President Trump hosting a dinner with top holders of his meme coin. It's the latest crypto-friendly event of the new administration. And joining us now to talk about DC's embrace of crypto, as well as pending stablecoin legislation known as the Genius Act — not the Stable Genius Act, not yet anyway — Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino. Tether is the world's largest stablecoin issuer by market cap. And I guess we should just start by explaining exactly what Tether is. Not everybody knows exactly how it works. You're number one, it's pegged to the US dollar, mostly usually pegged to fiat. But then you can put it on the blockchain, on Ethereum or something, and do what people think Bitcoin was going to do all along, and that is do these seamless, frictionless transactions around the world. Sounds like a good idea.
Yeah. I mean, first of all, thank you for having me. Tether is a company that created the first stablecoin in 2014. A stablecoin is a digital asset, but it's a digital dollar. So in 2014 we looked at this great technology called blockchain, and we thought, okay, instead of creating yet another token as many do, we put the most used currency in the world on top of this beautiful technology called blockchain. And that currency was the US dollar. So since then, for the first six years, USDt has been used as the most predominant asset for cryptocurrency trading. But in 2020, with the advent of the pandemic and national economies going down the bin in all the emerging markets, developing countries, the adoption of USDt as the digital dollar for all the hundreds of millions of people, the billions of people that are called unbanked or underbanked around the world skyrocketed. So as of today, we have more than 420 million users across the emerging markets, developing countries. And we are growing at the pace of 30 million new wallets per quarter, almost like we were Facebook in a certain sense, because the interest of having a stable currency when you live in Turkey, where you have inflation of 50% year over year, or like in Argentina, where the Argentine peso lost 98% of its value against the US dollar, is just astronomical. So our growth is word of mouth.
But the US dollar devalues over time. And I guess so many questions to ask. You have 100 — and so you say 120 billion in treasuries backing. It's not like a meme coin. This is backed by more than the amount of tokens that you've issued. You're holding more in US treasuries, 1.1 times as much.
So we have 152 billion in issued tokens.
In issued tokens. And we have 172 billion in total reserves. We have more than 125 billion in US treasuries. And the rest is very, very liquid assets. We own more treasuries than Germany. Well, Tether is not a nation, but if we were a nation, we would be the 18th largest nation holding US treasuries. We have more treasuries than Germany, UAE, Spain, Australia. And our approach is to keep growing our US treasuries base. We only keep the short maturity, like around 90 days. We think that is the best approach to create the most solid digital currency.
I mean, if this is all above ground, it sounds like everybody's winning here because you emphasize it's a force multiplier for the US dollar. It's not going to supplant the US dollar. It actually enhances the attractiveness, I guess, or the leading, you know, as the leading currency of the world. It probably adds to that. And I would think that the US would be happy someone's holding our treasuries if we're worried about sovereigns or other countries tightening up on treasuries. You might be the people buying the treasuries.
Well, last year in 2024, Tether was the fifth largest purchaser of US treasuries. When you have Japan that needs to defend the Japanese yen or China that are selling T-bills at a very fast pace, I think we are proving with Tether that we are a company that created three very important features for currency. The first one is financial inclusion. With 420 million people using our product that have been underserved by the traditional financial system, that is a great feature. But then on top of that, we are spreading the US dollar hegemony. I think we are the stronghold for the US dollar hegemony. When we are in Africa, in Central South America, there is very little US presence, but there is a lot of BRICS presence. And on top of that, there is Tether.
Trust you, but I'd still like to verify.
Well, I was gonna ask about the verification. So I believe back in March you said that there was going to be a Big Four accounting firm that was going to do an audit of your reserves effectively. Is there a timeline for that? Do we know when that's going to happen? How comprehensive is that going to be, a public audit of any sort?
So here's what is going to happen. In March, on the 3rd of March, 2025, we hired our new CFO. He comes from a very important background. He comes from Letter One. He is an expert in audits. I don't think ours should be contentious, but still, I think we got the best-in-class CFO. And also, given the change of direction of the new administration in the US last year, having Senator Warren basically saying, oh, you are an auditing firm, you should not touch crypto and especially stablecoins with a ten-foot pole — that was very hard to get anyone on board. Right now we are seeing a change of direction. So it's not up to me to set the timeline, because I see these Big Four auditing firms actually being interested. And I have opened a dialog with us that we are in discussions, and that is our top priority.
How tough is it to do that? How tough is it to do what Andrew's asking?
