The title of the presentation is 'The Quest for a Stable Society.' Today I want to tell you about what we are doing at Tether and how we think about what a society should look like and why it is important that we focus on stability.
So this is our manifesto that we wrote a couple of years ago. Stability derives from equipotent access to technology and finance. Decentralization of technology and finance makes society resilient to failure and abuse. Technology and finance are a reflection of society. Peer-to-peer, for the entire history of humanity, we have been used to talking to each other without intermediaries and transacting among each other without intermediaries.
Cash has always been peer-to-peer. We had in the past different forms of money — silver coins, gold coins, salt and all the rest — but it has always been peer-to-peer. People were sitting around the table and talking, sharing information and sharing value. But things changed recently. In the last 50 years, if we think about it, both money and information became completely centralized and fully intermediated, not just by one intermediary necessarily, but many more.
So how do we think about a stable society? What are the components of a stable society? For us, the components are four. One is stable finance. Without predictability of your wealth, without protecting your wealth, without the ability to plan for the growth of your children and your households, it's very hard for any person to have a stable life.
But also, is money the only thing that matters? No. Because even if you have a stable form of money, if you cannot communicate, if you cannot talk, if you are in a despotic country, even having stable money doesn't matter because you are still not free. You are not free to build a better future if you cannot communicate and build with your friends, colleagues, and family.
So you need stable communications — a form of communication that ensures you can say what you think, as in any democratic state, or as should be. Unfortunately, we are seeing recently how things are going south in that respect. Third is stable energy. We all know that without energy we cannot power up phones, we cannot power up any communication system or monetary system. And lastly, stable intelligence.
But let's start from stable finance. That is the thing that Tether is mostly known for. So this chart says it all — that's why USDT works. On the top of the line you see the US dollar, the straight line. And then the others are all the different national currencies of emerging markets.
In the last five years, the Turkish lira lost 80% of its value against the US dollar. In the last five years, the Argentinian peso lost 94.5% of its value against the US dollar. So imagine yourself and your family live in Argentina where every year, from January to December, at the end of the year you are poorer compared to the beginning of the year. Venezuela — the bolívar lost 99.8% of its value against the US dollar.
You can see here some headlines throughout the last few years showing how stablecoins helped all these people. We are talking about four billion people in the world who don't have access to basic financial services. They're called underbanked, unbanked, or underserved. All these people live in countries where the national currency is devaluating against the US dollar, and every single good and product you buy in these countries is priced in dollars.
Oil is priced in dollars. Without oil or gas, you cannot create energy. Without the ability to use dollars, you cannot purchase phones — mobile phones are imported for most of these countries and priced in dollars. So if you don't have a stable currency, your economy will be completely paralyzed. That's why all these people who need to give their children a better future need to have access to a better form of currency than their national currency.
The main feature of USDT is one-to-one with the dollar. Simple as that. USDT lets people move dollars around in a digital form. It was born in 2014. For the first few years, the growth was very limited. Today, the market cap of USDT is $186 billion.
You can see it here. This is some stats of our company — sorry for this bit of bragging, but $186 billion. Last year we operated with 97% profit margin. I think that's a very unique statistic for any company in the world. It proves that with efficiency — in Italian talking to a few Germans, efficiency is funny — but with efficiency you can achieve a lot and you don't even need huge capital.
Tether was born from nothing with a simple idea — the most basic idea you can think about. The genius idea is just a tokenized form of the US dollar. In 2024 we made $13.7 billion in profits. Last year we are still finalizing calculations, but we made more than $10 billion in profits also in 2025.
This is probably the most beautiful chart. We now have 534 million users, among which most are in emerging markets and developing countries. These users are part of the four billion people I mentioned before — people who have been left behind by the banking system, left behind by any basic financial system. They needed a lifeline. Those are the 500 million plus people that we have.
It's growing by 34 million new users per quarter. That is Facebook-level growth. That is social network growth. As I said, there are three billion people who are underserved in this moment — half the population of the world. In Europe and the United States we are lucky, but we have to think that really half the population in the world does not have access to a basic financial system.
That's why I said money is the ultimate social network. Money, especially programmable money like USDT, can transport two things — information and value — at the same time. That growth is a Facebook-style chart because money is the ultimate social network: while it transports information, it also transports value.
There are many use cases for USDT. We have real-time settlements. Remittances is one of the biggest. All the people working in Europe — fathers and mothers of families working in Europe sending money back home. Same in the US. The US is the biggest remittances corridor in the world. A lot of people living in the US send money to Mexico, Argentina, Brazil. A lot of people in Europe send money back to Nigeria, Turkey, the Philippines, and other countries.
USDT right now is around 9% of the entire remittances business in the world. The total volume for remittances is calculated to be $900 billion per year. USDT is around $80 billion per year already, in just two years. Why? Because if you use a normal remittances company, you are charged between 6% and 26%. Imagine you work the entire week, half your money goes to pay taxes, and then one day per week you are working for the remittances company. With USDT, the fees are zero.
Another group of statistics: 37% of the market cap — the $186 billion of USDT — is used for savings. People prefer to save in USDT rather than Nigerian naira, Turkish lira, or Argentinian peso. From the chart we saw at the beginning, USDT accounts for 61% of the total market share of stablecoins. That number will go up for many reasons — I will be kicked off the stage in some minutes, so it will be hard to explain.
The other great functionalities that USDT created, which are kind of shocking, is that we also innovated on the US dollar itself. Before, when the US was printing the US dollar, people in emerging markets were taking these dollar bills as cash and putting them under mattresses. That was okay, but not very helpful for the United States.
What USDT is doing now is: when people buy USDT, we take their dollars and invest in Treasury bills. When we invest in Treasury bills, we are helping back the US economy. But on top of that, we are doing something very unprecedented.
Right now, countries that are antagonistic to the United States, like China, still have $700 billion in US Treasuries. Thirty years ago they had two trillion. So there is one decision maker in China who can press a button and sell US Treasuries. What we have created is 500 million different-thinking people who will not altogether one single day decide to sell US debt.
In effect, we made US debt much more resilient, safer, stronger, just because we were able to decentralize it across multiple holders. We are the 17th largest holder of US debt as a private company. We have a huge active user base and a huge investment portfolio. More than 95% of our revenues and profits were not distributed to shareholders — they were put into our portfolio so that we could increase our market share, our distribution network, and invest in great companies pushing forward our mission of building a stable society.
We also built the same thing with gold. It is growing very fast — Tether Gold grew more than 100% in the last few months in terms of market cap. It's around $2.5 billion, the biggest tokenized gold market and digital token. We're seeing huge adoption again in emerging markets and developing countries — the same people that love gold. Think about India, the Philippines, Brazil, and so on.
But let's move to the rest. How do we think about stability? We talked about four billion people — half the population of the world does not have access to a basic financial system. That gap will be multiplied by a factor of 100 because of AI. The same people who cannot have access to basic financial services will not have access to basic AI services.
We all know, as Europeans and Americans, that the topic of the day is how AI will impact our jobs. Will AI take our jobs? How will AI impact the lives of people in our countries? But imagine those who do not even have the luck of having a form of money that works for them.
So when we talk about the stability of societies — what if we already have half the population of the world that is poor and does not have any opportunity to change their fate? What if we add on top of that, as more fuel on the fire, the fact that they will not participate in the growth of humanity through AI? To me that is very scary. When we talk about the stability of society, that is the biggest question mark we have — what will happen if that gap becomes 100 times bigger.
So we built a technological stack. I know there are many technologists here. We built a technological stack that starts — this is inverse, right, it's a stack. We tried to think what was the most complex thing we could do: peer-to-peer artificial intelligence, an AI layer that can run directly on a mobile phone for people living in Africa, Central and South America, or Southeast Asia. Something that does not require a connection or big power, so that you can offer very cheap access to basic AI services to the same 500 million people who are our customers today, but eventually the four billion people left behind by the financial system.
That was the most complex thing we could dream about, and we released the first apps for QVAC. But walking back, in order to get there, for the last five years we built a tech protocol and a networking protocol that would allow any device to connect to any device without intermediaries. Remember the concept of removing intermediaries — from money, communication, intelligence, energy. That is the theme of a stable society. That is the theme of Tether.
We built an execution layer that can scale any application on any device — from any smartphone to any laptop to any server to anything. We built a payment layer called WDK that allows digital assets to be held self-custodial, to be integrated in any AI agent, any human. Any developer can build on this layer — it's fully open source. All of this is fully open source. Anyone can take it and build it for the bettering of humanity and society.
So we have the AI system. Now you guys are going to start with the drums, so I will be kicked off the stage. But we have the payment layer, we have an amazing peer-to-peer chat application that proves you can have chat rooms with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of people without a single server in the middle.
We built the communication layer and the networking layer behind it — that is the runtime I was telling you about. And also we built local decentralized energy. We built already 800 kiosks in Africa in selected villages, serving already 800,000 people across these villages, where we have kiosks with solar panels on top and rechargeable batteries inside. We sell for 3 USDT — $3 per month you can recharge the battery four times. For the first time — there are 600 million people in Africa who don't have electricity at home.
By 2030 we project to have around 100,000 kiosks — that means 20 million households, 180 million people powered up in Africa. That is a change you can see from space, because if you see Central Africa from space now, it's very dark during the night. So that is very ambitious. Thank you very much for your time.
