We feel an enormous weight on our shoulders because there are hundreds of millions of people who depend on our product, and so we are extremely risk-averse. If we need to do a collateralization process, it is overcollateralized at 165%.
The people who criticize us, including S&P, are the ones who didn't see the beam in their own eye in 2008. We remember The Big Short — the two analysts went to talk to S&P and they had missed something quite big.
When they came out with their downgrade, I wasn't even angry. I almost took it as a victory. I wrote publicly on X: 'I wear your contempt with honor,' because if you are the ones who are about to blow up the global financial system and didn't notice all the trash behind it — you were complacent about that situation — I am happy to be considered weak by you. I need to be considered weak by you, but strong by all my users.
So today is a very important day because we have here a very successful Italian who is also a partner — his name is Paolo Ardoino, he is the CEO of Tether — and I couldn't help but be here with you. But I especially want to hand over to Raffaele and Silvia, because I would be conflicted. I'll make a disclaimer: I'm a big fan of Tether.
Today this book by Havel, The Power of the Powerless, is very much in vogue. It was debated a lot at Davos by Carney. There's a story in The Power of the Powerless about a greengrocer — a book I kept giving as a gift in the '90s and 2000s because it truly permeated my life.
The story is about a greengrocer under the communist regime — because Havel was first and foremost a philosopher, a thinker, a writer before becoming the post-communist premier of Czechoslovakia. This greengrocer puts up a sign every day that reads 'Workers of the world, unite!' — a lie he knows is untrue, but he must display it under the regime.
Then one day the greengrocer decides not to display that sign anymore. Havel says that was a revolutionary act — he exposed the lie behind the message. Everyone knew the worker had no power, everyone knew the regime was oppressive. That revolutionary gesture of throwing the sign away — that's what Tether has done, especially philosophically. It's the first experience I've had where a company has genuinely fought a lie — the debasement of currency — that I've written books about and worked on extensively.
If there is a company in the world that has picked up that sign, thrown it away, made a truth known that we all kind of knew, and actually done something to fight that lie, it has been Tether. So I declare myself somewhat conflicted and I'm enjoying this wonderful interview.
Thank you very much Guido. Obviously welcome everyone. Welcome Paolo Ardoino. Ciao, thank you for being here with us. You're surrounded today by the Blackbox team. It's like what you said Guido — it's like what Ray Dalio said the other day: 'At this moment I'm selling my Treasury holdings and buying gold because there's not just a war of capital but also and especially because of debasement.' So Paolo, why are you in Italy?
Well, I'm Italian, I'm Ligurian, but part of my family currently lives in Milan. And my extended family, as Guido introduced, includes B Water, Cora, and Will.
Let's take a snapshot first — the latest available data for Tether is from Q3 2025. How did 2025 close for you? What signals are coming from this January, and what do you expect from 2026?
2025 has been another excellent year for our company. We closed with a profit of around 10 billion dollars. We're finalizing the accounts in these days — in a few days we'll have the next attestation from BDO Italia with the final figures. But the profit was approximately 10 billion dollars.
We operated in 2025, like in 2024, with approximately a 97% profit-to-margin ratio, which is very unusual. I don't believe any other company in the world has this level of profitability and this ratio. This means our company is extremely efficient, which is also due to the market capitalization of our stablecoin, which is now exceeding 186 billion dollars. On these 186 billion we earn interest that in 2025 was approximately 3.75 to 4% annualized.
In 2025 we also consolidated our position not only as the leading player in digital assets but also demonstrated we can expand into other areas including artificial intelligence and communications. We have an investment portfolio currently worth 23 billion dollars in retained earnings. 95% of Tether's profits historically have not been distributed — they've been retained and reinvested in gold, Bitcoin, and other companies that advance our philosophy of a stable society focused on new technologies but also keeping the human being at the center, not necessarily machines or money.
Let me get straight to the point. Raffi and I have a billion questions for you, but I'm also following current events — from Venezuela to Iran. In Venezuela, with the Maduro situation, the word Tether kept coming up because on one hand it represented a lifeline for many Venezuelans given the hyperinflation, the dictatorship — and it's not just Venezuela, many countries need to anchor to something like a stablecoin. And on the other hand Tether came up because apparently USDT was used to circumvent sanctions for oil payments. There's also a report about Iran — the dictatorship allegedly bought millions of USDT to try to prop up the rial. My question is: what is your reaction when you read these reports? Did you expect this? And what do you do to fight illicit use?
First, we need to understand what Tether USDT is. It's a digital dollar — we are a representation of the dollar. Historically, there are hundreds of billions of dollars in what are called 'cash pallets' — those pallets of paper money that travel around the world, used by criminals, terrorists, anyone wanting to evade sanctions. The numbers reported are negligible in the context of global crime that uses paper dollars.
What Tether has actually done is bring transparency to the US dollar and how it moves. Every single dollar used illicitly is a problem, and it's a problem we take seriously. We work with more than 300 law enforcement agencies in over 60 countries. No financial institution does what we do. The numbers reported were incorrect because they represent volume rather than quantity.
We work with Chainalysis, Elliptic, all the companies that monitor secondary blockchain markets. Blockchain instruments are transparent. We collaborate with the US Department of Justice, OFAC, the Treasury Department, all the major departments worldwide to monitor what happens. Our ability to intervene as soon as we notice a transaction — or are made aware of one — because we are both active and collaborative when we receive information, gives us a reach that doesn't exist in international finance.
We're very proud that we're giving access to the American dollar to people — most people in Venezuela are good people, very poor people — and in some way they're dissociating from the Maduro regime. On the other hand, we've collaborated with the US DOJ and OFAC to block many transactions linked to sanctioned entities. But these are a drop in the ocean of all the paper dollars being used right now to evade sanctions — transactions that governments are fully aware of but happen in opaque, dark worlds.
The concept of Tether bringing transparency to this makes it, without precedent, like the emperor without clothes. And we're almost used as an example of what not to do — this transparency bothers people. We're accused of bringing transparency to a world that is infinitely larger than people think. We're talking about 500 million linked to Iran, which is infinitely less because the numbers were reported incorrectly. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of millions in cash pallets traveling from Ukraine to the Middle East to Asia that nobody talks about.
But when you talk about transparency — you had already promised in July an audit, a review by one of the Big Four. Is it coming? Why hasn't it happened yet?
Well, this is one of the questions I've been asked most historically.
Actually — last year, when Trump came to power. You can think what you want about the Trump administration, I'm not here to discuss politics, but the reality is that before Trump, the Biden administration was extremely aggressive against the cryptocurrency world. There was talk of Operation Chokepoint 2.0 — the behind-the-scenes pressure from the Fed, the OCC, and other government entities against banks supporting crypto or digital assets.
Remember how many lawsuits the SEC filed, often losing them despite the Biden administration. And Senator Warren publicly sent a letter — easily findable on Google — discouraging and almost sending a threatening message to the Big Four, strongly suggesting they avoid any new engagement with crypto companies and not do any audit related to stablecoins because it wasn't aligned with US policy.
It's clear that if you're a Big Four auditor and you're in a hostile environment toward cryptocurrencies, and a prominent US senator tells you to avoid engagements with crypto companies, these auditors just stay well back. At the beginning of 2025, when the Trump administration with David Sacks and others clearly signaled support for the cryptocurrency world, very quickly we were able to restart discussions with several of the Big Four interested in evaluating a relationship with us for a full audit.
For Tether, a full audit remains a priority. I spend personal time within the company with a fantastic team on this priority, and I remain confident we'll conclude a full audit. Of course, given the damage the Big Four have done in the past, it's not necessarily a guarantee of transparency — one of them made a colossal mistake. I remember Enron — one of the Big Four was involved in a huge fraud.
I want to ask another question because I come from the bond world. You're sitting on the largest carry trade in history — in terms of size, opportunity, and spread. My question is: how long can it last? Because in carry trades there's an attraction toward these types of operations and many players come in wanting to do the same thing — eventually the trade gets crowded. Rules could change because it's a carry trade essentially endorsed by the state — the Genius Act basically made this carry trade regulated. So how long can it last? And looking at what you're doing with profits, I see you more as a sort of large venture capital operation, knowing this can't last forever.
Actually you've put a lot of meat on the fire. The intrinsic carry trade from US Treasury bills that generate yield is very interesting, but I don't see it as that crowded. There's also the factor of zero funding costs.
Right, but there are people selling US Treasuries right now. China had 2 trillion in US Treasuries 4 years ago — now they have 700 billion. So there's selling pressure that can also be used to attack the United States from the Asian world. As for Tether, for 3-month Treasury bill auctions, we're the fourth or fifth largest buyer in the world, and we're the 17th largest holder of US Treasuries globally.
So on the macro side, there's a balance between those selling US Treasuries — because yields are falling, and there's US government interest in lowering yields, which technically means less incentive for investors to hold them — and on the other side, those wanting to sell to create friction within the American system, like the Chinese. Then there are stablecoins acting as a counterforce: we take US Treasuries and distribute them, decentralize them through 500 million people. We have 536 million users who each hold a piece of US debt, making it more resilient to attacks from potential US adversaries.
The other piece though is that if you make so much money, it attracts others who want to copy you. Because Circle, the second-largest stablecoin in the world, tried to do what you're doing. Let's look at Circle's profitability — in Q3 2025 they closed with about 100 million in EBITDA with 74 billion under management. In the same period, with 170 billion under management, your profitability was around 4 billion. There seems to be a significant gap. And the thing is, you can try to copy what we do, but everyone who copies us is forced to give away 90% to compete.
Why? Because what Tether has fundamentally created is the largest distribution chain in the history of humanity. With 536 million people using USDT worldwide, we've created a distribution network that brings the American dollar directly, with an extremely limited number of intermediaries — essentially just us — into the hands of people in emerging markets: Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria.
There's a beautiful chart comparing the flat line of the US dollar against all other national currencies of emerging markets. The lira has lost 81.5% of its value against the dollar in the last 5 years, the Venezuelan bolívar 99.8%, the Argentine peso 94.5%. So we're distributing outside the US the flagship product of the US — the American dollar. We've created a distribution network we own. We've bought chains of bodegas and stores across Central and South America — thousands, tens of thousands — in direct contact with end users.
These stores sell phone top-ups, products, services, pay bills. They operate on USDT settlements. They're our stores — you don't see our brand directly, but everything runs through USDT. In Africa, we're building chains of kiosks in the most remote villages. We already have 800 kiosks selling subscriptions for rechargeable batteries, with 800,000 people subscribed. In coming years we'll reach 100,000 kiosks, 25 million households subscribed, meaning 150 million users in Africa.
We've created this mesh network for distributing a product — but actually many products. With this network we can distribute information, content, ideas, education. When you're in contact with the customer, you can do cross-selling of anything. That's what we've created, and it's why instead of pocketing 95% of the company's profits, we took them and became an investment fund that brought our distribution to an unprecedented level in human history.
Circle, on the other hand — to incentivize users, they distribute 90% of their profits to platforms like Coinbase and others.
But that brings me to another crucial question. Circle or Coinbase has essentially rejected the Clarity Act because they want to make stablecoins a yielding asset — which could be a true tokenization of debt. What is your position on this?
First of all, we've always operated outside the US, and this was actually a rather absurd criticism. When I first went to the US in 2025, I had to explain why we operate outside the US. It was almost a criticism — 'Why doesn't Tether, if it sells the dollar, operate in the US?' It took me some time to explain that this was exactly Tether's strength. If you're the US government, do you want to sell your debt to Americans or do you want others to buy it? Obviously you want others to buy it — otherwise you're creating a spiral where you buy back your own debt.
Once we succeeded in explaining this concept, we showed the importance of USDT outside the US, where we reinforce American dollar hegemony in countries where the intraday volatility of the Argentine peso is over 4% — which is what you'd get annually. None of my users outside the US has ever asked me for interest. We're very comfortable because we're aligned with banks — we don't want to replace banks.
We're agnostic on the Clarity Act — we don't care. We've applied to issue Tether in America, but we won't distribute yield. You only distribute yield if you need to acquire userbase you're not getting, and then you enter into major competition with the banking world.
Outside the US, we position ourselves as a savings account. If you're Argentine, you have the peso as your checking account for daily payments, and then you have your savings account which is the US dollar because it already performs so well against the peso. In the US, we position ourselves as the opposite — we're the checking account, and the savings account can be the S&P or investment portfolios.
But the question is — in America there's the Genius Act, but it doesn't cover other countries. Is there a possibility of having a Genius Act for each country? That would be total chaos.
Many were waiting for the US, and others will copy the Genius Act — it'll be the template used by many other states. We have a regulatory and compliance team that's fantastic and already works with many countries worldwide, providing consultation on how digital assets work. Because very often they try to regulate something they don't understand.
Classic example: Europe. Europe passed a law that initially I thought was written by people who don't understand the problem. The law requires that anyone issuing a stablecoin hold at minimum 60% in bank deposits. To an inexperienced person this sounds normal, but bank deposits are only insured up to €100,000. If I have a stablecoin with 10 billion in market cap and put all of it in bank deposits, the bank takes 90% and lends it out for mortgages — which is exactly what happened with Silicon Valley Bank.
That's exactly why the two Italians running Tether have explained how to maintain risk management on a stablecoin. They also explained it to the Americans and Wall Street. What Circle did was hold 10% of reserves in uninsured bank deposits — I say uninsured because the €100,000 or $250,000 guarantee limit.
That went well for them because it wasn't guaranteed. We instead hold everything in assets we can control, the majority in US Treasuries, which are bearer securities — so if the bank fails, they all come back to me. Bank deposits go into the bankruptcy process and are distributed proportionally.
To finish — I follow Zoltan Pozsar a lot, who talks about re-dollarization of the system. You are agents of re-dollarization in a system that's trying to de-dollarize. The macroeconomics and politics are super complex. The BRICS are pushing for de-dollarization, Europe is afraid of the dollar, the ECB has declared multiple times that one of their main fears would be dollarization of Europe, while the US wants to maintain or increase the dollarization of the world.
Right now there are still 360 billion dollars in cash — banknotes under mattresses — in Argentina alone. We are modernizing access to the dollar for those who are desperate and need access to it, because otherwise they work from January to December and in December they're poorer.
But aren't you in conflict with local states? For example Turkey — I'm talking about Erdogan, not the people. Clearly you're doing this for the people because they have a means of subsistence and transferring money, but from a state/central bank perspective in an emerging country with hyperinflation, you're in a certain sense in conflict with—
No. Let me explain, I'll come to Turkey. Let me explain with the Bolivia case. Our team had never been to Bolivia before March 2025. One of our people, Marco, flies to Bolivia, walks into a random store and sees all product prices on shelves in USDT. He's a bit stunned. Goes to the next store — same thing. Then he meets the president of the Bolivian Central Bank who shows him how USDT has become de facto legal tender.
The problem for emerging markets is the same for all of them. With a weak currency and most products priced in dollars, Bolivia reached a point of paralysis. If you're an emerging market, good luck receiving dollars through the banking system. If today from Europe you try to send a dollar wire transfer to Bolivia, it will never arrive. The same for El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras — and even Brazil and Argentina. There is a desperate need for access to dollars to buy oil and gas. Without oil, factories don't work, trucks don't move, the economy paralyzes.
We've spoken with dozens of heads of state and central bank governors in emerging countries who were truly desperate — their economies and states were no longer functioning — and they're using USDT to bring in dollars and restart. We work with the largest commodity traders in the world, and they've always used dollars until dollars stopped working — intermediary banks could no longer deliver dollars to Bolivia, El Salvador, or any of these countries. So they started using USDT years ago.
If they send USDT to a commodity seller in Bolivia, that seller can then use it to pay salaries, machinery, everything. USDT has become an integral part of the financial fabric of all these states.
Could we say you're the central bank of Tether — meaning nobody can open an account directly with you, but you are essentially the central bank?
Yes — well, okay, that's a bit of a stretch.
Paolo, before getting to a question I know made you angry — we talked about it at Blackbox Morning — the S&P downgrade. I want to ask you two things. First, about Bitcoin: you opened 2026 by purchasing about 800 million. What is your accumulation strategy for 2026, where do you see the price going, and what could be the biggest obstacle for Bitcoin's price in 2026?
First, we need to contextualize. I'm a huge Bitcoin fan. As a mathematician, I believe a currency controlled by the laws of the universe, by mathematics, by physics, is much more interesting and long-lasting than one created by humans who are volatile, change their minds, and must answer to many masters.
Bitcoin is a currency that nobody controls because nobody can control it — and that's why everyone can use it. It's fascinating. Right now Bitcoin is still small — it's more correlated to the stock market than to commodities, behaving completely differently from gold. Gold almost hit $5,000. Bitcoin needs to grow. Let's remember it was born in 2008, first transaction in early 2009 — so let's give it some years because it's competing with national currencies imposed by governments. The beauty of Bitcoin is that it imposes itself on nobody. It's an option, it exists as a way to allocate a portion of your wealth to something that isn't volatile and isn't managed by the whims of two or three people.
In coming years I believe we'll see a decoupling between the stock market and Bitcoin. Right now Bitcoin is less than 10% of gold's market cap, so it's still small and subject to much more volatility than gold. It also needs a generational change — Bitcoin is better understood by younger generations, while those in power are less inclined to change. Unfortunately, the older you get, the less prone you become to change, to understanding something new. As time passes and generations turn over, Bitcoin will remain as an anchor of safety for everyone who sees that even the most solid national currency is subject to inflation.
The real theme and critique I can make isn't about Bitcoin itself, but the fact that in such a strong debasement moment, you would have expected a different response from Bitcoin. What you said is correct — Bitcoin trades like the stock market. What worries me, Paolo, is that in this phase with all the treasuries — you've done 21, there's MicroStrategy — and we've read here at Blackbox various structured notes from investment banks on Bitcoin that are horrifying because they trade on margins, volatility spreads, etc. This tells me that finance always finds a way to extract value from a good idea by making it its own. Bitcoin belonging to the financial world — with the BIS, ITF, securitization — is a problem because derivatives can damage Bitcoin's performance in a period that could be prolonged.
But it's an interesting concept, similar to gold. The market says the paper gold world is much larger than physical gold, but already in Asia there's a dislocation between physical gold price and paper gold. So if today everyone says ETFs accumulate all the Bitcoin, there will come a point where physical Bitcoin trades at a significant premium to securitized Bitcoin. It may not be pleasant to watch while this institutionalization happens, but from a philosophical perspective, the Bitcoin world has always sought to become institutional.
Now that the institutional world has arrived, we can't complain. We need to make peace with that. On the other hand, the beauty of Bitcoin — like the beauty of gold — is that at a certain point people will chase the underlying asset. I think it's called a Minsky moment — the point of no return. If the spread between physical and paper goes from 5% to 20, 30, 40, 50%, there will be a rush to sell paper gold or paper Bitcoin and want physical Bitcoin. At that point, where will the price of physical Bitcoin be? Where will the price of physical gold be?
My background as a trader — I always wondered about the difference between gold securitization and Bitcoin securitization. Bitcoin is very attractive to traders because the implied volatility is very high, and banks can make enormous money on that — selling that implied volatility and buying it at much lower prices.
Michael Saylor has announced another mega purchase — at the highs. Well, now he's buying at the lows and the highs. Paolo, I wanted to take a step back to help our audience understand the future role of stablecoins. First, how developed is the enterprise side for you right now — will stablecoins really become the backbone of cross-border payments, where your real competitors aren't banks but Western Union or MoneyGram? Second, in an AI-driven world with AI agents entering all commerce platforms, stablecoins will be central for payments. Third, we saw the NYSE announced tokenization, NASDAQ had already done it — stablecoins will play a central role there too.
Just look at Western Union's stock chart — it doesn't represent full health. Those who did remittances — when someone earns in the US and has family in Africa and sends money — from Europe to Turkey, from the US to Mexico — these enormous corridors are 900 billion dollars a year in volume. In 2025, USDT covered 76 billion of that — and 4 years ago it was zero.
Think about the growth speed of our market in the remittance world. The pricing compared to traditional finance is entirely lower. If you send money from a rich country to a poor one, you're taxed 6 to 26% — and the poorer the destination country, the higher the tax. A person working away from their family works one day a week just for the remittance company. With USDT the percentage is literally zero — not 1, 2, 3%, zero. You can't go below zero unless you give money away.
The remittance market will reach a point where 50-60% will be stablecoin usage, and I believe Tether — with our 536 million users growing to billions — represents all the people left behind by traditional finance. I always say: if you look at a Venn diagram and intersect Tether's users with JP Morgan's clients, there would be maybe 50 people, because we go to everyone they don't want — not because they're bad people, they're fantastic, but simply because they're too poor to be clients of JP Morgan.
We have a user base growing by 30 million people every quarter. If you look at the USDT user growth chart, it's the Facebook growth chart, not the PayPal growth chart. PayPal reached a plateau in user growth. We continue to grow simply because half the world's population has no access to basic financial systems, and fundamentally what we sell is the simplest product in the world. I have no doubt that for cross-border payments, remittances, and everything else, we will be the company that—
Used, the most used product in the world. Agentic payments the same. I believe that in the future we'll be 10 billion humans, 10 billion robots, and trillions of agents. This could happen in 5, 15, or 20 years. It will happen. There are trillions of investments going toward AI and this future. If you follow the money, we know this will happen. It's unthinkable that an agent would use a credit card or have access to a JP Morgan account. They'll use stablecoins, also because agents are inherently programmable, so they'll want a form of money that's programmable, which is what a stablecoin is. I often say, connecting back to what I said about remittances, the reason our user chart is growing so fast, I describe money as the ultimate social network. The way we created this new form of money is because it transports not only value, as money always has, but also transforms and transports information. It's the first time money carries money, meaning value and information together, which gives unprecedented power to social interaction. That's fundamentally what Tether has created.
You sell Tether through intermediaries, right? Like... what's it called? Primary market.
Primary market. So, basically, the KYC is done by the intermediaries, right?
KYC is the way to verify who's buying these Tethers, right? So how does it work? Do you intervene at a later stage? The intermediary sells the Tether, right? Or places an order for how many they need, but the client verification is handled by the intermediaries. And then you intervene afterwards with, let's say, the enforcement or anti-money laundering. Who handles that?
Actually, we collaborate with all of their enforcement agencies around the world. It works like this. I'll use your example: the central bank has a series of primary dealers, usually about 25 in the world. In the American case, there are 25 primary dealers and then all the other banks underneath. So Tether, in a much smaller and unofficial way, works similarly. We have a list of clients who are our primary market, our primary dealers. There are about a hundred of whom we know everything — we do due diligence with unprecedented depth, beyond the banking world, because we not only have their KYC and AML information but we can also track everything they do and have ever done via blockchain. So we not only know what they tell us, but also what they don't tell us.
What they don't tell you.
Then these clients interact with the rest of the world — they interact with exchanges, with other blockchains, etc. And we use monitoring tools we've built in-house, but also in collaboration with various companies in the sector, to monitor everything happening in the crypto world. Additionally, we have a relationship with over 300 law enforcement agencies in more than 60 countries, where either we proactively notify them of suspicious events using our monitoring tools, or they, having educated themselves about blockchain, notify us of suspicious events. We're the only stablecoin, the only crypto company that has done direct onboarding — meaning direct clients onboarding onto Tether — of the American Department of Justice, the FBI, the Secret Service. We work with each of these entities to make our product much safer for the end user.
But let me ask you — you're talking about the centralized world, right? What if I enter DeFi, open an account with MetaMask, and then go to Aave... at that point, that's totally anonymous.
It's not totally anonymous because the blockchain is transparent. Every trace you leave is an indelible trace.
There's no KYC. But when you entered via Aave, where did you enter from? Where did you get the funds?
OK. And from MetaMask, how did you put the money in?
Well, I don't know because I haven't done it.
Usually what happens is people pay with a credit card, buy stablecoins through MetaMask, deposit them in MetaMask, and from MetaMask put them on Aave. You used a credit card.
