The Wolf Of All Streets - Tether: The U.S. Dollar’s Secret Weapon (And Why They’re Buying Billions in Bitcoin) | Paolo Ardoino

Episode Date: April 13, 2025

We dive into an exclusive chat with Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, on The Wolf Of All Streets podcast, exploring his groundbreaking journey to lobby U.S. lawmakers about stablecoins. We uncover how stablecoins could reshape global finance, why Paolo's U.S. visit was crucial for crypto regulation, and Tether’s massive role in supporting the dollar worldwide. This conversation could change how we see crypto’s future—don’t miss it! Paolo Ardoino: https://x.com/paoloardoino ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEKDAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/ 🔥 𝗟𝗕𝗔𝗡𝗞 𝗘𝗫𝗖𝗛𝗔𝗡𝗚𝗘 - 𝗡𝗢 𝗞𝗬𝗖 𝗥𝗘𝗤𝗨𝗜𝗥𝗘𝗗! 𝗖𝗟𝗔𝗜𝗠 𝗨𝗣 𝗧𝗢 𝟱𝟬% 𝗧𝗥𝗔𝗗𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗕𝗢𝗡𝗨𝗦! Join today & get rewarded! Start trading to claim up to 50% in trading bonuses!! 👉https://www.lbank.com/activity/ScottMelker-Cashback?icode=4M3HD ►► Arch Public Unleash algorithmic trading. Discover how algorithms used by hedge-funds are now accessible to traders looking for unparalleled insights and opportunities! 👉https://archpublic.com/ ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. Use code '10OFF' for a 10% discount. 👉https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://x.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.com/ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c #Bitcoin #Crypto #Tether Timecodes: 0:00 Intro 3:08 Stablecoins Change Everything 6:24 U.S. Dollar vs. BRICS 9:27 Regulation's Hidden Risks 13:53 Monopoly Risks in America 17:22 Could Banks Fail Again? 21:12 Stablecoins Dominate Payments 25:27 Bitcoiner's Dilemma Explained 28:41 Tether's Big AI Move 31:00 Bitfinex Bitcoin Returned Soon? 33:23 Bitfinex Saves Crypto Users 35:15 Too Many Stablecoins? 37:04 Bitcoin Cycles Still Relevant? 39:07 Robots Will Use Stablecoins 42:38 Tether Coming to Lightning The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

We have success because countries cannot get their stuff together. You know, French people are, you know, consider them different than Italians. Italians are considering themselves different than Germans. And there is nothing wrong with that, right? So we need to grow up. It's a good price. Even with all the craziness that happened in the world, it's still 80, the price.

Come on, we should be happy. I'm going to run that on loop at the beginning, and we're going to cut the rest of the podcast. I've long made the argument that there are two proven killer use cases for crypto. One of them obviously is Bitcoin, but the other is stable coins. Today I had an incredible conversation with Paolo Ardoino, the CEO of Tether and the CTO of Bitfinex. He finally got the opportunity to come to Washington to lobby for the

interests of stable coins, to meet with legislators and to make sure that we get proper legislation on the books for stable coins. We talked about that entire process, what his first trip to the United States was like, and of course, the promise of Bitcoin and stable coins for the world moving into the future. So Paolo, you've had a lot of great accomplishments over the past few years. I think everybody admires everything that you've managed to pull off, but I've got to congratulate you on perhaps the biggest accomplishment of all, which was stepping foot on United States soil for the first time and not ending

up in jail. Well, I mean, that is what, uh, someone was going to, was saying going around saying everywhere, but you know, I came, I love the U S it's a great country. I, well, I only saw two cities, Washington and New York and just one day of San Francisco. But, uh, man, it's a very good country and good food. I was worried about that. And we have amazing food because we have the best of every culture. Yeah.

You have to work on your coffee. Um, being Italian, that is very, very hard. I mean, the, you know, the Italian coffee is very, very short and dense, right? So it's not like those, uh, that, that is soup that you guys drink, but you know. We drink hot water with caffeine. Yes, yes, and it's terrible, right? Terrible. No, but I wasn't able to land and stay alive. And I had great meetings on the hill. And, you know, there just you know you know you you could understand WOM that was going around saying oh you know Paulo will never come to the U.S. right so and well he's afraid yeah I'm

not afraid. Clearly not well all joking aside the fact that you made that trip spend time in Washington and New York is clearly a signal as to where the industry is at in this country and how far things have come. So maybe let's talk about why you decided to make the trip, what you were doing in Washington, what that experience was like. You know the crazy thing, Tether created the stable coin industry in 2014. We created the first stable coin. And it's an honor to think that after 11 years, the most powerful country in the world, the government of the most powerful country in the world is now going to craft the law on

a technology that we created. So there are a few things in life that would match that. It's a very huge honor. I'm very proud of it, proud of the company. We have to be there to explain why stablecoins matter. It might sound kind of obvious, but of course, from the US perspective, US lawmakers would regulate stablecoins for the US. That's fine.

That's great. But the reality is that why stable coins can be great in the US, as for sure a lot of use cases, they are a plus to have. It's a nice thing to have because you have always had the best banking rails, the best dollar rails, the best financial rails of the entire world. There is the US and there is no second best when it comes to moving money around. Outside of the US is all downhill from there. You go everywhere else and people have problems to pay, people have problems to have access to the US dollar, to a stable form of money. If you go in Turkey, in Argentina, you and I talked so many times about the use cases, about stable coins out there outside the US. That is a story that unfortunately was not told

to the law makers. It was not properly told and explained to our regulators either. It was not told because from our competitors, there was no experience in these types of areas and in these jurisdictions. We built a USDT use case and a user base, now that comes more than 400 million users, starting with the boots on the ground, building shops in Africa and building bodegas in Central South America. We have millions of physical touch points in the physical world. That's something that is so crazy, so new, so unique that only us could explain it. I met excitement, I met interest, I met so much positivity when I met with people from

the Senate and from the House. They really do care about the US dollar hegemony, but also they do care about financial inclusion. They do care about making sure that with our work, with our good work and Tether's good work, we can move the needle in the US dollar adoption out there. If you saw in the last, just from the start of tariffs, you could see, for example, China that started selling more T-bills. There is an attempt of de the dollarization of the world. There is a new Swift channel created by the BRICS countries. So, there are so many different ways that

this de-dollarization is being pushed through. To me, it's not about a stablecoin bill and a couple of companies, you know, trying to, you know, have their own ways, but it's more about national security. The US needs to know that, needs to understand it. And that is the most important thing in the war to me. I'm actually a bit surprised to hear that legislators in the United States were particularly concerned with poor people and banking rails in foreign countries. You wouldn't be surprised. It's actually very interesting to them, right? So, when they realize that the best product in the United States is the US dollar and is doing good around the world,

I think is a very important message and they are very receptive to it. They are very interested and appreciative of what we're doing and we can only do it thanks to the US dollar. Any other currency failed, honestly. I mean, if we tried with so many other currencies, we tried with the euro and we we started Euro stablecoin in 2018. The highest market cap we could get was 70 million euros. No one wants Euro outside of Europe, not even Europeans want the Euro. So why someone else out there should want the Europe? Everyone wants the dollar. You stop one dozen people in the streets outside the US, you ask them, oh, what do you want to keep your national currency? What do you prefer, the dollar?

Everyone will answer the dollar. Not even one person will say, oh, I want my peso. So that's something that is a given. That's the fact. The simple way we explain it with facts, with data in our hands, make the people we meet on the Hill very proud of what they built and what they enabled for us and what they enabled for hundreds of millions of people. Obviously stablecoins are viewed as the most likely low-hanging fruit for legislation now,

right? On the docket, the first thing that there seems to be bipartisan agreement on, we have bills, the genius bill coming out of the Senate, stable bill coming out of the House. One of these is going to get done. That said, my personal concern, or I would imagine the concern of anyone in the industry, is that we get legislation, but it has unintended consequences that they don't think of further down the road, just because they're not as knowledgeable on what they're legislating. They don't maybe understand the technology or see the second order effects. Now, you and I talked a lot about MECA when it was passed. The industry applauded the fact that Europe had given us this clear regulation. Everybody was excited about that, but now we're sort of seeing the

second order effects. You made the point that the biggest risk to Tether in Europe is the fact that you have to back the money in fractually reserved banks in Europe. We just saw Tether dropped off of Binance in Europe because of Mika. So, A, I guess we could talk about what some of the unintended consequences could be, but B, the bigger question is how do we make sure that they get it right in a way that actually allows stablecoins to reach their fullest potential and protects the incumbents like you that have built this out and truly understand it? I'm European, so I'm allowed to say that unfortunately Europeans don't see the big picture. They don't understand the fact that Europe is falling behind every other country in the world. Europe is a federation, but still they are falling behind everyone else. Europe has been lagging behind in terms of technology and opportunities.

lagging behind in terms of technology and opportunities. There are so many outflows of great minds out of Europe. You know that if you need to raise money, if you need to find capital, if you need to find talent, unfortunately, the Europeans have the best talent out there. It's the cradle of civilization. You have the best masterminds in terms of physics and whatnot, but they have to go somewhere else to find opportunities to find capital. If you were looking at the GDP of Europe 20 years ago compared to now, it's lagging behind the US dramatically. China and India are producing more talent now in terms of a number of engineers, well, more engineers than everyone else in the world, even in the US. But even especially if we compare to Europe, it's just unbelievable.

And that makes me sad, but the problem is that Europe, first of all, the government of Europe is elected indirectly, is very slow. The meme from the Simpsons where the gardener was talking about the Scots and how the Scots basically in the end, they fight with each other. Basically Europe is exactly that. We are not actually a proper federation. French people consider them different than Italians. Italians are considering themselves different than Germans.

And there is nothing wrong with that. There are all different cultures and different... We come from very, very long history of Europe. So the US was founded 300 years ago. Europe went through the last 2,000 years of the infights and the polarization and creating cultures that are very different from each other. And so it's very hard for us to get together. And that creates friction, both from the monetary monetary policy from the decision-making policy. There is no common tax regime, there is no common army,

there is no common anything. So, you know, while all the countries are in fighting with each other, they also need to pay attention to what the hell is going on out there. And, you know, we are just very bad at it. So that's why we ended up with a lot of unintended consequences. Yeah. So then how do we avoid that happening in the United States? There is some nuance in each of these bills and the worst versions of things being proposed have the idea at least that perhaps a stablecoin would

have to be issued by a United States bank. There are certainly the most egregious provisions that could theoretically keep USDT out of the market. You've said you would go ahead and launch a United States-based stablecoin if that happened, which which have very cheeky and quick response to that. But what if they say only Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, State Street Bank of New York, Mellon can issue stable coins because they're trusted financial institutions in the United States? Are they? Okay, trusted. They are in cahoots with the government of the United States.

No, actually, nobody trusted that. And like, I'm going to run what you do. I'm going to run that on loop at the beginning and we're goingots with the government of the United States. No, actually, nobody trusted that. And like, I'm going to run what you do. I'm going to run that on loop at the beginning and we're going to cut the rest of the podcast. The trusted students, are they trusted? Yeah, no, they're not. But so trusted, trusted by the government. Yeah. So, look, jokes aside, I think that the it would be be very hard for that type of thing to pass. I think that would be very anti-American. I'm not saying myself, wherever I go, the US and the government, the administration,

the average person I talk to from the Hill, they believe in having a fair playing field. They want to have proper controls on stable coins. The thing that they want the most that I think that makes total sense is making sure that also foreign issues stable coins, they will collaborate with US law enforcement and they will have to reply to lawful orders from US law enforcement. Actually, we are very proud of that because, even compared to US-based stablecoins currently, we are the only ones that are on board with the FBI, United States Secret Services, we work with the UJ. We don't wait for a court order. A court order can take six months. Look at what Zach XPT says on Twitter about our way of collaborating with US law enforcement

compared to the others. I think that there is a lot of interest to make sure that US will not create a monopoly and will not allow lawfare to be used to just create a power grab for a few companies in the US that are trying to use them low as the mobster way. So it's been very clear that there is an interest of creating a proper good framework that will do and will protect consumers, which we very much agree with. But everyone is very interested to make sure that stablecoins are going to be there to help the US people and help people outside

the US and help the US back buying a lot of Treasuries. That's what we need to do, what we have been doing. We have been the best in doing that. Our voice has been heard and we are very excited for it. So obviously, everybody remembers the near collapse, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. And obviously, the exact situation that you pointed out as possible for MECA effectively happened to circle to some degree, right? The Fed obviously

came in and backstopped it, it ended up not being a major issue. But they had roughly $3 billion in Silicon Valley bank backed in dollars and that fractionally reserved bank collapsed and that money was at risk. I'm assuming in these stable coin provisions somewhere there's going to be some rules about how much of your assets need to be custodied and how and where. So is that risk that you pointed out for Mika in Europe, is that a risk in the United States with the legislation that's being proposed now? No, I don't think so. Well, the legislation allows treasuries and cash equivalent and bank deposits. So depending on how much you use the bank deposits, you could end up again with a situation similar to Silicon Valley Bank. So the good thing

about Tether is that our assets are very solid, our serves are very solid. We have $144 billion in issued tokens and we have $164 billion in total assets in the entire group. We have access equity to the latest attestation on top of the 100% reserves of the stablecoin of $7 billion. And we keep our money in the US. One of the things that I'm telling to the US lawmakers and regulators is, you know, Tether is keeping all its TBLs in the US in counterfeit Gerald. We are very proud of it. They are great. And if you want to go and check them, they are there. US simply has an entire huge power on Tether already already we keep our money in the US so it's not like we are trying to hide ourselves it's there it's been safe safer than anyone else in the space and also in the bank space. So come and know us and meet us and talk to us because we are the ones that created this industry and we are ready to work with the US. We are also ready to create a domestic stablecoin that we believe has a very different use case

than stablecoins for the emerging markets. It's more an institutional stablecoin and we are very excited to play on the US turf, because we believe that if we start playing in the US, then we can become quite fast the bigger stablecoin out there as well. Our competitors might not like it, but it is what it is. This is separate from Tether though. You're saying this is what I mentioned before, a US specific stablecoin. Is that something you would build because of legislation or because there wasn't enough clarity for Tether itself to operate in the United States? Or does it actually have a

separate use case as you're discussing here and a really good reason business-wise for there to be a different asset? I want to do it because it makes sense. I think we can prove ourselves in the US as well. I think that is a different use case because it's very more institutional and payment-driven. More than 40% of our user base of USDT stablecoin user base is using it for savings. An American would never use the dollar for saving. They would have a saving account in a bank that would generate a yield. They would buy T-bills themselves. Instead, if you live in Turkey, where the Turkish shillier devaluated 80% against the dollar in the last five years, then you would

use the dollar as your saving account because it's that effectively. It's a completely different situation. Two different stablecoins with two different use cases. Also, I think that it has been said from our competition that we would never touch the US and then we were afraid to come up to the US. Now, we will be in the US. We love the US. Now, we will be in the US. We love the US. We are the ones that are making the US great out there in the emerging markets with the US dollar hegemony and

pushing for the US dollar hegemony like no one else before. And so now we want to play the US and we want to demonstrate that we can also be great and be the best in the US. Obviously, your market cap is growing exponentially. I think we actually talked when you were surpassing 100 billion, I think you just said you're at 140, right? A 40% increase in a few seemingly months, less than a year is nothing to sneeze at. So yeah, if you're going parabolic, at what point does Tether and Stablecoins as a whole really start to become a threat or I don't even want to say a threat because it's a negative terminology, but become the major player in payments around the globe competing with the swifts and wire transfers

and ACH, all the PayPals, all the other ways that people traditionally move money outside of crypto rails. So I think that stablecoins will be a very important net positive for the payments business. I mean, the payment business is for the people. If you ask me if USDT and stablecoins can be a threat to the companies that are charging remittances 20%, sure, it should be a threat because it has to be a net positive for society. If you are asking me if stablecoins and good stablecoins, high quality stablecoins can be a threat to the US dollar or US economy. No, actually, we are the ones that are buying last year in 2024. Tether was the seventh largest purchaser of US Treasuries. And if you were such an insane number, I'm sorry, that like every time

I hear that I can't help but it's mind blowing. But if you see the countries that are before us, like the six countries before us, you have Cayman, Luxembourg, and UK, we're very close to UK. So, but just if you remove Cayman and Luxembourg, that they are just aggregating all the US Treasuries by from the compound by all the hedge funds, by all the hedge funds, we would be the fifth largest purchaser of US Treasuries. And we're very close to the UK. So in the UK, there are many hedge funds. So if you would remove also the UK, because if you remove the portion of UK purchasing from hedge funds, we would be fourth. So it's insane, but if you're looking really China in the last week sold 50 billion of US Treasuries, so they were $230 million two years ago or three years ago, and now they're

like almost $700 billion US Treasuries. So if you have one single decision maker pressing a button from one of your antagonist countries and this person would sell your T-bills in your face, that is a big threat. That is problematic. But if you have 400 million users like USDT across the world and each user, each one of these users is a different brain, is a different mind, is a different person, and they will not decide altogether to sell the T-bills. They cannot do that in the sense that they are all different people. They have different problems, different lives. So that's the beauty of it.

We made the US debt and the US dollar infinitely more resilient through this. And that's another point that when we talk to people in the US, they really like it, they understand it. We have the data to prove it. You have this interesting bipolar situation for, I guess, you as an individual, but for Tether as a company, you're obviously deep believers in Bitcoin. You add Bitcoin to your balance sheet. We've talked about it a thousand times that you're a, a Bitcoiner first.

We also have the macro environment and the economy in the United States and tariffs and Fed cuts. And we saw the Fed cut, which was supposed to bring rates down. Rates didn't go down. They went up. We've seen tariffs and rates temporarily dropped and then went right back up. Well, rates being up is exceptionally good for Tether as a company, right? Because obviously your T-bills yield more, you make more money. But I would imagine at your

core, there's a part of you that would want to see these come down, see the government get themselves under control and start to operate a balanced budget, all these things. How do you, as a business person and as a Bitcoiner sort of square those two things? So there are, yeah, there are three things actually to me. One is, yes, I'm a Bitcoiner. So I believe in the long-term power of Bitcoin as the perfect money is the only type of money

that has been created through math. And while humans can fail, math is the only certainty that we have in this world. And so I think that Bitcoin is that type of currency. Second, you have, yes, we make money out of the increased interest rates. So that is good for the company. But I said it multiple times, I feel like one of the difficult things for me to come to terms with is the fact that the success of USDT is directly proportional to the insuccess of monetary policies around the world. That is the way is a sad thought. And I think about it every single day.

And I think about it every single day. So I think about that we have success because countries cannot get their stuff together. But at the same time, if we were not there, then people will, and the communities in these countries would suffer much more. So it's a very fine balance between all these three things. And I'm doing my best to think about it all the time and try my best to be a net positive as a person, as a company in this world. I mean, to your point, you can't change the fact that everybody in the world want dollars, that's global reserve currency, and you're making access to those dollars much easier. You also buy

a lot of Bitcoin. Yes, we bought 8,888. So you're taking 8,888. I love the number. And so you're taking a lot of that money and putting your money where your mouth is, so to speak, and buying Bitcoin. And then on the other side, you're also investing massively in technologies that you believe can help people, including artificial intelligence. Yes, that's correct. We're investing a lot in, by the way, we're investing a lot of our profits back in the US, well, in part in Bitcoin, part in gold, and part in the US. And some outside the US to keep increasing and spreading the installed monetary base of

the US dollar through USDT. But when it comes to artificial intelligence, I am very fond of it. But I think we are looking at AI in a completely different way than many others are looking at it. Our approach to AI is to create AI tools and an AI software development kit that can allow any developer to run and build AI applications directly on the smartphones. So we are going soon to launch a translate app that can fully translate documents directly on the phone using an LLN directly on the phone, very fast, very, very efficient, without having you to upload the data to a server. Imagine that you have your personal health summary from your doctor,

you want to translate it, or you have some other like your house contract, whatever, and you want to translate it in another language like Spanish. And you don't want to upload that to Chess GPT, right? You don't want to have it uploaded to Gemini. You don't want someone else to have your data, especially big corporations. They A, they will resell the data. B, they will train their AI on your data. So that's why I think that our approach to AI is different.

We want to protect people's privacy. We believe that AI should be offline. Well, if the AI needs to search something on the web, that's fine, but it should be first or even that should be privacy first. But even more so when the AI will have access to a microphone, the AI will have access to a camera, when the AI will have access to your documents should be all running on your device and keep all the data on your device. Yeah. I want to talk a bit more about Bitfinex since we've been focused so much on stablecoins here. Obviously, in all of this regulatory, legislative clarity, regime change in the

United States, one of the biggest narratives has been the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. We got an executive order from Donald Trump talking about the strategic Bitcoin reserve and the bulk of that is the Bitcoin already held by the United States government. That's A and then obviously exploring budget neutral ways to add more Bitcoin to the balance sheet, which is a wait and see. So a lot of the Bitcoin held on the United States balance sheet is yours. It's from the Bitfinex hack, obviously, right?

Probably about half, although we don't have a full audit. What happens when the United States Strategic Bitcoin Reserve gets cut in half because the Bitcoin that's rightfully Bitfinex gets returned? Well, I think that David Sachs said that the number that they had in mind was an estimation and they wanted to do a due diligence to understand exactly how much was seized through criminal activity where on both sides you have criminals. So, you can be in a situation where you seize money through money laundering where there is the guy that is doing money laundering and on the other side you have the guy that

is happy and is healthy in doing money laundering. And so that money gets to the government. In our case, we are very confident that the justice is doing rightfully its own course, and you have us between us as a victim, and then you have the others on the other side. So we are very confident that things will be resolved for the best. I saw that there was a lot of noise online, but where our neighbors are focused. We waited now now it's nine years, almost nine years from the hack of the drinks. We waited nine years. We wait, we are very patient, patient animals.

Yeah, I guess at the end of the day, it just, I mean, maybe I've got it wrong. From a third party perspective, it's like somebody comes into my house and steals my wife's jewelry. And then you as the individual, you know, pay, you get paid back or you pay back whoever needs to be paid back. But then the police just keep the jewelry. Right? Because you guys have made everybody whole who was involved in that hack. I mean, you did the right thing as a company. You filled that massive, massive debt. And so that Bitcoin doesn't need to go to victims, it leaves you as the sole victim

theoretically. I mean, is that correct theoretically? That's correct. And we gave, we made everyone all within seven months. I think that the story of Bitfinex and how we are paid the debt, it should be discussed in every single financial history book. I agree, especially as a Voyager creditor. I mean, listen, it should be though,

because you can look back at what's happened to the crypto industry for the past three years and see how horrid of a process bankruptcy was for creditors in every single one of these, how long they take, how much money goes to the lawyers, and you just made your customers whole. Yes, that's why I think that we are, as people and as a company, as a group of companies,

we are a net positive for the industry and the world. So, curious, does Bitfinex have any plans because of the changing environment in the United States to increase operations here? The United States is a very crowded place for changes. So we don't have the plans in this moment. Bitfinex is more like a broader institutional platform for OGs and that's, you know,

we have a very good healthy volume. The company is very profitable. I mean, also in the bear markets, when I see some public companies in public exchanges that release their quarterlies in the bear markets, I would cry if I weren't them. Bitfinex remains profitable. Very proud of the team. It's an incredible team. It's very lean, very efficient,

very dedicated to security. So yeah. I think it's fair to say that in both the exchange and stable coin space, we have way too many players, right? I mean- Stable coin, we do have many players. Seemingly never ends in the stable coin space. Like every time I turn, you know, look at X, it seems like some stablecoin I've never heard of is depegging.

There's some new one. I saw it as a headline, F something USD. And then you see all these kind of exchanges that come and go and disappear and no KYC. And I wonder if they're just money laundering operations. Is there any risk to having so many people trying in these two spaces? Well, I think the market structure bill in the US will help setting the boundaries for also exchanges. That would be very, very good.

I think that stable coins, I mean, everyone and their sisters now want to do a stable coin, and from big institutions to everyone, I think that there is space for quite a few. There won't be space for everyone. As always, there will be the ones that can get it right, can get the distribution and others that will just simply fail. You know, both of these, I believe that by end of the last 20, six regulations will fix most of the issues. At least it will make it very hard or harder to do ragpoles and, and, and scams and money laundering.

That makes sense. Looking at Bitcoin from a, I guess, cycle perspective, we've seen this massive Bitcoin move all the way up to over 100,000. A lot of people obviously viewed Donald Trump as the Bitcoin President. He was coming in. We've seen price obviously drop since then, not Donald Trump's fault, just to be clear. But do you think that the same cycles we've seen in the past are somewhat still intact?

Or do you think that now things have changed? Because a lot of people are expecting, you know, this Bitcoin move, altcoins go crazy, Bitcoin moons again, the same thing that we've seen over and over and over again. It really has not repeated this time. Well, I can speak for Bitcoin, not for Ethereum. I think they have some problems there. Ethereum is back in 2018 now. Yes. It's a nice time machine. The real stable coin, the best stable coin.

You have competition, it's Ethereum. Right. I believe that Bitcoin, I mean, yeah, we complain about the price because we want always it to go up, but it's still like 78, 79. I mean, come on. It's like, we always complain. We are like, we need to grow up. It's a good price.

And even with all the craziness that happened in the world, it's still 80, the price. Come on, we should be happy. We should be, we should high-fiving each other. And we should be proud of their silencing of this currency. So there will be time. The beauty of Bitcoin is that currency that means me to resist to the test of time. So altcoins we'll see, but I like Bitcoin to the couple from altcoins.

I'm not the biggest fan of altcoins myself. I'm aware of that. So when do you hit a trillion? 2030. What would be the catalyst to send it flying that high? What do you think could happen in the world right now? I mean, we kind of talked about it a little bit before, but that could really, really, really send stable coins flying. I mean, I can see multiple, I mean, there are multiple points of views from, I mean, and there are multiple reasons why we can reach at one trillion very fast.

Some are not great options, but again, it is what it is. I cannot control the world, but it's, if the more the world will be in unrest, the more there will be shenanigans across all the different countries, the more geopolitical shifts will happen, the more global alliances will change, the more the stable coin market will grow, the more USDT will grow. So that is one scenario. The second one is, you know, I think a lot about how the world will be in just five years and how the world will be in 10 years. And everyone I talk to, they will say, oh, sure, there will be this company, that company, that company, and so on and all that. I think that society in 10 years

will be so different. We're going to have 500 million robots among us or 1 billion. And so I think that robots, at least at the beginning, will start using potentially stable coins. Maybe in the future they will become smarter and will use Bitcoin or whatever. But at the beginning, when we get to ASI, but I think that we should look at society as something that, in 10 years, and something that we are not going to be fully prepared to understand today. So, we have to factor in hundreds of millions of robots. We have to factor in user robots, we have to factor in robots and AI making 1,000 or 10,000 times the number of transactions that humans make on a daily basis.

I think that the robots will use stable coins for sure. Robots will use stable coins because they can program stable coins. They can program smart contracts. They will want to enforce their interaction, robot to robot, AI to AI, agent to agent. They will enforce that interaction through smart contracts and stablecoins. So I think we better will reach a trillion because of possible multiple outcomes. But even if we have 1 billion robots among us, probably the world is not going to be too nice. I don't believe in everyone playing nice necessarily, even that future scenario.

I started in 2016 in crypto and I remember all of the incredible use cases we are going to see in the mainstream adoption and bringing it to a billion people and gaming and NFTs and metaverses. And now here I am in, I guess, what we would call my third cycle. And it still seems like it's just Bitcoin and stablecoins and everything else is still an idea. Right? So none of the things I've been excited about over the years, it's nothing against them.

Things take time and I do believe we're building towards it. But none of those things have happened. But now you can legitimately think five years in advance, right? So I've been here nine years, think five to five years in advance, right? So I've been here nine years, I think five to 10 years in advance, and literally robots and AI are going to be transacting with crypto without any of us touching any of it. And I mean, that is the parabolic moment.

It has to be. Yeah. Yeah. That is the parabolic moment. And again, the point is that at that time, I don't know where humans will be. I mean, sure, there will be humans, we will be there. But in which condition in which situation, what will be the financial situation in the world, we will not know. But, you know, it's, we can only do so much is

not on only after us, Scott and me. Okay, so I want to ask you one last thing, and I'm gonna let you go. Tether is obviously deployed across multiple blockchains, can be used almost everywhere. You recently had news, I believe, that it was deployed on Lightning. Is that correct? I'm not looking at it, but it will be deployed on Lightning. Why have we not seen a popular stable coin yet Why have we not seen a popular stable coin yet that operates on Bitcoin? And do you think that that could be the final boss if it really gains adoption? So brief history, Taylor USDT started on Omni.

That was a layer on top of Bitcoin. So it was actually USDT was secured through the OmniLayer on top of Bitcoin. That was the OG USDT and as Bitcoiners we started there. Unfortunately, the OmniLayer had only very little traction, especially after as Mark Holds, Rex and Ethereum were born. The beauty of USDT on Lightning is that it is the best, it is the perfect way to do high-scale transactions. The difference between Lightning that is a peer-to-peer channel system, is a peer-to-peer layer two and everything else, like all the other layer twos, is that any other layer

two that you have on Ethereum, they have the same problem. They have a single share state and usually they have a very limited set of validators. So for example, if you have certain stacks, you would have one validator or three validators that are forming a multi-seq, but usually in most of the cases, actually you don't have one single validator that is very, very not crypto, very, very not decentralized anyway. But anyway, every node in that layer two system would need to subscribe and keep up to speed with the single share state across all the nodes. Basically every single node needs to see everything and know everything and need to know every single wallet balance and everything that happens in order to validate and be part of

the net. The difference with the peer-to-peer state channels like Light Network is that I can open a channel with you, Scott, and we will keep transacting among each other. We can also enforce a client-side validated smart contracts, and then we can go at a speed of light, we can send it, get ZETL transactions among the two of us, and then when we are tired, we just close this channel and settle the difference. That is exactly how everything should be built because it allows, I can have a channel with you, I can have a channel with another million people, and another million people can have channels with other million people, and I people can have channels with other million people.

And I don't have to see your stuff. You don't have to see the stuff that you, that all the transactions that I do with someone else. Right? So scaling is very important and scaling only happens if you remove everything's centralization point. And in all layer 2s out there, apart from Lightning, you have a huge centralization point and in all layer 2s out there at Heart Lightning, you have a huge centralization issue. That is the validators and the single-tiered state. That makes sense. So it's going to be interesting to see how successful it is, is what I hear, because I know that Bitcoiners are eager to have a functional stablecoin on Bitcoin.

And I think that a lot of things that have been built on other chains are coming back to Bitcoin right now. It's obviously been one of the more compelling narratives, this cycle. Paolo, I know you got to go. Thank you so much, as always, for your time. Anything I might have missed that you want to add? Not really. Just thank you for your time, Scott. Always excited to talk to you. And maybe we are going to meet and talk in 2049. Yeah, this time, this time I'm going to come up to you from the front. Very slowly. I'm not going to jump on your back in front of all of your security.

I'm going to do it the safe way this time. Thank you so much, Paolo. Thank you, Scott. Let's go!