The Wolf Of All Streets - How to Survive a Financial Apocalypse | Paolo Ardoino

Episode Date: August 31, 2026

Tether is evolving far beyond its roots as a stablecoin issuer, building a broader financial and technology company around USDT, U.S. Treasuries, Bitcoin, gold and even farmland. The conversation covers how its new KPMG audit addresses years of criticism, why Tether is hedging its exposure to the dollar with scarce assets, and how it could eventually become one of the largest buyers of U.S. government debt. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if the company behind the world's largest stable coin is actually building the financial system for a future of 10 billion robots and a trillion AI agents? Today, I'm sitting down with Tether CEO Palo Ardoino to discuss the audit that answered more than a decade of criticism. After waiting 12 years, knowing that the company was a good company, that we had all the money that we were supposed to happen. And more, actually much more. I think it's a win for our industry that finally got the recognition that he deserved. Why Tether could soon become one of the world's largest buyers of U.S. Treasuries. The ownership of U.S. treasuries from an antagonistic country is not a great thing for the United States,

because you have a single decision maker that can press a button and sell hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. treasuries from one day to another. So we created the decentralized ownership of the U.S. debt with 650 million people that today, basically are holding some U.S. treasuries, and they will not wake up altogether one single morning decided to sell that debt. and how Bitcoin, gold, and even farmland are protecting its future. We call ourselves the stable company. We need to take in consideration as every single possible scenario. That's why we invest in gold and Bitcoin. And we also invest in land.

It's not a game for us. It's a true mission. We need to remain a company that survived to the worst-case scenario. But the biggest story is what comes next. Programmable money for AI agents and technology designed to bring financial services and artificial intelligence to billions of people. people the existing system has left behind. Tether is becoming far more than a stable

coin company. Let's go. Today's video is brought to you by Kalshi. You probably know Kalshi for prediction markets, but now you can also trade crypto perps directly on the same platform. That means Bitcoin and other major crypto assets with leverage on a platform that's U.S. regulated by the CFTC. Cali has some of the lowest fees and you don't need to be trading millions of dollars to get exclusive benefits. Trade just $100,000. thousand dollars in volume per month and you unlock a bunch of VIP perks like one basis point taker fees private invites to calci events and more you can sign up using my link in the description and you'll get $25 when you trade your first $50. I was hoping that you'd take all the stuff off the

shelves so it could look like you're in jack maller's closet you have way too many material possessions back there yes I have like a boxing glove and uh how well uh you know you're let's sheet on the shots. Boxing gloves for punching the wall through the bear market out of Florida. Try to find something to do. But like, you know, I were joking. As boring as crypto's been for most people, it has not

been for you. I mean, this has been a banner year. Maybe we can start with the audit, right? You have the KPMD audit. You came out swinging with a gladiator meme. You know, are you not entertained?

All those years. And I can proudly say that I believed you were fully backed for all those years and we've had a lot of conversations. That had to feel good to put that out there. Yeah. I think the, you know, after waiting 12 years, knowing that the company was a good company, is a good company, that we had all the money that we were supposed to have been more, actually much more. And look, it's also, it's not, you said it. It's not just about myself or the. great team. I mean, our team has been incredible in making this happen. We are also very

thankful to KPNG, US, of course. But all the people like you and many others that supported us throughout the FAD, I think it's a win for the entire industry. It's a win for our industry that finally got the recognition that he deserved. You know, we went through an administration in the United States, the previous administration that was a very anti-crypto that also made almost impossible for auditors to sit down at the table with companies like us and look at and just look at our balance. I mean, our balance is not difficult. Like our balance sheet is not difficult.

It's like treasury, gold, a bit of Bitcoin and basically. And in excess, we have equity in excess of the liabilities. Liabilities are all the token issued. Then we have plenty more reserves inside the, you. you know, our company compared to all the issue tokens. And so it was never about the complexity of the audit. It was about the right environment that was understanding how crypto and digital assets are such an important tool for the future of finance.

And that's why we are grateful to KPMG, we're grateful to the administration that made this possible. and our team led by our entire finance team and the entire team of Tether worked very hard with top priority to achieve this moment and this milestone. Does KPMG now become an annual auditor? Is this a one-time thing? We're done. We've done it.

Come on. No, no. The plan is continuing to do this audit every single year. Of course, during throughout the year, We're going to continue with the attestation process that has been going on since a while, since many years, but the audit has to be annual, and we will continue with our commitment to do so. So obviously, as you pointed out, it was basically impossible to get an audit with the previous administration. We're in a much more crypto regime at this point, but that has led to legislation actually passing on stable coins with the Genius Act.

I don't believe the Clarity Act will pass personally, but maybe you have a different take on that. But with the regime that we currently have, it leaves you in an interesting situation as you make plans to fully become available in the United States, right? So USDT, USAT. Can you talk about the relationship there and what the plan is to be fully available in the U.S.? Well, I think that, first of all, USAT is the product that is designed from the GATO to be available in the United States and to be, fully compliant with the Genius Act. Also, USDT, we aim and we are working towards the full compliance. By the way, also, USDT is fully compliant already when it comes to all the KUC, AML, sanctions, monitoring, working with law enforcement. We have passed by a long shot now. There are more than 300 law enforcement agencies across more than 60 countries.

We have been extremely helpful to many of the US law enforcement agencies. You named the DOJ, the FBI, the secret services and so on. So that part is without any discussions, one of the biggest achievements of Tether, so the ability to create something very innovative in crypto and digital assets, but at the same time being of the highest compliance possible when it comes to following all the lows,

especially starting from the United States and all the world and moving to the rest of the world. So that is without any discussion, our priority when it comes to E.CML. But, of course, we comply with OFAC, with sanctions and all that. And USAT is more designed for a different purpose when it comes to the financial markets versus USAT. So USAAT is designed for being the liquidity layer, the interbanking liquidity layer, and a tool that is more geared towards the financial markets and high-velocity trading versus USDT is the stable coin,

for all the emerging markets developing countries. I don't believe in necessity that one single stable coin can solve the both different use cases. So let me explain this way. So both of the stable coins will be genius compliant. You know, with the USDT, we are aiming towards obtaining for reciprocity in across different jurisdictions. So all that is progressing well. When it comes to USAAT though, if you are, USAT will the primary customer, the primary user of USAT might be a financial institution.

You know, financial institutions might seek certain requirements from a stable coin. That could be, you know, velocity would be certain support of certain chains and the primarily focus on, for example, being the stable coin that can back the issuance of other digital assets or tokenized stocks or tokenized debt and so on and so forth. While on the other side, USDT is more focused on, I need to be the dollar of the person that lives in Argentina or Brazil or El Salvador or Congo. And so these two different things will require two different teams that will focus on two different priorities. And that is exactly the distinction.

So there is no real complex thing behind the choice of having two products. And in the end, we are seeing how the world is moving towards. like a gazillion different stable coins you will see now everyone and their sisters and daughters are going to launch their own stable coins so having two is not going to be uh problematic as long as us d and usat will remain interoperable which they are already they are operable and swappable one to one so i want to talk about something that i've been thinking about so you're in this very interesting position where effectively as a business you're long the dollar network right But you're also simultaneously hedging the dollar itself with your actual holdings, right?

So you distribute dollars globally through UST, you own an enormous amount of treasuries, which I want to get into, and your business generates billions of dollars. But you take the capital and you aggressively buy Bitcoin and gold, right? Which are the two assets that are most associated with protecting yourself from fiat to basement. That's an interesting needle to thread. Yeah, I mean, yes, it's, first of all, I mean, you have to look at it from the market perspective. So Tatar recently re-issued also a gold-packed token. It's called X-AOT, it's Stater-Gold.

You know, we believe in the importance of tokenized gold and tokenized commodities, and we believe that it's important that the most prominent tokenized gold token will follow the same rules and requirements that, for example, we follow with USDT and USAT when it comes to KOCML and so on. So there might be jurisdictions that are antagonistic to the United States that will soon issue tokenized gold. And I believe that is the best of interest of also United States to see a tokenized gold product that follows the same rules and is subject to the same requirements when it comes to cleanest of the product that the United States really wants with the Genius Act and with the Clarity Act. So on top of that, yes, I think is important for a company like Tanner that comes from the digital assets. to have a position in Bitcoin.

You know, Bitcoin is the mother of all the digital assets and is one of the greatest currencies in the world, if not the greatest, and is the currency that, of course, offers an hedge to inflation. And when Tether earns its own money, can decide where to put it. And I believe that is important to put it in something that will survive to an apocalyptic. future potentially. I mean, we see so much uncertainty on the global markets on macro that a company like Tether cannot afford to not look at that picture at that instability. We call

ourselves the stable company. We need to take in consideration as every single possible scenario. That's why we invest in gold and Bitcoin. And we also invest in land. Tether owns a big chunk of Adiqar that is probably the largest landowner in South America. And, you know, we have hundreds of dozens of sheep and cows and that company produce milk, rice, and so on. This is when we think about the stability of the world, that has to come through real tangible assets, that and include Bitcoin in that. It's not a game for us. It's a true mission. We need to remain a company that survived to the worst case scenario.

And that's – and I think our balance sheet speaks about that. Yeah, I think people forget that you were a Bitcoin or first. Yes, I'm a Bitcoin or a lot of Bitcoin. Yeah, and interesting, the gold-backed stablecoin, which I think may become more popular than people know. I had a conversation with Maricio from Leden the other day, and I know they're preparing to offer loans, you know, and they only offer Bitcoin-back loans now, and they're moving towards offering loans, you know, against your... gold-backed stablecoin XUT, seems like that's a signal that there's going to be massive adoption of that. And I think gold is sort of back in vogue as well, obviously, after it made that move over $5,000. So maybe, you know, we're going to see a lot of popularity for that product.

Well, think about the fact that, I mean, I'm a Bitcoiner, so I love Bitcoin above other currencies. The reality is that Bitcoin is small. We stay in the digital access space and the crypto space, we say multiple times we are still early. And in fact, we are. So Bitcoin is not yet at the stage of adoption and education for the broader world that will make it the new world reserve currency. So the majority of the decision makers in this world are above 60 years old and nothing wrong with that. simply there is a phase on not everyone understand Bitcoin and Bitcoin is not 5,000 years sold as gold so that Bitcoin does not have yet the penetration in terms of knowledge, understanding

that gold had for 5,000 years, proving itself as the reserve currency for every single or Z. In the Roman times, in Egyptian times, every single time, gold was there. And so when you have decision makers that are that have that are above maybe 60 year old, they are looking at gold as the premier asset for a potential catastrophe and financial catastrophe. So that's why you see so many central banks now buying gold every single day, every single week, and amassing more and more gold in their balance sheet. So unfortunately, Bitcoin is more understood by a younger generation. And I believe that there will be the need of a generational change for Bitcoin to be more broadly accepted also as a currency that can be extremely useful during a financial result.

You know, I have been surprised that we haven't seen a popular Bitcoin-backed stablecoin yet. But maybe that answers it. Maybe it's just too small still outside our echo jam. It's very volatile. I mean, you don't want to get into Teraluna yet again, right? So the problem is that Bitcoin with $2 plus trillion dollars, well, actually is less than $2 trillion now in terms of market cap. I was still wishing that Bitcoin was about $100,000.

It will get there, I believe. But, you know, it's below the trillion dollars. Bitcoin can be still very subject. to market manipulation from, you know, possible institutions or simple, it simply can still be considered going in tandem with the stock market, which would not make sense technically, right? You would expect Bitcoin to be non-correlated to the stock market, you know, to be a true edge against inflation. And so since Bitcoin does not have or does not yield that already that to that type of features, we need to be just patient. I don't think, look, it's, it's less than 20 years old.

It's still like a teenager. And we are pretending that everyone in the world understands Bitcoin as the best asset in the world. That would be very atopic. I think us as Bitcoiners, we need to have that patient. We need to invest more in education. If you go in, think about this. Like if you go in most remote villages in Africa, if you ask these people if they would prefer to hold their value in gold or Bitcoin, of course they will say gold. So because also these type of populations that are unfortunately are less educated because they are bit cut out from maybe even the digital system,

they know Bitcoin. They know, sorry, they know gold. They have seen gold throughout all their traditions and histories of the villages of their nations. So that will continue for a little longer while we need to be patient and we'll need to continue to build the Bitcoin momentum. But we need to do that throughout security and better user experience, which unfortunately what happened with a cold card hack didn't help. And so, you know, the story of Bitcoin has to be a story. of self-custody, and unfortunately we're not there yet, because then how Bitcoin can be better than gold, I mean, gold, one of the main issues with gold, I think that Theta Gold is helping

a lot to solve, is custody and portability, of course. But then if you put your Bitcoin on an exchange, how can be Bitcoin better than something else when it's still on a centralised exchange? So we are still early, but also not only because of the price of Bitcoin, but also because of the infrastructure. The Bitcoin infrastructure is still very poor and we need to be better at it and we need to invest more. Yeah. So I want to move on to your holdings and treasuries. I haven't checked the most recent, but last I had looked at you were 16th or 17th largest holder of treasuries basically on the planet. I mean, do you think we've gotten to the point where the United States views tether as a strategic asset to some degree? I mean, we're in a world

where, you know, treasuries are not the most popular assets. I think, you know, we're intervening in the end. So Japan won't dump theirs. China's been dumping theirs. We've seen central banks now hold more gold than they do U.S. treasuries. And you guys are just, you know, by structurally, you're just going to keep buying treasuries as your market cap grows. Absolutely. So I think the Tether will become top 10 and then top five buyer of U.S. treasuries. Well, by the way, we are top five buyer at the four, at the three months auctions. If you remove, for example, combine all the combined hedge funds that come through Cayman, for example. And so we are a great force for the United States.

I think it's, well, Secretary Bessens spoke very highly about the potential of stable coins to replace some foreign nation states that recently have been dumping the US treasuries. And I think that, look, the ownership of U.S. treasuries from an antagonistic country is not a great thing for the United States because you have a single decision maker that can press a button and sell hundreds of billions of dollars of US treasuries from one day to another. That is something that, in my opinion, is very scary.

And I think what Tether created when it comes to, what Tether created when it comes to stable coins and stable point technology is the first time that the US treasuries became decentralized owned. So we created the decentralized ownership of the US debt with 650 million people that today basically are holding some US treasuries and they will not wake up altogether one single morning decided to sell that debt.

And so this is something that is unprecedented. And Tether created that. So, you know, throughout all these decades of very, you know, well, with all these decades of, quote and quote, financial innovation by, you know, the classic guys and the traditional finance, they never could come up with this solution that actually make the U.S. debt safer because, and for the United States itself as an issue because of the fact that now the ownership is an incentivized and is, can the ownership in this way cannot be manipulated as if you had one single

the secret maker selling potentially hundreds and billions of dollars. Right. And all of this is based on human usage of Tether. And I think one of the consensus views in crypto is that where will we cross over with AI and crypto and it's going to be AI agents using stable coins. So how are you preparing? I would imagine that's very much on your radar. How are you preparing for Tether to be the currency of AI agents? Well, we invested in a couple of companies, first of all, just to get knowledge and understand, you know, how the future could look like. We invested in Neura, that is a German robots manufacturer company. We invest in GBIONics that it is Italian bipedar robot manufacturing company.

And the both of them are designing these robots with an AI brain, of course. And that AI brain will have a wallet inside that will be powered by WDK, that is Staters Wallet Development Kit. and will be also powered by USAT, Bitcoin and XOT as digital assets. So we believe firmly that robots and AI agents in the future will use stable coins and programable money for, you know, they will want to be paid for microtasks in microtransactions. And so that's definitely the future. I think the future will hold 10 billion humans, 10 billion robots and attorney on AI agents that altogether will leave this planet.

And since everything will program with logic and with software and everything will be interconnected, the only reasonable choice will be programable money. That's our bet, and I think we are going already to see, we are already seeing USDT, XOT and Bitcoin being used heavily by AI agents, and that trend will continue to grow probably 10X every single year. Do you think that will primarily be microchre? transactions or do you think we get to the point where they're effectively doing everything for us?

Well, eventually, well, physically they will do everything. Also, unfortunately, I'm one of those people that think that we are, as humanity, we are at the verge of finding out if we are special around. And it will not, I mean, it's not looking great seeing the advancement of AI. And so we are, we are, we need to be careful as a species. to try to master that technology without destroying ourselves. And, you know, there are different arguments of, you know, of other areas in the history of humanity where we have these breakthroughs when it comes to technology, like the Industrial Revolution and similar.

But this is the first time that all this happening so fast. We are getting a pace of change that is top year. So every year, so one year ago, things were much slower and the technology was much less powerful compared to today. In a single year, everything is truly changing. And in a year from now, we are seeing that pace continue to grow. Because also we are investing trillions of dollars as humanity into this technology. And so we are not, our human brain is not really and is not capable to comprehend even that speed of change.

So imagine our ability to adapt to that, not all simply to comprehend, but truly to adapt to, that fast change. And so now you have AI agents that can improve themselves and models can really, almost through genetic algorithms, can improve themselves. So this could lead to a very difficult time for our species, but in the end is also what evolution is about, right? So, you know, I am, we are watching very carefully. We're watching very closely. We're watching very closing. We believe that is important that altogether we we don't discount, we don't look at our own little garden and we don't discount what this could yield in terms of change for our species. Yeah, I mean, the speed of change is incredible.

I mean, on one hand, you see how fast these things are iterating. On the other hand, you watch the Chinese Robot Olympics and these things are like exploding and running into walls and maybe we're not there yet. Yeah. But we know that we will be next year. And if you look at what they were a year ago, it's absolutely incredible. I mean, that's kind of a scary future, right? I mean, and it could happen, I think, faster than people are anticipating.

Yeah, it's happening fast, so fast, also because the incentives are aligned to make it happen fast, because you said it, right? So, you, for example, we look at the speed of change in the United States. We look at the speed of change in Europe. Well, first of all, if you already look at the difference between Europe and the United States, United States is 10 times faster than Europe. But then you look at China and they have already the Olympics for robots and that you are like, holy shit, what is happening there. And so this is, so looking at only one country and if a country only look inwards, that is a very,

very bad decision. For example, imagine like if Italy would try to put a break to AI development or AI adoption inside a country or robotics adoption and then the rest of the world will go to. 10 times faster, 100 times faster, than over the next several years, Italy would be obliterated. Italy for like a random country because I'm Italian. But, you know, this is something that is so global.

And governments cannot just sit down and relax thinking, oh, this will be just another past infancy. And, you know, we are just looking at houseware. You have wars going on. You have macro being very unpredictable. You have robotics. You have AI. You have, you know, I was reading from the latest JPMorgan food shortage document.

You know, there are so many factors that combining require people to start looking at the sky compared instead of looking at their shoes. And so I really recommend everyone to just search and research information that that does not come from the traditional feeds and trying to really try to look at information that come from every single corner of the world because again, the speed of change is not just robotics and AI is everything. And so, you know, things can move quickly from here. I can see why you're buying Bitcoin gold and farmland. Makes a lot of sense. So I know we only have a few questions left. I know that you call yourselves a stable company, right?

So I think that the world still thinks of Tether as a stable coin company, but you obviously have evolved beyond that and have been viewing it as something much bigger. What's, I guess, the dear term and longer term goal of that? I mean, are you trying to become basically a parallel financial and technology stack outside of the traditional banking and cloud infrastructure? or are you trying to incorporate or are you trying to offer both? Well, you see, I think is very clear. I mean, today what we are doing, USDT, with XOT, with Tethergold and Bitcoin.

But we came with as a stable company, right? What does it mean, right? So stability means stability is not stability of our company. Of course, that is very important. And we demonstrated with our balance sheet. we demonstrated with the audit. But stability matters when it comes to society. So stability of humanity, stability of populations, of villages, of communities.

What does it mean? And so we analyzed many of the countries we operate in and we interact with. And we realized that already with USDT, we could yield a huge success. The Tether became the biggest financial inclusion success story in history of humanity just with USAT. But then we started thinking, is it enough to actually bring stability to the communities that we serve with USED? It's a great start.

No one in the history of humanity served these people and these communities as we did. But if we look at it, it's not enough because if there is already 4 billion people in the world and that number is growing, that are excluded from the financial industry, from the basic financial services, is not that they cannot trade. those stops. They don't have a bank account. They don't have a credit card. They don't have a basic access to a savings account. They don't have savings here. They have nothing apart a piece of paper of a currency that devaluates 30% per year every single year against the US dollar. Imagine put yourself in the shoes of these people. And so what can we do to change that? Of course,

having already access to the US dollar is a great thing. But on top of that, we realize that if these 4 billion people are not also be part of the new digital ecosystem, and especially over the AI ecosystem, is going to be very problematic. Because you have 4 billion people that are not financially included, and 4 billion people that are financially included. So there is already a huge gap. If you add AI on top of this gap, that gap will become 100 times bigger. And that is going to be catastrophic for the stability of society and humanity.

So in 2014, Teter, when created USAT, didn't go to all the people that JPMorgan or PayPal would serve. We went to all the people that JPMorgan and PayPal didn't serve and couldn't serve. Not because these people are bad people. These are the 4 billion people that are excluded from the financial system. We went to all them, well, to 650 million of them already, and we are going to get, hopefully, served all the 4 billion people. But in 2026, when we launched and we have launched our first AI product, we don't go to all the people that are using today, Open AI and Anthropic services. No, those people have already access to the financial industry anyway, because they

can pay for an open AI and entropy subscription. So in 2006, when Tether launches his own AI initiative, we go to all the people that both cannot be spared by the traditional financial system because these people are where excluded and today most of them are still excluded, but also since they are excluded, they cannot even pay or afford for an open AI or an entropy subscription. So Tatar is building an open source AI stack called KUVAQAQAWAC that is able, is optimized for small large language models and can run on every single device from a very basic cheap smartphone to any other smartphone on a laptop that is very popular for these countries. If you think about Africa, there are 1.4 billion people there,

and many 600 million people don't have even electricity at home, but the majority of them still have access to a smartphone or like a very basic laptop. And so we design AI tools that can run locally without the need of a connection because these people most of the time cannot even pay for a connection subscription. And so that the battle tatter is being able to serve the 4 billion people that are excluded by the traditional financial services that are today also excluded by the AI services. And we want to serve them both on the money side, on the currency side of USAT, XAT and Bitcoin, and we want to serve them on the eye side with QVAC, bringing AI local to them directly on their smartphones and devices.

So they don't have to foot a very expensive bill that cannot afford. And anyway, even if they could afford, they cannot pay because they are excluded financially. Sorry for the long grant, but is... That was an incredible answer and way to end. Because I think that thoroughly explains why very soon people are not going to look at Tether and think this is just a stable coin company. Yes, exactly. All right. You know that I love everything that you've been doing and love watching the success from afar.

So keep doing it. Thank you very much, Scott. It's always a pleasure. Pleasure, man. Thank you.