Thank you.
Good morning everyone. First of all, I thank the Magnificent Rector, the entire faculty, the professors, the students, the politicians present, and all the other people who came to listen to all the interventions today, which were extremely interesting. I would like to try to add, at the conclusion of this day, to tell a bit about my story — the story of a young man who fell in love with the University of Genoa, who had incredible luck in finding professors who supported and guided him during his educational path.
I believe Professor Marina Ribaudo is in the audience, another person I remember with great affection. And someone who unfortunately is no longer with us is Professor Giuseppe Ciaccio, who had taken me somewhat under his wing and shared his parallel computing laboratory with me.
I remember the Computer Science Department with great affection. On the fifth floor there was a coffee machine where I met my wife, and we later got married here in Genoa. For me, the fifth floor, the entire department, the Valetta Puggia canteen — my first lunch invitation with my wife was at the Valetta Puggia canteen, 4.50 euros, because that's what a good Ligurian could offer.
From there, thanks to the teachings and the capabilities of the faculty — Professor Rosolini, professor of logic, and many others I remember — I first managed to become a researcher, obtaining a research fellowship to collaborate on a couple of projects the University of Genoa was working on. And then subsequently I found my path. I found my path which unfortunately sees little of Italy, but sees much more of an international profile, mainly in emerging markets, developing countries.
Today I want to tell you what Tether is. You read a lot in the newspapers about our company, but I would like, without boring you too much, to explain how the idea was born, what we are trying to do, and the importance of understanding what lies behind the company — understanding the messages, the manifestos of the companies that surround us and are developing the finance and technology of the future.
I titled this presentation 'The Quest for a Stable Society' — the adventure, the search for a stable society. As a computer scientist, as a lover of mathematics but also of science fiction, I always start — I started telling Tether's story from my favorite author, Isaac Asimov. In 1956 he wrote a short story, which I suggest everyone read, called 'The Last Question.'
It's a 15-page story that in my opinion encompasses so much between science, religion, artificial intelligence, philosophy, and history. The story of a humanity that from the 1950s, every 100 years, every 1,000 years, every 10,000 years, every million years, every billion years — projecting into the future as every good science fiction book does — asks a fundamental question to this machine that becomes ever more powerful, ever more intelligent. This artificial intelligence that over decades, hundreds of years, billions of years is improved. There is only one question that humanity asks this artificial intelligence: how can we reduce or stop entropy in the universe? That is, how can we prevent the universe from dying? Fundamentally, how can we create a stable universe?
And we at Tether have done the reverse engineering of what this last question means, this concept of stopping entropy on Earth. And the concept of working — creating technology — was born, because through technology we can do so much, we can connect people. How can we create a stable society — not society in the sense of Tether, but a stable community?
Stability right now — you see it in all the newspapers every day — doesn't exist. But as a good geek, as a good hacker, I think it can be maintained through technology, but it can only be maintained if technology is accessible to everyone, if finance is accessible to everyone. So, somewhat like the Hacker's Manifesto, I wrote this small manifesto that represents us at Tether: stability derives from equitable access to technology and finance.
Decentralization of technology and finance makes society resilient to failure and abuse. If there is centralization of technology and finance, it is much easier to have abuse, to have despotic control. Technology and finance are a reflection of peer-to-peer society, person to person. Over the last 5,000 years, humanity has grown by dialoguing, meeting in streets, in squares, having direct contact. The same for information — words, discussions came person to person.
Finance worked the same way. We had gold and silver coins and exchanged them directly without any intermediary. Over the last 50 years, technology and finance have been excessively intermediated, and this is a problem. When we have a society that for 5,000 years has been based on social interaction and this is removed in 50 years, it represents an unprecedented uncertainty for the stability of society.
At Tether we have identified four pillars for creating a stable society: stable finance, stable communications, stable energy, and stable artificial intelligence. Especially the last point, for me, is important. Today, tying back to the first point we'll discuss — today in the world there are 4 billion people who don't have access to basic financial systems. We're not talking about online trading and such things — basic financial systems. Half the world's population, perhaps more, doesn't have a bank account. Not because they're bad people, simply because they're not profitable enough to be of interest to the banking world.
This is a problem. It makes society unstable. But if on top of this problem — instability due to lack of access to the financial world — we add a problem that in my opinion will be even bigger: the same people who won't have access to basic financial systems won't have access to the new artificial intelligence system. The gap that today we have due to lack of financial accessibility will be multiplied a hundredfold due to artificial intelligence that will be inaccessible in Africa, Central and South America, and Southeast Asia — where we mainly operate.
So as Tether, we set ourselves the goal of creating technology that addresses these four problems. Let me start with a fact. What did Tether create as the first template for this concept of financial stability? The product is called USDT. It's a digital dollar that uses blockchain — you've probably heard of it — it's simply a digital dollar. Today it has been very successful in emerging markets. The reason is very simple: the horizontal line is the value of the US dollar, let's suppose it stays constant over time. Over the last 5 years, the Turkish lira has lost more than 80% of its value against the US dollar. The Venezuelan bolivar has lost 99.8% of its value against the US dollar, and the Argentine peso 94%.
Imagine being a father, a mother in Argentina. You work from January to December, and at the end of the year you've worked incredibly hard, and at the end of the year you're poorer than at the beginning. You won't be able to send your children to school, especially abroad, you won't be able to give them an education or tools on par with those available in the richer world, simply because all these digital tools are priced in dollars. If the local currency devalues against the dollar, the entire economy of these countries is paralyzed.
Tether has created a digital dollar that moves at the speed of light, that breaks down barriers imposed by traditional finance. This is the basic concept of Tether. USDT is our digital dollar, it's worth one dollar. So when we say we've created a digital dollar, we're saying we've created a virtual currency tied to the value of the real dollar. This digital dollar moves cross-border. It is used in many situations. One of the main ones, which we'll see shortly, is the remittance system.
The company was born in 2014 — I started working there in 2009 at the University of Genoa. It started from the idea of my co-founder Giancarlo De Vasini, a person of incredible intelligence, and together in the early years we tried to explain the importance and value of this first technology. It was a bit difficult, I must say, as usual. In startups you try, you explain, you go around, but at a certain point something happened.
Here we'll remember it well — it's March 2020, the pandemic arrived. We need to put ourselves in the shoes of fathers and mothers of families living in emerging markets. If you remember the graph I showed you earlier — if you're a father or mother in Argentina who, for the last 50 years, because the country has had more than four economic defaults in the last 50 years, goes out on the street every week to buy paper dollars and puts them under the mattress. This is the life of people living in emerging markets over the last 50 years.
The pandemic arrives. What can't you do anymore? You can't go out on the street anymore. Emerging market economies collapse even faster than richer countries' economies. These families are in total panic. The children of these families teach and explain to their parents at that moment that there exists a digital dollar because they had used it, knew it from the cryptocurrency world, the online gaming world, the social media world.
The parents, initially somewhat distrustful, begin to use it, and within a few months — the market capitalization, what I had in the bank, was about a couple of billion dollars and it reached more than 60 billion dollars in a few months. Demand for this digital dollar exploded.
Today we have approximately 184 billion of these digital dollars in circulation. We are the digital dollar, if not the dollar used, on the most widespread payment systems in the world. This is the growth of our user base, which is a growth that is almost unbelievable. Usually when you see growth charts of companies they're logarithmic — they start very fast but then level off. This is a graph that demonstrates how word-of-mouth, how the necessity, the access that Tether provides with USDT to basic financial systems is unprecedented.
This is more similar to Facebook's growth chart, to a social network's, compared to a payment instrument's chart. But as I said, there are 3 billion people in the world — almost 4 billion — who don't have access to basic payment systems. Today Tether covers 566 million of them, and we're growing at a speed of 34 million people per quarter.
This leads us to say two things. Tether, in my opinion — you may have a different opinion — Tether is the most important story of financial inclusion success in the history of humanity. There is no company that has managed to bring payment systems, access to savings systems — and we're talking about money accumulation for people who earn $3-4 a day.
We're not talking about people on Wall Street. Tether's USDT is not used by those who live on Wall Street, not used by those who already have everything in life. It's used by those who for the first time in their lives find themselves in a position to interact with the rest of the world. In fact, I believe that USDT — or in general a programmable monetary system, which is what USD created — is almost a social network.
As I said, over the last 5,000 years people used gold, silver, or bronze coins as a social instrument for social interaction. And we have simply brought this back to people who haven't had this opportunity, especially in the last 50 years. Here are some newspaper headlines. We see in countries like Argentina, Lebanon, Nigeria — many people, these are very important newspapers that have reported this news in recent years because it is truly revolutionizing how these people protect their well-being, however modest.
Here is a very long list of USDT uses. One of the main ones I really like is remittances. Remittances, to understand each other, are the transfer of money that a young woman or man who works in, say, Italy, and has family in Georgia, Albania, Nigeria, sends home. We have many people living in Italy, in Europe, in countries with greater prosperity, who work and are far from their families and send money home. This is called remittance. It's about 900 billion dollars a year in remittance volume.
Before the existence of USDT, companies handling remittances charged between 6% and 26% for money transfer. Think about it — you already live and work far from your family, far from your children perhaps, and one day a week you have to work for the remittance company. With USDT the cost is zero — there is no transaction cost simply because technology has enabled this change, and this change is being adopted at the speed of light.
From the lesson we learned with USDT, we thought — just financial access and inclusion isn't enough, much more is needed. We need a communication system not controlled by three or four big tech companies. We need a decentralized energy system. And we need an artificial intelligence system accessible to everyone.
This is a graph — I apologize, it's for more geeky nerds like me — but it tells a bit about what we've done at a technological level. We started with what we call Holepunch. For the more technical, if you remember the BitTorrent protocol that I studied at the University of Genoa in the networking course, and then explored further with various researchers — it's a distributed file-sharing system.
We took this technology 10 years ago, rewrote it, perfected it — not only to ensure it could be used for file sharing but also to support any type of telecommunications. This is technology — everything you see is open source, it's free. I believe in free code, in the importance of free information. So these are hundreds of thousands of lines of free code written by us and made public for everyone, so that everyone can use them. This is the foundation of Tether and our company.
We created Holepunch, this peer-to-peer communication system without intermediaries, without centralization — a communication system that can resist any type of attack, in order to make people, communities, families, cities, and states truly free. There's no magic. BitTorrent created this concept in 2000; in the last 20 years no one had re-proposed it. We worked on it for 10 years, published it, and there are many companies now building on this technology.
We built an open-source wallet, a digital asset wallet that's open source, so everyone can create their own wallet without depending on us. I've always wanted to create a company that makes products that can survive our own death. In my opinion, there's nothing more epic and beautiful than creating something that makes people independent rather than hooking them on a specific technology.
And the last one, perhaps the most complex project we're working on, is called NEVA. It's an artificial intelligence system that runs directly on users' devices rather than in the cloud. I believe that when those 4 billion people who don't have access to basic payment tools, basic financial systems — we cannot risk, if we want a stable society, leaving them outside the new artificial intelligence movement.
So NEVA has the ambitious challenge of optimizing AI models to run directly on your phone's GPU and CPU. When you're in Africa, in remote villages in Africa, or in Central South America, connectivity is terrible, it's very difficult. And the only possibility to use these tools — which are fundamental because many villages in Africa don't have schools, so for the first time with artificial intelligence we can bring basic education to these people, to the young people — but if they don't have connectivity it's not possible. Creating global connectivity in Africa is almost impossible, but we can create a local intelligence system that everyone can have.
I'm a big fan of a person named Richard Stallman, who is the author of free software, of the GNU system, which is the base system for Linux platforms. His organization, his foundation has created enormous amounts of free code. Artificial intelligence is the most revolutionary technology in the history of humanity. We cannot allow just three or four companies to own it.
I know I'm running out of time. I wanted to very quickly tell you about this to show you that even in the energy world it's possible to do something revolutionary. People talk about Africa — how to improve access to energy in Africa. Without energy you cannot access digitalization. Today without energy it's impossible to turn on a phone and therefore have access to information, to education.
Africa is perhaps the most complex continent to try to change things, and we tried with a project. This project involves what we believe is impossible — bringing centralized energy production to Africa. It's impossible to think of having three or four nuclear power plants in Africa and then very long distribution lines throughout Africa. It's mathematically and physically impossible. So what do we do? We selected 1,000 villages in Africa.
We created in each of these villages a kiosk. The kiosk you see here has solar panels on top and rechargeable batteries of 145 watts. Inside there are approximately 1,000 to 1,300 batteries per kiosk. The village people can go to the kiosk, take a rechargeable battery, bring it home, recharge it four times a month, and when it's spent, bring it back and get another one. To date we have 1,000 kiosks in Africa and 1 million people enrolled in the program.
This is one of the experiments — let me use the word, it's a bit intentional, perhaps 'experiment' in this case — but one of the most important and least known energy revolution experiments in the world. We know it costs about 5,000-6,000 dollars to make each kiosk. Inside each kiosk there are young women who explain to people how the program works, how to interact with the battery. The battery is smart — you can connect your phone to check the charge. So we're providing jobs to 5,000-6,000 people who today may not seem like many, but now that we've discovered this all works — 1,000 kiosks, 1 million enrolled — we've budgeted within our company to scale this effort to 100,000 kiosks by 2030-2032.
This means approximately 30 million homes in Africa will have access to stable energy. That means 150 million people — about five people per household — will have access to stable energy for the first time. By the way, if you look at Africa at night, Central Africa especially is dark. This change, this single change in 5, 6, 7 years could bring all of Africa, including Central Africa, to be illuminated and visible at night from space. I thank you for your time, it has been an honor.
