in other people's companies, but you all have started to build artificial intelligence products as well. Give us an update on what's happening on that front.

Well, that is one of the projects I'm more obsessed with. It's called QVAC. The name comes from the pattern of names that Isaac Asimov used. Especially there is this short-term story called The Last Question, was written in 1956 by Isaac Asimov. And basically, it's a beautiful short story. It's like 14 pages. It includes the meaning of life, religion, philosophy, physics,

and artificial intelligence. So I recommend everyone to read it. And the idea behind QVAC is basically creating a platform that is a local-first AI inference and fine-tuning platform that can work everywhere, anywhere. From an embedded device to a $30 smartphone to any flagship phones, every laptop, every server. We have a very unique and experienced team

that is working on that. The idea is that data should stay with you and you should be able to run models locally on your smartphone or your laptop anywhere, but even on the smallest devices, right? The smallest devices could be brain-computer interfaces, but could be also even a light bulb, could be a car, could be a motorcycle,

could be a drone, could be a robot, could be a spaceship, could be a planet. I don't know. But you should be able to scale infinitely. So from the smallest part of the ecosystem to the biggest component of the universe. So basically, AI will be in 20, 30, 50 years embedded in 100 years or 10,000 years will be embedded in the fabric of the universe itself. And so it's unthinkable that AI will be remaining centralized and forever. even if you want to bring AI on Mars

or you want to build or use LMs on Mars or on a spaceship you don't have the latency will suck if you have to connect to the Earth where you built your gigabot data center so AI has to be able to be

lean, has to be able to be very precise and modular and local because latency matters latency between Earth and Mars is huge and Mars is huge, so it will not work. And even if you are on planes, even if you are in Africa,

that latency will be terrible. And so we want to build something that adapts and grows and evolves with the technology that we keep building. And humanity will keep building. So in the next five years, GPUs on mobile will be probably 10 times more powerful than what we have today

because investments will be massive. And so already today we can run very ton of models already locally on the phones, given the experience that we are gaining with QVAC. So imagine if we can do that today, in five years, it will be massive. Plus, given the peer-to-peer technology that we built with Full Punch, now we can also connect

all these AI agents that work locally among themselves, without any central servers, without any bottleneck, without any controllers. So we want to build the first, really, decentralized, unstoppable AI platform. And one thing that I say from one Bitcoiner to another is that the thing that I don't like about using someone else's AI platform is that you become dumber, you don't become more intelligent. When I was a kid, my teacher was forcing me and forcing everyone to do calculations in mind. So you do additions, subtractions, multiplication, divisions. and also more complex operations in my mind.

But with calculators, even today, people do very simple calculations on their calculator. Imagine what calculators did to our ability to do math in our brain. Imagine what AI platforms can do to our intelligence. At least, I think as Bitcoiners, we should think about something like not your AI, not your intelligence kind of thing. And so that's what we want to fix at Tether.

The beautiful thing is that Tether has the resources to make it happen, you know, given the profits that we had in the past years and we're going to likely keep having. Now, when we think about this kind of like locally run AI, one of the things that I always go back to is almost every on a weekly basis right now, there's some AI model that gets published that is the best one, right? And so we saw Grok 4 go and kind of leapfrog everyone. They kind of constantly keep improving. If you are using things on a local basis, how important is it to have the latest model versus maybe addressing some of the latency stuff? And obviously, you'd want to have both, right? You want to be able to run it locally, have access to the best AI.

So just talk through some of the practicality of when you're in this innovation boom and things are moving so quickly, if somebody doesn't go and actually update to the latest model or update the software, how far behind can they get? And how do you start to fix some of that stuff? Well, it really depends what you need to do. I think that we are very early on the AI growth. So in the next two, three years, there will be open source, and again,

I always never think about today or next year, because I think that for the next five years, centralized models will win. But I think within five years, the world will understand that either we create 100 gigabot data centers that I think is very impractical, and also will become a weapon and will become a target and only works if the world remains stable,

which I believe we all know that the world is going towards instability rather than instability. And so the reality is that we will keep improving. What is happening now with centralized data centers is just brute forcing AI. So we are trying to brute force intelligence. It's funny because we want to mimic the brain trying to create this infinite and super power-hungry data

centers when our brain basically consumes energy as a potato. So in a certain way, to me, it means that we have just the wrong algorithms. They're beautiful. They're great. But the research didn't stop. It will never stop. We'll keep improving our research.

We are going to keep doing better things. Then eventually, we're going to achieve levels of efficiency on large language models or even just will change the technology entirely that we cannot comprehend today, and AI will help that growth. Yes, so I believe that in two, three years for 90 percent of the jobs that we will assign to AI, local models, even slightly

adapted local models will be perfect. Then for the rest 10 percent, you will try to use the bleeding edge models, the best ones, and so on. But what I believe and envision with QVAC is that everyone should be empowered to create a very efficient small local models, and through our peer-to-peer technology,

we want to connect all of them without the masters, without any central servers so that you can have algorithms that will run queries across all these models and trying to get the best answer. In a way, it's a more collaborative approach across all like a gazillion number of models, rather than having a huge monolithic model. A certain way is like there is this book

called The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond, that shows the difference between, explain the difference between having a monolithic approach, that is what is happening now between OpenAI and XAI and so on, versus having a bazaar model or a bazaar approach to models where you have really a billion models that are all interconnected and will create incentives to collaborate among themselves. How are you guys using artificial

intelligence at Tether? What we've seen now, recursive learning. We've seen Meta throwing around billion-dollar job offers to AI engineers. They believe that the software will start learning from the software. The code will start writing code itself. What are you guys seeing or implementing now? You're notorious for having a very lean team, very profitable on a per-employee basis how are you guys using this new technology so we have hired i think among the best in class in um in engineers we are looking at building eventually our foundational models but first we want to build a platform that can run any model and locally uh and remotely um also we our one of our main focus is to do local inference that is very very complicated on um doing very

efficient inference on mobile smartphones hardware, for example, but also we are engaging on federated inference through peer-to-peer federated inference. That is very unprecedented. So before starting to do very complex financial models of ourselves, we want to build the groundwork that is in the end, as you said, every week there's a new model, and every week there is a new open source model.

Sure, we could compete and create the 100th open source model every single week. But first, I think what we are missing is a platform that will able to run every one of them is like the sovereign ring of the platforms that can run every single model and then scale to infinite number of nodes. Now, that's for building an actual model itself,

But are you guys using Devin, which is kind of this AI software engineer or any sort of technology internally? Are people using like Claude to write code? Like what about like the individual engineers that are humans today? What are they doing on a day-to-day basis to help actually build the Tether product? So we are definitely using code-assisted, AI-assisted coding. That definitely works. and also, first of all, we are testing all the different, both open and closed source models.

In the end, we are all going to open source all this stack, so we don't care. We want to make sure that we expedite our work because there is so much to do, so much to build that, that even 30 percent of gain is the same. So yeah, we are testing probably 10 of these things, and we are pushing every developer in actually improving themselves through AI-assisted coding.

All right. Let's talk about gold. You guys have Tether Gold, but you've also started to do a lot of other things around gold as a product. I think there's folks who will hear this and be like, wait a minute, the Bitcoin guys, they're into the gold stuff. Explain what you guys are doing on the gold side and kind of what the thesis there is. well i think that there is um you know i said that multiple times um there is nothing like bitcoin so um bitcoin is perfection but i think the bitcoiners mistake gold as a competitor to bitcoin rather than a gold competitor to the dollar um before 1971 gold was the backing of the dollar and all the other currencies and then stopped um or posed as they said at that time and And so reality is that gold is your edge against fiat and Bitcoin is just perfection, right? So sometimes if you want, for example, if you're a trader, maybe instead of selling Bitcoin versus dollars, you could start thinking about selling Bitcoin versus gold.

It's much... If you want to diversify from Bitcoin because you think you are like at the end of the cycle and maybe there is a crash and you want to just adjust your strategy to buy back Bitcoin at a lower price, probably is better if you sell it against gold rather than Bitcoin. And also it's true that gold is the thing that has been used for the last 6,000 years as a currency of reset. If a financial reset would happen in the next five years, for example,

we are not sure yet if Bitcoin will be big enough. uh right we know that gold is already is is huge right it's like 20 trillion dollars so it has a bigger size and so it's a matter of time right so again bitcoiners should understand that you know they should look at the world with um um and uh with in understanding basically that everything cannot happen tomorrow sometimes bitcoiners you know complain about the fact that um you know certain people in Africa are not using Bitcoin yet or enough because they don't understand that, you know, certain people, certain villages, for example, or communities,

they don't have the time yet that maybe a rich person in Manhattan can afford to learn about Bitcoin, right? So there is time for everything. and i think that when there is time if things will have if the world will go to hell in the next five years there is good chances that part of there is that will happen in gold now one of the things that bitcoiners seem to be doing right now that they're not waiting is these bitcoin treasury companies um i know that you guys are part of 21 you softbank jack mallers uh cancer fitzgerald uh rather than talk about that specific deal because i know you guys are

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there is um this kind of dichotomy between um bitcoin treasury companies and etfs right so um there are still uh in many situations not all the funds can can or not all the definitely the companies can access ETFs. And so, you know, investing in a Bitcoin treasury company is definitely a different option, for example. And so I'm a little bit worried, I will, but because there are very, very much a lot and a certain of these companies

and in a certain ways is good because, you know, they all contribute to my Bitcoin. But I see some that might be a little bit too aggressive and a little bit too risky. You know, leverage is going to be very, very important. And, you know, I think that eventually some will end up in inflates. Yeah. And is that because you think that they'll trade at a discount to NAV

or you think that they'll just literally get so over levered that they'll have to liquidate or, you know, there'll kind of be takeovers? What is that? The second. The second one is basically just like companies will actually blow up. There will be a consolidation, I believe, in the future. but it's like every happening happens in every industry right yeah talk about the brain computer interface i know this is one of your personal passions you guys have been spending a lot of

time and energy on this um what's the latest progress on the building so there is a so the new technology that um so we invested in blackrock neurotech is a great company um they have i think the best brain-computer interface technology out there. They have an upcoming version of their BrainChip is just out of this world. They made probably 100x improvement on the chip. They're based in Utah. They're a very lean team as we like.

Very humble, but basically they are the pioneers of this entire industry and technology set. The aim there is to create, to make sure that the technology is pro-humans and remains pro-humans and will be used by people to improve themselves and also to create and hedge against the takeover of machines versus humans. There is a very possibility, you said it, right?

So AI will code itself, AI will improve itself. And if that really happens, which I believe will happen in the next five years, there is this thing in technology called genetic algorithms. So it's like you know that, right? So imagine a genetic algorithm run by an AI that will be able to select the winners and basically modify itself, improve itself like 1 billion times per day or per hour or per minute. Our brain will not be able to comprehend that.

So, unfortunately, our brain is digital, but the way we express anything in our lives is very much analog, right? Our fingers are analog, you know, typing on a keyboard or our voice is very analog, right? So the way we communicate has been designed for an analog system rather than a digital system. And so if we want, I think in the next 15 years, the comparison between a fish and a human today is between a human and a machine. And so we'll be kind of like that. And so we need to be able to make sure

that the humans can communicate with the mathematical coprocessor in their brain that will make, they will access to the digital portion of our cells. And we want to do that in the most, we want to make sure that doing so So all our thoughts, all our information will remain private, you know, as you know, this is the Bitcoin way to do things. We want to make sure that that's also why local elements are very important.

I think that, you know, the technology that we're building at Tether will allow the data of your brain be processed by your own device rather than, you know, in cloud by opening an iPhone, for example. Let's talk about the macro economy. Obviously, that has been a huge driver of Bitcoin. Bitcoin has done very well. We still haven't gotten the latest interest rate cuts, but I think people think that will happen, you know, coming here shortly. We also saw all these tariffs that got announced. They seem to not have had the kind of catastrophic impact on the economy that people have predicted.

Seems like, you know, unemployment is still pretty healthy in the United States. GDP is growing very quickly. Inflation didn't show up, you know, in kind of a severe way that people thought it would. how do you think about the macro economy right now? And what's interesting is you guys are builders and investors. So building is kind of agnostic to the macro economy, but the investing, you may go faster or slower depending on what those economic conditions are. And so what's your current view on where we are from a macroeconomic standpoint? And are you guys doing anything differently as investors? Well, first of all, we are, as I mentioned

before, we're investing in gold, but also we have been investing in land and agriculture. I think that is just to remind everyone is outside of the research of the stable coin. So it's done with the profits. And so we have been investing in very cutting edge technology like AI, brain computer interfaces. But a good portion of the portfolio is investing in Bitcoin, in gold and land and agriculture. Those things are the things that will remain whatever happens. And I agree the United States are now in a very strong position. right so look at the deal that they got with europe um and uh you know as an european i i

mean i cannot i can only laugh in because otherwise i would cry and um in but you know it's um i think it tells a lot about the um the discrepancy that will that is um and worsening across, you know, all the different countries, right? So all the countries before in the last 25 years, everyone was talking about the globalization. I think that is very much that. Everything will go to localization. Every single country will look out for themselves

rather than, you know, thinking about others. That will just increase. And so that will create a schism. That will create definitely much more friction and also will accelerate for the poorer countries, potentially you know they're uh even more issues on their you know national currencies and um and the weakening of their economies and so um that's something that we you know at tether i we are very much aware of we are trying to build technology that at least will bring additional um opportunities

to the people living also in the less fortunate countries right so the point of usdt is bringing the dollar to the people that are living in countries where their central banks are taking very bad decisions and so we are trying at least to give an option plan b to the people um same happens with technology with the ai technology with telecommunications technology that we're building and so from the market side i mean i'm you know i i agree that uh you know the um The tariffs where people were screaming and basically projecting the failure of the United States in just a couple of years. Definitely, tariffs are working very well for the United States, but everything is... So it's a zero-sum game, right?

If they work very well for the United States, it might not work very well for other countries. And we are living in the same world. So that that might have side effects that are very hard to grasp and predict. And in my opinion, there is more likelihood that things will go wrong elsewhere. One of the things that's interesting to me about this like macro backdrop that we're operating in is on the geopolitical front. It does feel like there's some fracturing or some isolation. You know, the United States is saying, hey, look, we want an even playing field. And so we're going to put up these tariffs. We're going to really drive the reshoring of manufacturing and making investments here in America. At the same time that what feels like that fragmentation, we are seeing in a finance world where you all are bringing the U.S. dollar globally. You're actually bringing more people, you know, kind of together in the U.S. dollar. There's a ton of financial firms that are really excited about tokenizing public equities or, you know, other assets that in their mind will open up access to what has historically been kind of U.S. centric markets and assets.

And so it does feel like even though the geopolitical kind of fragmentation is occurring in a weird way, the financial assets are becoming more global and the borders are disappearing more. Right. yeah i mean certainly for the specific u.s dollar again um it's u.s dollar things that will become more global and um but the other countries are very like very much like lagging behind think about europe again europe has probably europe tried to do a digital asset flow much before the united states and they you know the result definitely is not great and um for the stable Stablecoins have been very vocal about, you know, they have the opportunity to have hundreds of millions of people participating outside of Europe, participating in the European economy, buying European stocks, buying European debt.

Because technically, if you buy European stablecoin, you would buy then European debt as exactly as USDT is in the United States in that sense. But unfortunately, not every single country has been understanding the technology and the opportunity and potential. what is happening in uk right so where like now to to go on any website uh you know um even spotify was reading and you have to kyc and then so just to verify your age i can see and i'm sure you can see how that can go very very wrong and very soon well you know what's funny is when i'm in the united states you can kind of go through different websites every once in a while you get hit with a

pop-up where you know maybe you've got to sign into something or agree to something if you go go in europe the joke for americans is like it takes you five minutes to get through all the pop-ups and the gdprs and the you know agree to this agree to that deny this whatever and then you get to get to the website and so it does feel like there is um even though the united states we still complain about regulations and you know data controls and all these things europe just took it to the extreme and so you know i come back to this idea and i think you guys are like a perfect example right most innovation both in the united states and internationally is driven by risk takers. And the definition of risk taker is taking risk, like doing things that may or may

not work, that requires investment, that requires trying new things, pushing the pace of what is potentially possible. There are certain cultures like the United States, which even though we have lots to improve on, seem to be very encouraging of that risk taking. The capitalistic system, the ability to fund this stuff, obviously venture capital, et cetera. Europe and maybe some other places in the world feel like they have essentially disincentivized risk-taking. And to me, like that is the story of why you get different results in these different geographies is like, are the politicians, are the people creating the rules and the kind of conditions trying to encourage risk-taking or trying to disincentivize it?

And the people kind of follow the incentive system, right? Like if you're in a place where they don't want you to take risk and you're a risk taker, you go somewhere where they're encouraging you to take risk. And so in a weird way, like you guys are unique in that you actually stayed in a place where there wasn't as much risk taking and you have succeeded by taking an immense amount of risk early on and being very smart about not getting complacent and kind of continuing to push the pace of innovation, it looks like. Well, if you build an industry for every new industry, you have to build something that does not have roads yet. right so um you have to do it in the safest way possible you have to be um working and trying to explain what what the hell you're doing but yeah i mean with you know car at the beginning cars didn't have roads and then there was no low code for um for driving the car and then it happened

right so every single innovation invention is the same right there is this uh um paper like a newspaper from the um 18th century that had all the you know uh was trying to push against the proliferation of electricity in the cities and was showing people hanging the cities through these cable electric cables right so you know the you will always have this thing and you know imagine when you touch finance even more so right so it it upsets many people it upsets but you know it's fine i mean the uh in a certain way i feel like a little bit for us gump right so we we we dodged the bullets and we were we kept running and now we're here all right this is the hardest question i've ever asked you you're a good looking guy who's successful who's built

this amazing company what problems do you have what are the biggest obstacles that you face the one thing you've ever told me is uh sometimes you don't get a lot of sleep because you got you know so many different things going on people are constantly messaging you problems etc but what are the other big obstacles whether for you personally or for you know kind of tether more broadly i think people are very drawn to the story of success but it's important to remind them that there are you know many obstacles that you guys still face and you're trying to figure out so like how do you identify maybe what the biggest things that that are the challenges right now for you well my personal challenge is that they have only 24 hours in a day um and that is uh it's a

annoying challenge because that you know i i have very a lot of ideas and the need to to either clone myself or or you know i haven't had paulo's ai um a local ai that that will help me uh but um yeah i think the you know one of the things that um i think is not challenging but um i think a lot about when in tether is that tether was born with with the mission of bringing uh financial inclusion and bring in you know uh uh you know improve us in a certain way society in in in certain aspects like with the you know again financial freedom access to you know more free access to wealth and all that and we are trying to do that in multiple other years now what we learned about in in in in finance with you as a team and cutting intermediaries we want to do it

with uh tech with uh with hope and keith and and all they say high platform all that so so first of all the the biggest challenge is you know we have so much to do and so we we have i think the mission is so big we are i've defined ourselves in is this once in a century company where we have the opportunity with our profits immense amount of profits that you know we could do is use in two ways one way that is not us right so companies will distribute all the money to the shareholders so they can buy a bigger yacht, you know, that is not us. We want to use these profits to keep reinventing ourselves and build something even crazier and more innovative and in all the possible other fields. So that is the biggest challenge, right? So how we can keep

reinventing and keeping innovating on other fields and bringing the same passion and the same ethos and philosophy that we have elsewhere. And the second one is kind of weird in a certain way i think that um you know i remember when a certain company the first motto was don't be evil and then kind of to me they turn evil or they betrayed the initial um philosophy and so how i can protect um you know how when i build technology how i can protect the users of that technology from even myself right so uh how we can make sure that we don't turn evil or we don't have any incentives to turn evil it's gonna be very important so that I think about that a lot. Well, it's pretty inspiring. When you're creating 13 plus billion

dollars of profit a year and you say, hey, we want to use this to continue to fund innovation and push the pace of what's possible. One, it's inspiring to people, but also two is you're going to win some, you're going to lose some, but the winners really, really are going to have a profound impact on individuals and society because you guys can take risks that maybe others can't since you're funding it. I think one of the things that people forget is so many innovations don't come to fruition for a long time, because you not only need the entrepreneur and the team to build it, you need someone to believe as the capital provider. But when you're able to hand the capital to the people who actually have the ideas and can build,

like in this case, certain things get funded that maybe otherwise wouldn't. And therefore, you can really push, you know, kind of what's possible, which I think is so exciting about what you guys are doing. Exactly that. Exactly that. Well said. All right, my friend. Where can we send people to find the Tether attestation? I think that's probably the most interesting place to send people who are kind of more interested from an investment and business perspective. Where can they go to see that? Go on tether.to and then in the header, you will find the transparency page and then you will find the attestation. We just released that yesterday,

was very good one. Good profits and we grew 13.4 billion in terms of USDT market cap in the last quarter, 20 billion from the beginning of the year. We put $100 billion between us and our main competitor um that is a huge um testament of trust in in our product um you know um i'm very very bullish also for the rest of the year i keep telling you 200 billion usdt market caps incoming so let's keep up the great work and uh we will do this again soon thanks bum