We are here with Chris Pavlovski, CEO and founder of Rumble. Day two of the DC Blockchain Summit. Chris, how you doing?
I'm doing well. Great to be back in Washington. A little colder than Florida, but it's nice to be back.
Yeah, it was 81 degrees here last week, so it was a little bit more like Florida weather, but
Yeah, apparently. I wasn't here, but I was told it was 81 degrees
and then tornadoes. Tornadoes.
Well, we have to ask you the token question. When our guests come on Crypto in America, the very first question we ask them is what does crypto in America mean to you?
Well, it's changed a lot in the last year since the new administration. What it was a couple years ago versus what it is today feels like decades have gone by. Now the way I look at crypto in America is that America has become one of the leaders in crypto, obviously with the GENIUS bill passing, that was a big milestone. And the administration's strategy around that has been very helpful. So I see America taking the lead and being a world leader. I'd love to see other nations follow, but it will take time because it's disruptive. It's a completely new way of doing finance, and I think it's inevitable. It will make its way around the world, and more governments will follow. There are already a few doing well, like El Salvador, but I see more following as America takes the lead.
Yeah, Chris, it's been a little over a year since Tether's investment of $775 million into Rumble and about 250 million of that was going towards growth initiatives. One, how did that pan out? And two, how do you describe your relationship with Tether and CEO Paulo right now?
They are awesome. Paulo is one of the greatest CEOs out there. What they've done with Tether is incredible. I would look at 2025 as a real building year for Rumble. In the last 5 years, 2024 was a huge election year with a lot of political content. We launched our cloud to the public. We serviced one of the biggest nights in online streaming, with around 17% market share on election night. Post-election, Tether made a big investment. From that time to the end of 2025, it was build, build, build alongside Paulo and the Tether teams, strategizing for the future and laying the foundation for what Rumble will look like 5 or 10 years down the road. We've laid that foundation. In the first quarter of this year, we launched the Rumble wallet with Tether, a non-custodial wallet that contributes to the creator economy. Creators can receive tips in Bitcoin, Tether Gold, and USDT. This is the first of its kind for any large platform. We also launched Rumble Shorts to compete with TikTok and YouTube Shorts. The entire year of 2025 has been about releasing these products and building for the future. We also announced the acquisition of Northern Data, expected to close in Q2 of this year. They have one of the largest GPU estates in Europe and data centers across Europe and the US. That will bolt onto Rumble Cloud and give it a jetpack. So from acquisitions and strategy to build out the cloud side and get into AI, along with launching Rumble Wallet and Rumble Shorts, it's been a year of a lot of growth and building. Now we have Rumble Wallet for payments, the Rumble video platform, cloud with data centers and GPUs, and we'll be bolting on AI. We're creating an entire ecosystem of multiple pillars to compete against incumbents like Google.
So I want to expand on obviously you guys had a huge campaign this week in Times Square with Tether was very exciting. The notion that digital assets and the creator economy go together so well, how did that thesis develop for you guys and where do you see Rumble continuing to expand into digital assets?
Yeah, the campaign in Times Square was awesome, it just happened yesterday. You could redeem codes and fund your wallet straight. If you were in Times Square and got the code, you can fund your Rumble wallet. With that money, you can tip your favorite podcast, do a Rumble rant (like a super chat), send USDT that shows up in chat. It's cutting edge. If you download the Rumble wallet and sync it with your account, you can send donations, tips, and Rumble rants to creators. Eventually we want to pay creators as well. The great thing is that when you send a creator $100 equivalent of USDT, they receive 100% minus any gas fees. There's no cut for Rumble. We make money on the on and off ramp. For the creator economy, it's amazing compared to YouTube taking a percentage. With Rumble Wallet, tips direct to creators have no fee. Creators get it instantly without waiting for end-of-month payouts. It's seamless. That's the current focus. Going forward, we want to start paying creators from Rumble advertising, giving them the option to receive Bitcoin, USDT, or Tether Gold. With blockchain, it's so seamless for the creator economy, why wouldn't we adopt it across the entire platform? That's why I say it's inevitable for the rest of the world to follow. The fees are so low. When you send money from the US to poorer countries, they take 10-15% fees, whereas you can send USDT around the world with no significant fee.
I was going to ask whether you see digital assets as more of a side bet for Rumble, but it sounds like it is more of a long-term vision for Rumble as a company from everything that you've just said.
100%. I actually think the whole market moves there. Whether it's 5 or 10 years, the world is going to move there, and the platform that's the first market mover will benefit. I started Rumble in 2013. It was a great business for a few years, but by 2020, censorship became a real thing and accelerated fast. We were at the right place at the right time. I think the same thing will happen with crypto and the creator economy. It's a matter of time till the switch flips and people realize it's a no-brainer. It could take two or three years, but when it happens, Rumble will be in the lead with the best product and will attract the entire creator economy.
Can I ask how the interest came about? Was it a friendship with Paulo? How did the partnership with Tether come about? How did the interest in crypto really spark for you?
Well, prior to that, I've always been a huge advocate for blockchain. I remember doing a presentation on this maybe a decade ago at some conference. I've always been very bullish on blockchain technology. Even before meeting Paulo and the Tether folks, we set up a Bitcoin treasury reserve and hold Bitcoin as a company just because we believe in it for the long term. So it's something I've always appreciated. When you look at Rumble's ethos of free speech and freedom, Bitcoin is the representation of that. It's something everyone can own, completely decentralized. It has everything to do with freedom and what we're building at Rumble: a freedom-first technology infrastructure from media to ads to payments to wallet to cloud to AI. We think the world is going to appreciate free speech and cryptocurrency because of its protections that no one can control. We believe in no censorship. Other big tech companies focus on censorship and control, while we focus on freedom, free speech, privacy, decentralization. Over the next 5 to 10 years, that will win. Everyone will want to own their data, have their own AI on their own phone, have a non-custodial wallet that they control, and be able to speak freely. That's exactly what we're building. Tether is so aligned with us on that; it was the perfect marriage.
On the front of Rumble's ethos of being decentralized, open, and free speech across the board. You mentioned how some other social media sites might not have the same ethos. Do you think down the line everyone will follow suit, or will there still be a divergence of censored sites and certain voices are welcome, or that the future will be this more open marketplace where everyone can speak freely?
I think what you saw in America is that a lot of people gravitated toward this free speech market, and we took a big market share. I do think large tech companies just go with the wind. If the administration is pro-free speech, they'll be pro-free speech for that time. But when the next administration comes, I don't believe they have any values. Their value is the dollar and doing whatever makes money. With Rumble, the ethos is different. Every person we hire really cares about free speech. The ethos at Rumble is completely different. Other tech companies will open up today and close down tomorrow. They've done it before. We all heard Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg talk about free speech, and then they closed everything up. They moved the goalposts. With Rumble, we've built something completely different. We're not going to move the goalposts. We're going to stick to our vision. Over time, you build trust with your community and gradually take market share as people realize the other places aren't what they pretend to be. We will prevail. We've seen that even when the Trump administration opened things up, Rumble's users still went up last quarter. That shows how loyal our user base is and how they've lost trust in big tech. The next wave of censorship through AI in the next 5 years is coming; it's just a matter of time.
Yeah. I wanted to ask, how do you hold your ground on that? Obviously the current administration is more open to it currently, but over the past 5-6 years how did you manage that and say no, we're holding this mission, and looking to the future everything might not be what it is currently, so how do you plan to hedge against that?
Yeah, that's a question a lot of people have asked. They ask why did the CEOs of these big tech companies fold? I guess the best word is they had no balls. They...
