Year 10,231. Humanity had conquered distance, bent matter to its will, built a civilization across a thousand worlds. And the empire wasn't just powerful, it was permanent. Or at least, that's what everyone believed. Everyone except one man. Mathematician Hari Seldon had spent his life on psychohistory, predicting the fate of civilizations through math. And it told him something no one wanted to hear.
He calculated the imminent collapse of the empire. It never happens all at once. First the unrest, then the blame, then the violence. Three factions, each convinced they alone could save what was already breaking apart. And then, silence. A world that once blazed with the light of a billion lives, gone dark. Not destroyed, just forgotten.
The empire will fall. Not today, not suddenly. He stood before the empire and told them what was coming. Everything we built will collapse. Society will descend into darkness, 10,000 years of it. Unless we act now. They called it treason. But Hari had seen this, too. Even in the deepest darkness, his equations showed a second term.
Small points of light. Not empires or armies, just people refusing to let go. Knowledge becoming a bridge, a bridge becoming a network, a network becoming a foundation. So he proposed something radical. A foundation at the galaxy's edge, a seed planted in the dark, meant to grow into light.
Everyone, good to be here again this year. Why this video? I wanted to try to explain in the best way possible how we think about Tether. So, Tether is very well known as a stablecoin company, issues USDT, is a buyer of Bitcoin. We have more than 130,000, 140,000 Bitcoin. We keep buying. Just today, we released a Bitcoin faucet. If you go on Twitter, Tether owns the @BTC account. You can do @BTC and your tether.me email address that you get when you download the Tether wallet, and you will get 10 cents in Bitcoin directly for free to your wallet, right? So, we do all these things.
But I tried to explain to you why Tether goes much beyond that. And the best way I could think about was taking inspiration from Isaac Asimov, who is my preferred author in history. And if you have read the cycle of the Foundation from Isaac Asimov, there is this person, this mathematician called Hari Seldon, that created this theory called psychohistory. And psychohistory is a theory — it's a combination between mathematics, statistics, physics, sociology, politics, all together. It's a complete science to understand how humanity and society will shift, shape, and change over the course of hundreds of years, thousands of years, and millions of years.
And so, you know, this is an excerpt from the books. And we use that to express, as Asimov was very well expressing in the books, that you can use science to predict, to analyze what is going on in the universe and to predict the outcome. And while you predict the outcome, try to think how you can use the very same science to adjust it, to move things in a different direction, to change the course of maybe the decay of society, change the course of potential darkness that could arrive among all of us.
Like, you know, in the books, Asimov was describing Hari Seldon predicting that after 10,000 years of the empire, the strongest empire of the galaxy, something would happen. A turmoil will happen, and 10,000 years of darkness will follow. And was also predicting that through the usage of psychohistory, that darkness could be reduced to just hundreds of years.
And so, why I'm telling you this, am I crazy? Why am I saying this at a Bitcoin conference? Why bringing up this doom and gloom discussion? But I think that here, the way I think about Bitcoin is the incipient of a technology and a new social construct that is creating a new sparkle that will survive and resist any darkness because it's made to be peer-to-peer, it's made by people, it's made by people using it, it's made by people accepting it in every single part of the world.
And so, if we believe that this is actually the case and, you know, if Bitcoin is truly the first element of a potential fight against an upcoming darkness, what can we learn from that? And first, when I thought about what Asimov was trying to communicate with his psychohistory science, then I thought, is it just science fiction? Is it just happening in the books? And then I thought, well, that darkness described in the books of Asimov is simply something that could be boiled down also and brought back to Earth.
Because darkness, as was described in those books, is nothing more than chaos in society. It's instability in society. And you might have heard me last year explaining that Tether, for us that we work in the company, we call it the stable company. It's a company that aims to bring stability in society. And while Hari Seldon in the Asimov books was trying to solve and reduce darkness from 10,000 years to a few hundred years through the usage of psychohistory, of this science, we believe at Tether that the darkness, quote unquote darkness, that we are seeing upcoming in society — because it's out there, right? So, we see wars, we see inflation, we see national currencies being destroyed, we see instability, we see all the possible signals that what we call darkness is coming, is there.
The world is not necessarily going towards a better place. There is more and more chaos, there is more and more instability. And so, I wanted to use this video to explain how starting from the universe and sci-fi, actually we can boil this down to what is happening on Earth. So, let me move on to the next part.
This is a story that doesn't just predict the future, it recognizes the present. Right now, 700 million people live with intermittent power. They are already in the dark. Families who have fed communities for generations discarded overnight because the system decided they were no longer economically viable. And in one of the oldest democracies on Earth, people arrested not for violence, but for words, for a meme. The lesson from some governments has been clear. They don't need to silence us, they just need to make sure we can't pay our rent. And in the most powerful nations, corporations are building machines not to serve people, but to exploit them. The darkness doesn't arrive with an explosion. It arrives with a slow dimming.
So, again, starting from the universe, sci-fi, to the Earth. So, what was described as a period of thousands of years of darkness in the universe and boiled down to Earth is simply society becomes more unstable, unpredictable. You have hundreds of millions of people and actually billions of people that don't have access to basic financial services. They don't have access to electricity. They don't have access to stable telecommunications. And more importantly, they don't have access to and will not have access to basic intelligence services.
So, think about 4 billion people in the world that don't have access to basic financial services. They are left behind by the traditional financial system. How can we think that half of the population of the world being left out will bring more stability to society? That is the analogy that we are trying to make with the psychohistory revelation. If we don't do anything about it, if we don't do something, if we don't try to use science or technology and our abilities to build something different, something that outlasts darkness, that can reduce the darkness, creating stability, creating spots of light across countries, across cities, people. Something that will connect people independently from where they are and make them resilient to the change in the world. That is going to be our darkness on Earth.
But how? Sure, many words. What does it mean? What does Tether intend to do about that? So, let's move on and see.
Hari Seldon understood something most people miss. You don't fight the darkness by winning a single battle. You fight it by building systems that outlast it. That's what we're doing. A foundation, real infrastructure, and we call it the resilience stack.
So, this is our answer. A resilience stack is an open-source technological stack that, as in the psychohistory case, is a scientific approach that analyzes the different issues that we see in all the countries we operate. Remember, Tether operates in hundreds of countries. In 160 different countries, we have boots on the ground, we talk to people. We have a network of 573 million users of USDT and Tether Gold and all of the other services that we provide. And it's growing. Our network is growing by 34 million new wallets per quarter. So, this is unprecedented. This is a scale that proves that the technology that we are building is growing at the pace of a social network.
It's not anymore a fintech company, it's not a stablecoin, but actually it's becoming a movement, it's becoming a technology stack that is becoming part of the fabric of that world. A part of the world where fathers and mothers of families are left behind by the traditional financial system. They're left behind by the ability to communicate safely with their children. They might not have even electricity at home.
And think about a world where you have half of the population of the world that does not have access to basic financial services and will not participate in the 100x improvement in intelligence capabilities because of AI. So, if the gap between the two sides of society was already that big because of financial inclusion, imagine what happens when AI will become truly part of everyone's life. You are going to have that gap that is now splitting the two halves of the population of the world — that gap will become 100 times wider because of AI.
And so, the resilience stack is our response to that. What are the practical things? What is the practical technology that, in the case of psychohistory, we could use and build and apply to reduce the period of darkness from hundreds of years or decades to just a few years and create the sparkles of light across society so that whatever happens, whatever dystopian future, whatever catastrophe, whatever pandemic, whatever will happen, we can still connect together, we can transact together with Bitcoin, we can use the AI services that work for us and not for a few big corporations.
So, all of this converges in a single story, in a single stack. You should look at Tether's GitHub open-source repositories. We have, I think, crossed 1,000 open-source projects on GitHub. That is very unique. That shows how really deeply we do care about building something that will outlast even us as a company because software technology needs to be resilient even to its own creator. That's also what I like about Bitcoin. It's everlasting, even its own creator. It will last forever. Of course, we are going to always remember Satoshi Nakamoto. We are all Satoshi, but that's the beauty of a technology. That means when a technology is well done, no matter who created it, everyone can use it. Everyone is actually the father of that technology. And so, let's see the first part.
At the base, a peer-to-peer protocol that needs no servers, no center to hold.
Tether built Holepunch. That is a completely peer-to-peer telecommunication protocol that can scale to billions of users, billions of machines, and trillions of AI agents. For the more techy of you guys, it's the BitTorrent protocol that was built almost 30 years ago, rewritten from scratch, improved, added the cryptographic layer, made it extremely scalable and adaptable not just for file sharing, but for any real-time data stream — for video calls, messaging, mapping, and you name it. So, this is fully open source. Everyone should take a look at it because for the first time, the Holepunch protocol allows any developer to build applications that can scale to billions of people and hundreds of thousands of companies without any single central server.
On top of that, we have demonstrated — we are going to see in a little bit — but we are ourselves capable of offering services that truly scale to the entire humanity without any point of failure. And you can build any application on top of it. Again, you can build a peer-to-peer Uber, you can build a peer-to-peer mapping system, you can build anything you want. It's out there, it's for free, it's one of the most sophisticated, but at the same time easy-to-use software and networking stacks that could be empowering anything you are building for your company or for yourself, for your families, for your friends, in an incredible way. This is, to me, what Bitcoin is to finance, Holepunch to me is to networking and telecommunications.
