Bo, it's quite the walk. I had some exercise. I know that is a long walk. I feel like we should play some walkout music. You're at the White House. You now are the CEO of USAT. When I think about your importance in the crypto industry, there are a couple of big things that you can hang your hat on. One of those being that you guys got the strategic Bitcoin reserve done. You were able to get a lot of clarity, no pun intended, in terms of the administration's approach to crypto. Talk maybe just about your time in the White House working on the crypto stuff and when you walked out that door to go and work with Tether, how did you look at like here's what we accomplished?
Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, we had a blast. Obviously with David being in there, we set the mission forward to move at tech speed and I feel like we did that in that office. Patrick was a deputy there who's now in my former role. But it was just fun. We moved at lightning speed to try to get as many things accomplished that we possibly could. Understanding the nature of political cycles and how these things work, we felt like we had momentum early and we captured it. But I think the biggest question that we had to answer when we first arrived was what bill do we want to put forward first? That was the debate between Genius and Clarity. We were able to get Genius passed this past July. But the Clarity debate continues to rage on. I do not envy Patrick in this position right now. But I think one of the things that might be lost on some people is yes, we were able to get the SBR done through executive order. Obviously, we hope to see that cemented through congressional action. But we had the president's working group report on digital assets that was also released. This was probably the most comprehensive regulatory framework ever produced by a government in terms of what the digital assets ecosystem should look like. I encourage you to go take a read. It's crypto.gov. You can go look at it and comb through it and see everything that's in there. Our goal was to lay the groundwork for a brave new world in the financial system. With Genius, stablecoin regulation gives us the on and off ramp we need to enact a world in which a lot of us in the technology space have dreamed of in the digital assets world where we have 24/7 markets and all of that grandiose stuff. I loved my time there. I felt like it was the right time to move on after Genius was passed. I think I got leveraged into being the bully a little bit on that bill. So it's always good to have a fresh voice in the room for the next phase. Post that report, I decided to step back and that's what's led me to be the CEO of Tether US now.
Now when you think about the Clarity Act, everyone is very focused on is this thing going to pass? Is it not? We had some people yesterday put the odds at 60% that it gets passed. How important is this for the industry or is everything going to be fine if it doesn't get passed? But it'd be nice to have.
I think it's immensely important. It's the other piece of the puzzle in order to have the complete picture that we need to progress things forward. I think it's probably 80 to 90% likely that it passes. We're down to a few small details that we need to iron out. The biggest one being about UX structure. I say that because everyone in the media is talking about this yield debate between banks and the crypto natives. I really don't think it's a yield debate. It's more of a UX debate, meaning that do you have to be an OCC chartered bank and do you have to have a separate platform in order to pass that yield along to your customers? This really only pertains to one actor in the space. I think that a lot of the folks in the crypto world are now unified around this and I think that the banks are coming to terms with the fact that stablecoin adoption is here and integration is about to begin. I'm confident they'll get to the right place. Knowing how David and Patrick work, both brilliant people, I think they'll find a good landing spot.
Talk about Tether US and what you guys are doing.
Yeah, well look, I think Tether is arguably the most important player in the crypto ecosystem that's not a commodity. We have about 530 million customers now. We're growing at about a clip of 30 million a quarter, which is pretty remarkable. We're the 13th largest holder of gold in the world. We're also huge Bitcoin maxis here at Tether. It's just a very unique company: 300 employees, 10 billion in profit in 2025. Under the Genius Act in this brave new world, we decided that we wanted to launch a Genius compliant stablecoin product here in the US to service institutions and work on that integration that we had attempted to set up in the White House with this bill. It's been a wild ride over the course of the last year. We move very fast. We're a lean mean machine. But it's remarkable how organized everything is inside of the orbit. That's truly a testament to how PO runs the business from the international side. We're hoping with this US product, with our 530 million customers worldwide, we can connect these emerging markets to the US capital markets and create corridors that have never been established before in finance. I think that Tether is probably the only company positioned to do that in the world. Tether's much bigger than just a stablecoin company. We're prolific investors in technology space. We're building everywhere, whether it's in robotics, infrastructure. We're constantly looking for ways to improve the system. For folks that really care deeply about Bitcoin, stablecoin integration is a huge boon for the ecosystem at large because it's an on-ramp into this digital assets world that allows people to move in and out of assets like Bitcoin and other commodities in a much quicker and more efficient way. I think that's a great thing.
Saying that Tether is a prolific investor in technology is an understatement of the century. Every time I talk to Paulo, I get an update about the brain computer interface company and the various other things. You mentioned these corridors. Describe a little bit as to what is the benefit of establishing this? Are there things that the US institutions are trying to do that they can't do now because of the technology gap? What is the kind of sales pitch, if you will, to these institutions?
Yeah, I mean look, it's still very inefficient to move money in the US. Our rails are 95% efficient compared to the rest of the world, but it's not very cost-effective. You're limited to the time frames in which you can move money on a larger scale. Stablecoin adoption really changes the world dramatically in all of these different verticals. You can think about it from a settlement perspective, whether it's intra or interbank settlements. This allows Korean banks to actually participate in US capital markets on a Friday afternoon because they have a settlement mechanism and a vehicle to do so post close. The biggest thing right now as we think forward is what does the infrastructure look like? If you're trying to move NYC on chain and have all that trading take place there and have the on and off ramp stables, the infrastructure has to be able to support it and has to be cost effective. There's a race right now to build chains in which it actually makes this reasonable and palatable for folks to move forward and create a world that behaves in this way. Stablecoin adoption from the institutional side brings obvious savings to banks and other merchants alike. You go from T2 to T1 to T0 with stablecoins. You're not waiting for inter intermediary settlements any longer. For businesses this is also huge. For us consumers, it's great from a remittance perspective. What you're going to see from UX adoption is a lot of these folks should be building these products all into one. You start thinking about origin points, whether it's payroll companies paying their employees in stablecoins rather than on a bimonthly basis. They can get paid on a daily basis now. They can programmatically say, 'I want to send 10% of my daily paycheck to somewhere in Latam or somewhere in Asia.' Packaging these financial products in a way that the consumer doesn't have to think about engaging with stables is the way that we want to move forward. US citizens have access to many money transfer mechanisms, but they're still very costly. Our goal is to change that dramatically over the course of the next couple years.
Let's talk about yield on the stablecoins. Obviously it's a huge debate. There is a trade-off between it could be beneficial to the users. It could put pressure on companies to do different things if that's not their monetization. You can imagine that some financial institutions are looking at yield and stablecoins as almost like a maybe not a loss leader but just like, 'Hey, we don't care about the margin as much. We just are trying to use this from an adoption standpoint.' How do both from a national standpoint, is the US looking at the yield, and then how does Tether and USAT, how do you guys look at the yield?
Well, look, I mean, Tether is agnostic when it comes to the yield conversation because it's not our business model. What we do is we provide the deepest liquidity and the best distribution and that's how we attract our customers. Our market cap right now is around 185 billion. We've talked about the numbers of adoption in terms of how many people use the product. We have the on and off ramps back into fiat that people are looking for, especially on an institutional scale. The larger question here is whether or not you can be a broker, exchange, and a bank all in one. Someone would call those shadow banks. I think this is where the banking industry starts to tighten up a little bit and starts to be protective of their territory. The easy solution here is to get an OCC charter. That way you can engage in the same model of yield sharing relationships that you could with your consumers just like a bank would. I think that's probably going to be the landing place with Clarity. I don't see how banks could be opposed to that. It's clean for the crypto natives. The OCC is moving very quickly in terms of handing out banking charters to crypto native companies. We're in a world in which we can do this. But for us, we're kind of sitting on the sidelines as patient observationists at the moment when it comes to this bill because it really doesn't have a direct impact on us.
When you think about the 530 million people who currently use Tether products and you mentioned growing 30 million quarter over quarter, how do you think about what other financial services to provide to them? There are a lot of people who don't have traditional bank accounts and now all of a sudden they have a wallet, they're able to transact, they can save in US dollars which is very attractive to people especially internationally. Are there other things that you all can do over time to help them get more access to a financial system other than just dollars and payments?
Yeah, I think there's going to be immense chain consolidation and stablecoin consolidation over the course of the next 5 to 10 years. The market here will behave just like any other market does except it's going to be exponential in terms of how it shapes, and that's just the way the world of crypto moves. As you start seeing people build especially in the wallet space, Tether's working on WDK, which is our wallet development kit. This is an immense project for us. We believe that having the point of origin for the customer is extremely important and I think that's where the race will go. You'll start seeing people package a lot of these financial services into these wallets, which is tremendous for the consumer. Tether's main mission over the course of the last seven years has been to provide access to people that don't have the direct ability to engage with financial instruments that we need in our day-to-day lives to live. That's something that we've accomplished in areas that a lot of people didn't think was possible 10 years ago. Creating that financial access brings people together and we're still very committed to doing that over the course of the next few years as we start working on these wallets and other financial instruments.
