Right, yeah. So everyone talks about stablecoins with the hype, right? So in the US you would use stablecoins for payments and programmable money and all that, right? There is a lot of talk—I think tomorrow there is a hearing about that—but that is cool, that is a very nice tack. The reality is that stablecoins are much more important for billions of people that, differently compared to Americans or Europeans, these people, these communities don't have other ways to pay. In the US you can pay with PayPal, you have Cash App, you have hundreds of ways to pay. But if you go, for example, in Africa, in Central and South America, in Turkey, in Asia, there are hundreds of millions of people that are unbanked. Three billion people in this world—so almost half of the population—does not have access to financial services. They use mobile money with the phone credit, they use cash and all that, but they are not part of the digital economy at all. They cannot send wires, they are completely cut off. They are not bad people. Their only problem, if you want to call it a problem, is that they are too poor to be of interest to banks. In order to be of interest to a bank you need to generate $100, $150 per year in commissions, but if, for example, in Ethiopia the average salary is $134 per day—it makes it very hard for you to be banked.
And on the other side, also the other part is that these people live in high inflation countries where, for example, Turkey—the inflation last year I think was 50%—and the national currency, the Turkish lira, devalued 80% against the US dollar in the last five years. And for example, peso argentino devalued 98% against the dollar from the last default of the country, and every time in the last eight years Argentina, for example, defaulted many times. So put yourselves in the shoes of someone that every single decade was in a country that defaulted, or basically put yourself in the shoes of a father of family in Turkey that works from January to December, and at the end of the year, after one year of hard work, is poorer compared to the beginning of the year, right? So this is our user base: hundreds of millions of people that need a dollar because their national currency is very bad, cannot allow them to give a better future to their children, and they don't want to speculate, they don't want to buy all the altcoins and all that—they just need a dollar, simple like that.
So Tether in 2014 is the creator of the stablecoin, the first stablecoin, this technology, and at the beginning we thought, oh well, this will be a $100 million dollar market cap token, and now it's 140—almost 143 billion—and it is growing rapidly. Sounds crazy, but Tether is the company that brought financial freedom and financial inclusion to hundreds of millions of people. I don't want to sound coy or disrespectful, but we heard so much about financial inclusion and how important it is, and all that—this is the financial inclusion is the topic of the 21st century—but I believe there is no company—I mean, we are not an NGO, we are not a charity. There are so many NGOs and charities that raise so much money to do financial inclusion, and we don't see them anywhere in the countries where we are. We did much more for financial inclusion with hundreds of millions of people than anyone else in the world, and while we are doing that we are buying back the US debt. Right now we have around $5 billion of US treasuries. We are not a country, we are a small company, we are 150 people, but if we were a country we would be the 18th country in terms of ownership of US debt.
And if you think about it, we also make the US debt much more resilient. Right now, for example, you had one single decision maker in China three years ago that had control over almost three trillion dollars of US debt, and now they decided to sell a good chunk of it, and now China has only 770 billion in US debt. With USDT that cannot happen, right? So every one of our 400 million users is a different brain, is a different mind, is a different person. So all these 400 million people will not wake up one single day all together thinking, oh, now let's redeem Tether and sell the US debt. No. So we decentralized the US debt, we make it more resilient. We are every single day with our boots on the ground building infrastructure for the US dollar and Bitcoin, by the way, everywhere in the world. So everywhere we go we bring Bitcoin, we bring the US dollar, we do education, and we are in the trenches. We never approached a financial institution around the world, we never started top-down, we always go bottom-up. We build kiosks in Africa with solar panels on top, inside you find batteries, and we sell subscriptions to people in Africa for three USDT per month so they can swap these batteries four times. We have already 300,000 customers and several million swaps of these batteries. There are 600 million people in Africa that don't have electricity at home, so on one side we are building infrastructure for electricity so that they can power smartphones, they can power small computers and small televisions with these 14.5-volt batteries, but on the other side we also bring them and teach them about Bitcoin and the US dollar, which is something that of course they prefer much more than, for example, Nigerian naira. So every single day we are in the trenches building the biggest distribution network—physical and digital—for US dollars, but not only for that, for Bitcoin, for education, and for any other product that our company is producing or will produce in the future.
Yeah, amazing. I think there's a few things you said there I want to highlight. One is who your customer is—you're talking about African countries, Latin American countries, that's where you're seeing a lot of the growth. What I find fascinating is I think Tether's largely misunderstood, I would say, because it's not competing with Chase Bank. I think a lot of the times you see these headlines by certain media that maybe have it wrong, and that you guys are going after entirely different customers. In fact, Chase can't have 400 million customers—there's not 400 million Americans. So I think that is what's fascinating. In hearing Bessent—Scott Bessent of the US Treasury—say in a recent remark that he views stablecoins as strategic in his plans for the dollar, in the way I think that you guys are onboarding an Argentine cab driver onto the dollar, onto being a purchaser of US debt at such a scale that you're comparable to countries. Can you talk to who do you think your true competition is, who's competing for your customer, and how you're selling the dollar and onboarding folks into bringing demand for US debt? And can you comment on Bessent's remarks and that he views stablecoins—which you guys are the majority of, if not the entire market—how he views that as strategic? How do you think you're strategic to America, and who do you view as a true competitor? Would you agree that Chase Bank as it stands today is a great business but not necessarily competing for the same customers and selling the same product as you?
