Today we're recording our episode from New York City. We're here today with Paulo Arduino, the CEO of Tether, and Bo Hines, the new CEO of Tether's new stable coin, USAT. We're super excited to have you both here. So, thank you for joining us. It's a super exciting day for both of you. Congratulations on your new launch.
Great guest, too. I know coming on the show again.
So, we've spoken a lot today obviously about USDT and now USAT. Just give us a little bit of a rundown. What exactly is USAT? How is it different than USDT for our audience who may not have seen all the headlines today?
Yeah, look, I mean, I'll start with Genius because our intention with Genius was to get the best and brightest back to the US in order to innovate and build and be interoperable with our capital markets. And that's what we've done today in launching this product. So obviously, our goal is to revolutionize the financial system. It's to create more efficient transactions with instant settlement times that are more cost-effective for the American consumer. And fortunately, we have the inventor of stable coin sitting here with us, that's now operating on the USO and providing American consumers with the tremendous technology that he's built. And so one I would just say it's exciting. I'm honored. I'm privileged to be sitting here with Bo today. I think that USAT will be the tip of the spear in revolutionizing our system here at home. I hope that it becomes the institutional stable that Americans use, both Americans that bank with some of the larger institutions and those that are also underserved as Paul has described quite a bit today. But look, I think that at the end of the day, this product will provide Americans with an outlet to move money more freely. And we care a lot about freedom at Tether and Paulo talks about that quite frequently. So I'll let him describe the interoperability. We, you know, it should be seamless between USDT, but Paul can dive into that a little bit more. Yeah, our plan is to make sure that USAT and USDT can collaborate together and USDT will be the distribution channel for USAT abroad in the rest of the world in all emerging markets developing countries, and at the same time, USAT will be for USDT the ability to bring back value into the United States in the form of a local domestic regulated stable coin.
Right. Obviously, Tether is the world's largest stable coin. Everyone knows it, I think, more abroad and emerging markets outside the US historically. And now you guys are really focusing on the US market. Obviously, there's a positive regulatory climate, but what else is kind of driving the growth here?
Um, the growth here is going to be helped by our pre-existing distribution network already in the United States. For example, Rumble platform is a good example of a huge distribution network that counts more than 60 million active users per month. And we believe that doubling down in helping Rumble to grow themselves as an ecosystem of different tools and competing with large behemoths like Google and so on, has the ability to help in that growth, but at the same time, enlarging the reach of Rumble as a digital platform plus all the other investments. Remember, we invested almost $5 billion back in the United States. So this helped us to actually create this unique distribution channel between the United States and also abroad that will position us as not an incumbent competitor like many asked us, right? How we are going to compete with existing stable coins, but actually we have already a strategy and a plan that will unfold in the next months just because we were ready, we have near ready since a long time.
Yeah, congratulations again. It's obviously a huge achievement to be coming back and building this product in the US. I'm curious about the sort of coexistence or the relationship between USDT and USAT now, as this genius compliant instrument and obviously you know USDT with its historical distribution technology. Are you guys going to be... obviously we saw that the headquarters is going to be in Charlotte which is great. I grew up in South Carolina so very familiar with that. The fintech hub. A lot of good friends ended up in finance there. How will the two entities kind of coexist? Like are there custodian relationships that will be shared or like what's the separation or the blending if you can talk about that side of it at all?
Yeah. So USDT has as issuer Tether International that is headquartered in El Salvador, while USAT has Anchorage as the issuer. So Anchorage will take care of issuing USAT and Tether International will continue to take care of USDT. As we announced also on stage, the reserves of USAT will be held with Cantor Fitzgerald. But the technology is what will create the common layer for making sure that there is a seamless transfer between the two and the user experience will be beautiful and as simple as possible, because again, the underserved people are the ones that have least time to waste in trying to find the actual digital dollars among all the dogs with hats and all that. Well, and then the other point I'll make on that from the institutional perspective is we will be the licensed stable product in the US. We have first mover advantage and we also have the best tech in the space. And so as we start working with some of the larger institutions to talk about how our technology can benefit their customers, I think it'll be really exciting for the American people just in terms of how they can now move money like they've never been able to before. And like we've talked about in previous episodes, our system in the US is still archaic and differently than anything else in America. And Paul's talked about this, you know, we're playing from behind. And I think that that's one reason I decided that after the digital assets working group report was released, it was time to come work in this sector from a private perspective, just given the fact that I think this product could be crucial in actually helping to revolutionize the system that we so desperately wish to do.
What are we looking at in terms of a timeline potential roll out for the US token?
So we plan to do the first transactions and have the first transaction rolling by end of this year. So by December I would say.
Paul, when you were on stage you showed a chart of USDT's growth from before pre2020. It was like down there and then you said 2020 and then it spikes up and it went really parabolic. Do you kind of see the bigger push in America kind of even growing that even further or what do you see on that front?
I think that, of course in the first years of USDT we didn't have the distribution channel and the widespread adoption. So I think that that adoption will make the chart of USAT growing much faster and becoming parabolic much faster than waiting five or six years to see that happening with USDT. Right?
So USAT will be able to piggyback on the existing infrastructure of USDT. But is USAT within the broader Tether entity or not? Are they separate? Because people might be confused. Is it under Tether or is it its own thing? Could I buy both tokens and they're separate?
Separate tokens. As we said, the entities that are issuing are separate. The tokens are separate, but the beauty of blockchain technology and what we know about division and smart contracts is that the technological layer can help reduce the friction and help you swap one with the other at a very low cost or actually one-to-one, because they represent basically the same type of product that is a digital dollar. And both of them are very strong. With USDT we proved that starting from 2022, we proved that we had much more liquidity and strength than any bank in even the United States.
