Accelerate USA: Tether's Bo Hines

Oh man. Well, one, I genuinely am super appreciative of the time I got to spend in the Trump administration. I'm super thankful for the president and everything he's done for this industry and the crypto ecosystem at large. Obviously it's a testament to the builders and the founders that have done so much in the space over the course of the last decade. And you think about it, it's honestly quite remarkable that the first piece of large financial legislation that we put forth was related to crypto and that's a testament to all the builders and Solana and obviously the granddaddy of them all which is Bitcoin and the birth of blockchain. I look back on the time that I was just 18 years old and I was just a retail trader in the space and a lot's changed since then. I think that people are getting the recognition they deserve and I think that blockchain technology is here to change the world and we're just at the precipice of that.

Yeah, I mean look, I think that Treasury is undergoing this process in which they're going to start rolling out rulemaking over the course of the next 18 months and, you know, Tether fully intends to be GENIUS compliant both from a USDT perspective and now the new US product which is institutional facing with a long tail with retail. And at the end of the day I think that GENIUS really struck the right chord which for the United States government our main objective was dollar polarization and Tether plays the most instrumental role in that. You think about Tether right now we have around 600 million active monthly users of the product. We're growing at about 34 million users a quarter. It's quite frankly the most prolific business that exists today. And obviously with the introduction of the new product, we're hoping that we can start to institutionalize some of these folks with stablecoin development, really create more efficiency and cost effectiveness with the rails in terms of how we're moving money on a large scale. And that's really our objective. We'll see what happens with rulemaking. I think that for the most part, the architecture is there so we don't expect too many surprises, but we're well on our way to ensuring that we're a part of this process. And obviously with the launch of Tether US, we're showing our commitment to establishing ourselves here domestically and the growth of the company at large.

Sure. Well, it's kind of just the beginning for us. We had our soft launch about 3 months ago. It's a little bit chicken and egg with stablecoins. You have to bootstrap with code a little bit, actually allow a viable entry point into the product. And so that's what we've really been focused on is working on some of these commercial partnerships that we've struck over the course of the last 6 to 12 months. I can't make news here today, but we have some very exciting ones which we'll be announcing probably in the next 30 to 60 days. And I think that Tether is uniquely positioned, really is the only company in the world that has the ability with the distribution that's already been created to establish a very viable corridor between emerging markets and the US capital markets. And so we look to do that with both retail in terms of remittances. Obviously most of stablecoin adoption has been driven by a hedge against volatility with a person's own domestic currency, but that's changing and so I think that the technology that undergirds these products is really what's to be adopted long term and so we obviously want to position USA to be a big part of that. And I think that one thing that folks should recognize between the two products is that USAT will be seamlessly interoperable with USDT and so that allows a lot of our institutional partners to borrow from that liquidity and distribution that's already been created in the Tether ecosystem and really have that seamless corridor created in terms of flows and money movement. So I think that again we're just beginning to scratch the surface with adoption. We're working with banks both GIS and large banks all the way down to community banks in terms of what this new brave frontier of finance is going to look like. But I think that Tether is positioned to win this race in terms of product adoption. And obviously now that the US capital markets are engaging with these products, I think it's really going to revolutionize the way that finance works here in the US. And so, you know, one thing I've done with the domestic product is I've tried to position us to almost be the agnostic intermediary between flows, whether that be with GIS going to stratify exchanges or elsewhere. I don't expect that a name brand stablecoin becomes the settlement tool of choice for banks internally. What I do expect is that they're going to look for seamless interoperability between their own tokenized deposit systems and/or their own stablecoin settlement systems to use between each other and trades. So you can think about it this way. If you're a big bank, why would you settle with another big bank and their stablecoin? It just doesn't make sense. So there has to be that agnostic product there. And I think that given the distribution liquidity that we've already created as a company, we're the natural product of choice. And so this truly means a lot to us. I mean, Paulo, our international CEO, is an open source builder and he's doing a lot in technology outside of stablecoins as well. He likes to refer to Tether as the stable company and that kind of defines our investment strategy and everything else that we're building around the globe, whether it be power sources in Africa, whether it be in robotics, whether it be in P2P messaging technology. All of these things kind of coincide to build a vertical stack that services folks that might not have access to financial instruments or tools that we have here in the US. And so I think that we're focused on institutional right now from a retail product adoption perspective. It's a little bit longer tail in the US given the fact that our rails are about 99% efficient compared to the rest of the world. But that's not to say that it's not going to change. I mean, folks are still looking for ways to save money and that's not lost on us. And obviously the rails that we've created allow people to do that. And so I think a big part of it is an educational hurdle where folks have to recognize that this is a safe, secure and cost-effective way to move money. And once that actually starts to run its course and we can package these products in ways that make it more palatable for the everyday American, that's when you're really going to start seeing this compounding effect of usage and adoption.