If you think Tether is just a stable coin company, this conversation is going to completely change how you see the future of money. In this interview, Paolo Ardoino breaks down why Tether is launching a new US-focused stablecoin called USAT, how regulation has finally caught up to technology—we built the technology and we sat on it for 11 years before seeing the world recognizing it—and why stablecoins are no longer a niche crypto experiment. They're becoming core financial infrastructure. Today we have 536 million users. It's not anymore about something that a couple of geeks are using. Well, it was never about that, right? It was hundreds of millions of people around the world using USDT as their digital dollar.
Then Bo Hines explains the part nobody in finance wants to say out loud. This isn't crypto versus banks anymore. The real battle is about liquidity, distribution, and who becomes the rails of the next financial system.
A lot of folks that have really wanted to enter the Tether ecosystem from the US have been looking for a vehicle to do that, and that's what USAT provides. It unlocks this network of liquidity and distribution for folks here that they've been clamoring for access to for years, but they haven't been able to participate in. Eventually, you're just going to see basically stablecoin sandwiches built, deposits will be tokenized, everything will be moving through stables.
But this conversation goes way beyond money. Paolo explains why Tether isn't just building financial products. They're building AI infrastructure, decentralized telecommunications, and peer-to-peer energy systems designed for the billions of people who've been locked out of traditional systems. If you want to understand where money, banking, and technology are actually headed, straight from the people building it, then you need to listen to this conversation.
Paolo, I want to start kind of where we always do, which is how incredible of a year you just had. Or usually we talk quarterly, so I should say how incredible of a quarter you just had. But 2025, the numbers are once again absolutely astounding. Over 10 billion in profit. Tether continues to be on the rise even after an incredible few years.
2024 was amazing, 2025 was incredible. 2025 was an important year because the Genius Act passed—very relevant for Bo as well—but it's the year of the legitimization of a technology that Tether built in 2014. When you see what you built recognized by the most powerful country in the world, that means something. It meant a lot to our entire organization, created a lot of excitement for new opportunities because now it's not anymore about something that a couple of geeks are using—well, it was never about that, right? It was hundreds of millions of people around the world using USDT as their digital dollar. But now that the government recognizes it, what you can build upon this technology is almost infinite. That was probably the biggest achievement as an organization to see that happening, and of course the announcement of USAT in September.
Tether is building many different products in different areas. We have been involved in commodity trading, AI, sports, building wallets technology, tokenization technology. We are spreading ourselves in 10, 15, 20 different directions that are very relevant for the current moment in time that humanity is living in. That's the part that excites me the most—how the company is continuing to grow. So it's not a stablecoin company, Tether is the stable company. A company that builds technology to empower society to remain stable.
Bo, you seem to be in a very interesting spot. Obviously you were pivotal in crafting Genius and getting it passed in your previous role, and now you're on the other side working with Tether to have a compliant stablecoin in the US in USAT. What I'm interested in—the legislation passed. Are there any critiques you have of it? In a perfect world, wouldn't the original Tether be compliant and everybody would be happy and we'd have hundreds of billions of dollars in liquidity there? Why are we in a position after the Genius Act to create a new stablecoin?
I think that world will exist. That's why reciprocity is in there. The process that's ongoing is Treasury fleshing out exactly what those reciprocity standards are going to look like, and from there I'm very confident that USDT will receive reciprocity. For USAT, being the first Genius-compliant product in the marketplace, we have a unique first-mover advantage to help onboard institutions into this brave new world in the financial system. What we're doing for our customers is giving them an on-ramp into the Tether ecosystem, which is a tremendously powerful one. As Paolo just described, I've been blown away being on the internal side of things how organized this company is and how much is actually being worked on.
Tether is probably the most prolific technological company that exists today, and it's a privilege to be a part of it. With USAT, we're building and working on so many different partnerships, many of which are extremely exciting as we start to see the merger of TradFi and this crypto ecosystem come together. We hope to be the tip of the spear on that. Tether is the most important player in the ecosystem, and what we're doing is building an on-ramp to the US capital markets to that system. I think it's going to be very well received. We just launched less than a week ago, we're starting to build our liquidity, bring our partners in, and you'll start seeing these very exciting partnerships announced over the coming weeks. I think your audience will be very impressed and very pleased by what they see.
When you talk about partnerships, is this effectively institutions that are going to need to have a stablecoin plan or utilize stablecoins who either would have the option to create their own stablecoin—which at this point I don't understand why any institution would do that—or partner with some sort of incumbent that exists already?
The power of incumbency is extremely strong, and what you'll find is that really two things matter: distribution and liquidity. We're working to make USAT interoperable with USDT via a variety of mechanisms—whether through Anchorage as issuer or through pools on exchanges. Folks have the optionality of whether to engage with a US Genius-compliant product or with the most powerful token in the crypto ecosystem in terms of transfer of value.
What we're doing with a lot of these institutions as they start to flesh out what this brave new world looks like for them is helping them understand the technology and how it benefits their customers. We're talking about increased efficiency, transaction costs being lowered at a tremendous rate. There's no better company to work with than Tether with these products because we already have these things built. Banks are starting to realize it's probably not the best idea to issue their own stablecoin considering that other banks don't want to settle with them in their own product. We're providing an agnostic product that already has the distribution and liquidity so that money can flow freely.
As we thought back to this legislative process and David and I were deciding where do we go with this, we pushed hard on the fact that Genius needed to go first. It's a testament to what Paolo just described—what they built is being recognized as really what's going to undergird our new financial system and the rails that are going to be there. You think about institutional settlements and the way they view it from the interbank settlement perspective—these products are going to be enormous and the integration has barely begun to scratch the surface.
A lot of what we're doing in terms of pitching and building these partnerships is helping to educate. They want to be involved, they want product adoption to occur in a streamlined manner, but they really need to understand the best way to do it. There's no team that's better at doing that than Tether. We've been doing this for several months now. We're talking to large-scale institutions, merchants, thinking about how we build product utility and give the consumer the best optionality for product use.
It's such a 180, Paolo, because in our early conversations, you couldn't get anyone to talk to us. Banks just weren't even thinking about this—they viewed it as competitive, there was no real chance it was going to become compliant or become legal. And now here we are. I would imagine the floodgates are open and everybody's calling because they have no idea what the hell they're doing.
The time preference of Tether is different from anyone else. We built a technology and we sat on it for 11 years before seeing the world recognizing it. You were very helpful trying to explain to the world the importance of stablecoins, you hosted me many times, no one gave a damn until the Genius Act passed. But we never stopped. We were relentless and we continued to believe in the importance of what we were doing. Today we have 536 million users across the world. That is the biggest financial inclusion success story in the history of humanity, and that's probably the thing I'm most proud of.
It still needs education, and definitely banks have seen it as a threat. The horse industry was seeing cars as a threat. But now banks actually can adopt this technology and build new amazing products. They can have 24/7 trading, instant settlements at the speed of light. The new avenues for monetization and growth for banks are just insane. They just have to realize it. They need to hire talent that will understand how to embed these products within their ecosystem. But I think Bo is doing a fantastic job already engaging with different financial institutions that are very much interested in understanding what is possible. They want to leapfrog technology that has been built—many banks still rely on technology built 40 years ago in COBOL, and now they have the chance to leapfrog 40 years and adopt in a second the most elegant technology layer for money ever built.
Are there any risks associated with stablecoins if people do them the wrong way that people are not paying attention to? We can talk about every bank in the world creating their own stablecoin. It seems like somebody's going to blow it some way, shape, or form if they do that, right?
We saw in 2023 different banks that blew up—Silicon Valley Bank and others—because they had the wrong duration maturity for US Treasuries. Having US Treasuries is not necessarily the holy grail; it's also the maturity. You need to have short-term maturity so that your treasury is resilient to changes from interest rate environments and all that. Peter Thiel said you have to think about a problem for at least 10,000 hours to become an expert in it. It will be important for new institutions and international institutions to hire people that have long-term experience in stablecoins to make sure they don't redo the mistakes. I hope we're not going to see a Terra-Luna built by a bank. History is there for a reason, and we should hope it will be respected and understood and studied before making the same mistakes.
Bo, coming over to the other side and being on Team Tether instead of trying to craft the legislation—what pain points do you see with the educational process with these institutions? How broad is the scale of their understanding? Are some people coming to you saying literally what's a stablecoin and what do I do? Or are they more advanced at this point?
I'll be honest with you. Probably three of the multinationals are pretty well astute in the process of integration and what stablecoins provide both the bank and their customers. They've started to develop infrastructure around this but they're still looking for partners. If you start going down the totem pole in terms of market scale and you're talking to regionals or super-regionals or community banks, the knowledge gap begins to widen. But that's not to say it's not worth pursuing those folks as partners because a lot of Americans like bank optionality, a lot of them like community banks, and they need access to the same products.
We're watching this fear model play out with clarity. You're watching the new legislative process on market structure, you're seeing banks grappling with the fact that stablecoin adoption is continuing to be widespread, and that scares them because they're worried about deposit flight. At the end of the day, I think it's actually going to work in the inverse. As banks start to have a better understanding of what product integrations look like and they choose the right partners—which I continually say is Tether—they're going to have tremendous success not only in keeping their deposits but upgrading their systems and allowing their customers to have the best access to the best financial products in the marketplace. It gives them a lot more freedom and power as consumers.
We can't speak to everyone at once, but we're pursuing a path in which we're not just focused on multinationals. We want to talk to regionals and community banks as well, start talking about what this integration process could look like for them and what it could mean for their customers long-term. Everything takes a little bit of time. We're still on the precipice of this law just passing back in July. I feel very confident about where things are going long-term. There is an appetite there. If they can get to the right place on Genius with the banks and the crypto ecosystem, it provides a pathway for us to have a streamlined process of integration with everyone, not just the multinationals.
You alluded to all these incredible new products that they can create utilizing stablecoins, but I would also imagine there's plumbing being adopted behind the scenes that is not making the news. I've seen quite a few companies over time allude to the fact that they're using stablecoins—like Stripe and Robinhood—but they're just using them for internal payments on weekends cross-borders. It seems like there's a two-pronged thing. There's the stablecoins that threaten bank deposits in their mind, but there's also hey, we probably just want to move money faster and cheaper for our own purposes. Where's the push and pull between those two things for these institutions?
From an intrabank settlement perspective, you can talk to some of the largest banks overseas—whether in Asia or other markets—and they're very excited about the prospect of stablecoin adoption. As Paolo hinted at, we're undergirding this brave new world of finance in which we'll probably have 24/7 trading and 24/7 markets. That's great for global trade, great for banks to facilitate trade in this manner. They can settle over the weekends. If you're a bank in Asia, you can now participate in US capital markets post 2 p.m. on a Friday because you don't have to worry about settlement. It unlocks a wide variety of different manners in which they can engage with the US. Banks obviously see the benefit of using these products for their own internal metrics of settlement, but I think they'll slowly start to recognize their consumers are going to have a demand for these products as well.
Everyone wants to be able to move money at will whenever they want in a very cost-effective manner. Adoption is inevitable. That's what we saw with Genius as we pushed it forward—this was the product in demand. It's a testament to what Paolo and team built at Tether, and that's why it's so exciting to be here now. I get to be a part of the other side of Genius. This is what we envisioned, but now we're putting it into practice, and it's really interesting to see how it's going to play out.
You've got to be having more fun the last two months.
I'll tell you, Scott, I don't envy being in the market structure debate. There are actually conversations happening at the White House today, and I feel for all the folks involved because I know how tumultuous of a process that can be. Look, it's the pressure cooker of a system and ultimately you get to the right place. I think they will. I'm very confident they will, and I think it'll be good for the ecosystem at large.
Paolo, I love when you say it's a stable company and not a stablecoin. You guys have notoriously really started showing that. Obviously with massive AI investments, developing decentralized AI platforms that I think align very well with what you said about financial inclusion. There's a lot of people who can't afford a couple hundred bucks to use AI, and you're opening that to them in the same kind of way that you've allowed inclusion to the dollar into the financial system. With this large web of things that you're now investing in and developing, how does that all feed the beast with Tether itself, with really being that stable company?
The user base of USDT, the obvious user base of USD, is four billion people. There are four billion people that are underserved, underbanked, left out by the traditional financial system. The very same people that cannot afford to have a bank account because they cannot pay $150 per year to keep a bank account open are the same ones that will not have the ability to purchase a subscription for a prominent AI platform.
The risk I see here is that we talk about wealth gap and the huge disparity across emerging markets and the Western world when it comes to money, finance, and wealth. We have to realize that intelligence is very important as well, because whoever has access to AI services will become 10 or 100 times more intelligent—they'll know everything, have access to speed-of-light information and problem solving. How can society remain stable if we have the other half of the world that will not become as intelligent? That is a huge risk to the stability of the world and to stability of society.
What we learned with USDT is the power of disintermediation, the power of bringing tools directly in the hands of the people, the power of peer-to-peer. The same concept can be applied to energy. We built peer-to-peer energy, decentralized energy in Africa with hundreds of kiosks—solar panels on top and rechargeable batteries inside—where we can sell a subscription for 3 USDT per month. A person in a village in Africa can recharge the battery four times. We have 800 kiosks now and one million users paying to get these batteries, and for them it's a lifeline. Without a battery there is no energy. Without energy you cannot have access to anything digital.
Having a smartphone in the house or a tablet will help with education of kids in these villages, but without energy nothing can be done. So we built decentralized energy. You cannot have centralized energy in Africa because these villages are very far apart from one another. You cannot have long-distance lines and a nuclear plant. Even with energy, we think the Tether way. Telecommunication—we built Holepunch, a peer-to-peer telecommunication system. With AI, again, how we fix the AI disparity is with AI that is local-first, that runs on smartphones, that runs on any laptop, that can scale based on the hardware you have available. We try to optimize using the best models—even the tiniest model helps you with the basic things that AI should give you if you are in a remote village in South America or Southeast Asia or Africa. That is our way to build technology that is resilient, distributed, helpful, that does not have any strings attached.
We feel very lucky as an organization. We made plenty of money, we said it before. So we are not actually optimizing for yet another buck. We are optimizing for positive impact on society. We believe that being able to onboard 500 million plus people onto USDT means we are clearly on the right track of success also on a broader scale with other types of technologies—AI, energy, and so on.
How much do you think Americans will utilize USAT or USDT outside of the financial system? Or do you think it's more of a focus on all the things you're doing to bring stablecoins into the US financial system? Because we have a relatively stable financial system. Most people in the US able to venture have a bank account—it's certainly not the same as in Africa. But that doesn't mean I want to spend two hours, which I did last week, trying to send a donation to my kid's school with JP Morgan fraud alerting me two times over a small donation from my own bank account. The pain points are real. Do you see this as most Americans using stablecoins through their bank, or using it the way Paolo is describing, or is it going to be a blend?
I think it's going to be both. Everyone when we start talking about rail efficiency in the US talks about how the rails are about 95% efficient. That's true, but it's relative. We still experience these pain points and they often come at very inopportune times. It's still very expensive to move money in the US, whether you're using Venmo or another money transfer service, especially from a card or via bank account in terms of settlement.
Americans will pick up on the idea and concept of stablecoin integration from a retail level, but you do that by packaging the products in ways that allows them to engage with stables without having to think about the fact that this is coming from the crypto ecosystem. We're thinking about all different ways in which we can do this. We've talked to payroll companies that front-run payroll for some of the big-box retailers. Folks that make minimum wage in this country—it's really hard to be paid on a bimonthly basis. With stables, the company they're working with can pay them almost on a daily basis. That's a huge unlock for folks, especially for folks engaged in remittances.
You can start packaging these products together. If you want to automate a 10% remittance out of your daily paycheck to family overseas, you can do that. We're seeing these products being developed. The technology is just beginning in terms of where it's going here in the US. We're talking to folks that do mortgage origination, giving people the optionality to actually put a down payment in stablecoins here in the US and pay it on a monthly basis in stablecoins. But I think it will be a blend ultimately—it's like the merger of the retail space with traditional finance.
Eventually, I envision a world in which you're going to have access to a stablecoin wallet through your banking UX. You can do a checking account swap and then send that money anywhere in the world instantly at any time at basically zero cost. That's where we're going. But I also want to provide retail activity opportunity to consumers—being able to walk into a big-box retailer and pay for a product in stables. It just makes life simpler and saves you a lot of money in terms of settlement. I think even the card companies are now looking at stable integrations. You can think about Visa and Mastercard—it saves them a ton of money on the back end that they can pass on to the consumer in savings and still increase revenue long-term.
It's just about creating efficiency. In the US it might take a little bit more time given that folks have access to different ways to move money, but that's not to say it's not going to convert. I strongly believe at the end of the day stablecoin adoption will be extremely widespread here domestically. I think it'll kind of blend this world of crypto into the traditional financial world in a way that's really positive and leads to tremendous success for retailers, merchants, banks, and customers alike. It's going to be really exciting to see.
In my mind, I've always said that when you send a stablecoin, we'll know that we've won when somebody just thinks they're sending dollars from one person to another in the same way they do it with PayPal or Venmo or Cash App, and they don't care if it was on Avalanche or Solana or Ethereum or a private blockchain or even what stablecoin it was. If we do end up with a whole bunch of private ones, how close are we? Paolo, you've been building that for a long time. How close are we to completely abstracting away any of the crypto, as Bo sort of just mentioned?
One of the main issues I still see in the industry is user experience. Even without all the other things we're doing, I would really not consider Tether a crypto company in the sense that it's a digital dollar. We are definitely using blockchain technology, but blockchain is one of the best tech layers out there. People need to have access to wallets and infrastructure that is single-purpose focused to their needs. Most people in the world don't have time to understand crypto. They don't have time to understand the difference between a dog with a hat and a dog without a hat. They just want a dollar, they just want maybe Bitcoin. That's it.
The way we build technologies needs to be respectful of the actual needs and problems of the people. That's how we've always approached it—to be helpful and care about their struggles and their frictions. User experience needs to be abstracted to be melted into something that can work for an interbanking interface but also for more consumer-type platforms. We are demonstrating our efforts with Rumble and the Rumble Wallet. We don't want to distract the users with too many products. There will be Bitcoin, Tether Gold, USAT, and USDT. It will be used in the Rumble ecosystem for tipping and for the local economy that was already existing and just needed more efficient, faster, and cheaper rails. We want to set the standard for what it means to take this technology seriously and adapt it to the real world.
