We, I must tell the truth, feel an enormous weight on our shoulders because there are hundreds of millions of people who depend on our product, and therefore we are extremely risk-averse. So if we have to do a process, it is overcollateralized at 165%.
The people who criticize us, including S&P, are the people who didn't see the beam coming in 2008. We remember The Big Short, the two analysts went to talk to S&P and they had missed something quite big. In fact, the moment they came out with their downgrade, I didn't even get angry, I almost took it as a victory. I wrote publicly on Twitter, on my X account, 'I wear your contempt with honor' because if you are the ones about to blow up the global financial system and I don't believe it, they didn't even realize there was so much garbage behind it, but they were complicit in this situation. I am happy to be considered weak by them, because I must be considered weak by them, but strong by everyone else, by all my users.
So, today, well, it's a very, very important day because we have here, first of all, a very successful Italian who is obviously also a partner, his name is Paolo Ardoino, he is the CEO of Tether, and I couldn't help but be here with you, but I'll leave it especially, I want to leave it to Raffaele and Silvia. Because I would be conflicted? I would be conflicted because I declare myself and I make a disclaimer, I am a big fan of Tether. For me, this book by Havel, The Power of the Powerless, is very fashionable right now, it was debated a lot in Davos by Carney and there is a story in The Power of the Powerless that talks about a greengrocer. This is a book that I continued to give as a gift in the 90s, in the 2000s, because it's a book that really permeated my whole life. Maybe it was also a bit of a trick to read it for me in certain moments of my profession. And there is a very, very beautiful story in this book that tells of a greengrocer, a greengrocer who under the communist regime, because Havel was first and foremost a philosopher, a thinker, a writer before becoming post-communism and the premier of Czechoslovakia. And Havel in this book tells the story of a greengrocer. A greengrocer who puts up a sign every day in the middle of the communist regime that says 'Workers of the world, unite.' Now that greengrocer knows that what is written on that sign is not true, it's a lie, but every day, since he is under a regime, he has to put up that sign, but he knows that the workers of the world uniting could do little or nothing against the regime that oppressed him. Then there is a day when the worker, or rather the greengrocer, arrives and decides not to display that sign anymore. And Havel says, 'That is a day where the greengrocer performed a revolutionary act, that is, he made known the lie behind that message.' It was known that in that phase the worker had no power. It was known that that regime oppressed and everyone knew there was a truth behind it that was very different. Well, that revolutionary gesture, that sign taken and thrown away, in a certain way, Tether did it. Tether did it for me above all, and then we will talk about what Tether does, but it did it above all philosophically, in the sense that it was the first experience I have touched with my hands that has really fought a lie that I have written books about or worked a lot on, which is The Baseman, that is, the loss of purchasing power of money. If there is a company in the world that has effectively taken a sign and thrown it away and made known a truth that we all knew and did something to counter that lie, it was Tether. So I declare myself a bit conflicted and I'm enjoying this beautiful interview.
Thank you very much Guido. Obviously welcome everyone. Welcome Paolo Ardoino. Hi, thank you for being here with us. You are surrounded today by the Blackbox team. It's what you were saying Guido. It's what Ray Dalio said a few days ago when he said 'I at this moment am selling the three dips buying gold because not only is there a war of capital but also and above all for the debasement. There is a loss of value.' Meanwhile Paolo, why are you in Italy?
Well, I am Italian, I am Ligurian, but part of my family at this moment lives in Milan and my extended family, as Guido introduced, includes Blackwater, Cora, and Will.
Listen, let's try to take a picture because the latest available data from Tether is from the third quarter of 2025. How did 2025 close for you? What signals are coming from this January and what do you expect from 2026?
2025 was another excellent year for our company. We closed with a profit that is around 10 billion. We are closing the accounts in these days. In a few days we will have the next attestation which is prepared by BDO Italia and so we will have the final figures, but the profit was about 10 billion dollars. We operated in 2025 as in 2024 with about a 97% profit margin, which is very particular. I don't think there are other companies in the world with this profitability and this ratio. So it means our company is extremely efficient and this is also due to the market capitalization of our stablecoin which is currently exceeding 186 billion dollars and with the fact that on these 186 billion dollars we earn an interest that during 2025 was about between 3.75% and 4% annualized, it allowed us to maintain this very high profitability. In 2025 we also consolidated our position not only as the main player in the digital assets world, but we also demonstrated that we can expand into other realities, including artificial intelligence, communications. We have an investment portfolio that currently consists of 23 billion dollars, which are our retained earnings that we have not distributed. 95% of Tether's profits historically have not been distributed, they have been kept in the company and reinvested in gold, in Bitcoin, and in other companies that are carrying forward our philosophy, our model of a stable society that must focus on new technologies, but also keep man at the center of society and not necessarily the machine or money.
Listen, I'll go straight to the point. Raffi and I have a billion questions to ask you, but I also follow the news a bit from Venezuela to Iran. Obviously in Venezuela and with the news about Maduro and not only, the word Tether kept coming up more and more because on one hand it has represented and represents a lifeline for many Venezuelans, given the inflation that exploded, given the dictatorship, and it's not just in Venezuela the case of a country where obviously there is a need to anchor to something like a stablecoin, and on the other hand Tether came up because apparently USDT was used to circumvent sanctions for oil payments. There is another news, another report concerning Iran. Practically the dictatorship would have purchased millions of USDT to try to raise the rial. I ask you first of all when you read this news what is your reaction and above all if you expected it, is it something you had accounted for or not, and above all what do you do to fight illicit activities?
First, we need to understand what Tether USDT is. It's a digital dollar, so we are a representation of the dollar. Historically, there are hundreds of billions of dollars in what are called cash pallets, those pallets of paper money that travel around the world and are used by criminals, terrorists, by those who want to evade sanctions, etc. The numbers that have been reported are negligible in the context of global crime that uses paper dollars. And what Tether has actually done is bring transparency to the American dollar and the way the American dollar moves. Every single dollar used illicitly is a problem, and a problem we take seriously. At this moment we work with more than 300 law enforcement agencies in more than 60 different countries in the world. No financial institution does what we do. The numbers that were reported, first of all, are incorrect because they represent a volume instead of a quantity. And we have worked with Chainalysis, with Elliptic, with all the companies that monitor secondary blockchain markets. Again, blockchains are transparent tools and we collaborate with the American Department of Justice, with OFAC, with the Treasury Department, with all the major departments in the world to monitor what happens and our ability to intervene as soon as we notice a transaction or it is brought to our attention because we are both active and collaborative when we receive information. We have a capillarity that doesn't exist in the international financial world, so it always makes news, but we are very proud of the fact that we are giving, on one hand, to people who are also people, most people in Venezuela are good people, they are very poor people, access to the American dollar, in fact they are in some way dissociating themselves from the Maduro regime. On the other hand, we have collaborated with the American Department of Justice, with OFAC, to block a lot of transactions linked to possible sanctioned entities which are anyway a drop in the ocean of all the paper dollars currently being used to evade sanctions that governments are fully aware of, but they are opaque, they happen in dark worlds that are impossible to control, but it's convenient that way. So almost the concept of Tether bringing transparency to the thing makes the emperor naked without precedent. And we are almost held up as an example of things not to do, that is, this transparency is almost bothersome and so we are accused of bringing transparency to a world that is infinitely larger than people think because again, we are talking about 500 million linked to Iran which are infinitely less because they were reported incorrectly and on the other hand we know there are hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash pallets traveling from Ukraine to the Middle East, to Asia that no one talks about, so it's a bit absurd, if you will, when people talk about Tether to disincentivize Tether's actions in bringing transparency to this world.
But when you talk about transparency, and in July you had already promised an audit, an accounting review by one of the Big Four. Is it coming, is it arriving? Why hasn't it happened yet?
Well, this is one of the questions I have been asked the most historically. This year, actually last year, Trump came to power. You can think what you want about the Trump administration, I'm not here to do politics, but the reality is that before Trump, the Biden administration was extremely aggressive in the crypto world, against the crypto world. There was talk of Operation Choke Point 2.0, so the pressure behind the scenes by the Fed and other entities like the OCC and other government entities, against banks that supported crypto or other digital assets, against companies operating in the crypto world. Let's remember how many lawsuits the SEC filed, often losing them despite the Biden administration. And Senator Warren publicly, clearly, sent a letter that is available and easily findable on Google, disincentivizing and almost sending a threatening message to the Big Four, strongly suggesting they avoid doing new engagements with crypto world companies and not doing any audit related to stablecoins because it was not aligned with US policy. It's clear that if you are a Big Four auditor and you see you are in a hostile environment towards crypto and you see a prominent US senator telling you, 'Look, I think it's better if you avoid doing a new engagement with crypto world companies,' it's clear that these people stay well back. At the beginning of 2025, when the Trump administration with David Sacks and others clearly indicated there would be support for the crypto world, very quickly, actually very quickly, despite some time having passed, we managed to restart an engagement, a discussion with various Big Four firms that are interested in evaluating a relationship with us for a Full Audit, and for Tether a Full Audit remains a priority. I spend time personally within the company with a fantastic team on this priority and I remain confident that we will be able to conclude a full audit. Of course, with all the damage the Big Four have done, I mean in the past, it's not necessarily a guarantee of transparency. I remember Enron, one of the Big Four made a colossal mistake.
In fact, I want to ask you another question because I come from the bond world, right? You are sitting on the biggest carry trade in history, both in terms of size and opportunity and spread. My question is this, how long can it last? Because we know it well, in a carry trade there is an attraction towards these types of operations and many players arrive who want to do the same thing, in the end the trade gets crowded, the rules can change because it's a carry trade approved by the state since the Genius Act has done nothing but make this carry trade regulated, right? But my question is how long can it last and I also see what you are doing with profits, I see you more towards, let's say, a sort of great venture capital, right? Knowing that this is an operation that cannot last forever.
Well, actually you have put a lot of meat on the fire because the intrinsic carry trade given by the existence of US Treasury bonds that generate yield is very interesting but I don't see it as so crowded, in the sense that there is also...
Ok, but there are people selling US Treasury bonds right now. Like China had 2 trillion in US Treasury bonds 4 years ago, right now it has 700 billion. So there is selling pressure that can also be used to attack the United States itself from the Asian world and therefore it makes Tether, regarding the 3-month Treasury bill auctions, the fourth or fifth largest buyer in the world and we are the 17th holder of US Treasury bonds in the world. So, let's say the macro part where I think there is a bit of a balance between those selling US Treasury bonds because the yield is falling anyway, there is interest from the American government to bring down the yield, and on the other hand...
So the American deficit makes yields fall, so technically there could be less interest for those who are currently investors to hold US Treasury bonds. On the other hand, there are those who want to sell to create friction within the American system like the Chinese. On the other hand, there are stablecoins that act as an opposing force, that take the US Treasury bond and distribute it, decentralize it through 500 million people. We have 536 million users at this moment who hold a piece of American debt and make it more resilient to attacks from potential antagonists of the United States.
What I think you were adding, the other piece you were adding is that if you make so much money, this attracts others who want to do the same thing.
It's clear. But let's look at the second largest stablecoin in the world right now, it tried to do what we are doing. Let's look at Circle's profitability. Let's look at Circle's profitability in the third quarter of 2025. They closed with EBITDA around 100 million dollars with 74 billion dollars under management. In the same period, with 170 billion under management, our profitability was around 4 billion. There is, in my opinion, a bit of a discrepancy, a problem. That is, you can try to copy what we do, but all those who copy us find themselves forced to compete with us by having to give back 90% of the yield.
Paolo, can you explain why?
Because what Tether has created is fundamentally the largest distribution chain in the history of humanity, that is, with the 536 million people who use USDT in the world, we have created this distribution network that brings the American dollar directly with an extremely limited number of intermediaries, fundamentally one intermediary which is us, into the hands of people, people who live in emerging markets, who live in Argentina, who live in Brazil, who live in Nigeria. There is this beautiful graph that shows if we imagine a flat line where the flat line is the American dollar, then all the other lines of the performance of national currencies of emerging markets are compared. The lira has lost 81.5% of its value against the American dollar in the last 5 years. The Venezuelan bolivar 99.8%, the Argentine peso 94.5%. So it's clear that we are currently selling or distributing outside the United States the flagship product of the United States which is the American dollar. So we have created a distribution network of which we are owners. We have bought chains of bodegas, of shops in Central and South America, thousands, tens of thousands, that are in direct contact with the user. These shops sell phone top-ups, sell products, services, pay your bills, and these shops now run on and are our shops. You don't see our brand directly, you don't see Tether written on them, but they work, all settlements are through USD. In Africa we are creating chains of kiosks in the most remote villages in Africa, we have 800 kiosks in Africa that sell subscriptions for rechargeable batteries. We have 800 kiosks, we already have 800,000 people in these villages who are subscribed to our service and in the coming years we will reach 100,000 kiosks, 25 million households that will be subscribed to our service, meaning 150 million users in Africa. So we create this mesh network of distribution of a product, but actually of many products. With this network we can distribute information, content, ideas, education. So when you are in contact with the customer you can do cross-selling of anything else. This is what we have created and the reason why instead of pocketing 95% of the company's profits, we took them and became an investment fund that has brought our distribution level to an unprecedented level truly in the history of humanity. Circle on the other hand, what does it do? To incentivize users, it distributes 90% of its profits to this user base.
To Coinbase, right? Then...
Not only Coinbase, but all the other platforms.
But I come to another question that I think is crucial, right? We saw that Circle or Coinbase has practically rejected the Clarity Act because it wants to make stablecoins a yielding asset, right? Which in the end could be a real tokenization of debt, I believe, right? It could also be defined that way, so what is your position?
First of all, we have always operated outside the United States and moreover this was a rather absurd criticism, right? Within the United States, when I was born in the United States for the first time in 2025, I had to explain why we operate outside the United States. It was a bit of a criticism. Why Tether, if it sells the dollar, is not in the United States and doesn't sell it in the United States? And I took a little while to explain that it was exactly the opposite, the strength of Tether. That is, if you are the American government, do you want to sell your debt to Americans or do you want others to buy it? Obviously you want to sell it to others, otherwise you are creating a spiral where you buy back your own debt, so you are leveraged on your debt and then things end badly. So there was already some difficulty explaining basic finance to a Silicon Valley venture capital system that doesn't know a market other than the American one. Once we succeeded in explaining this concept, we managed to explain the importance of USDT outside the United States, where we go to strengthen the hegemony of the American dollar in countries where the intraday volatility of the Argentine peso is more than 4%, which is what you could give on an annual basis. So none of my users outside the United States has ever asked me, can you give me a little interest? So we are very calm because we are almost aligned with the banks. We don't want to replace the banks.
Are you against the proposal, that is, the Clarity...
We are agnostic, that is, in my opinion we are quite agnostic, we don't want to, we don't care.
But you have made an application to issue Tether in America?
Yes. And we don't think... Exactly, USDT, and we won't think about distributing the yield because you distribute the yield only if you need to acquire a user base that you are not having.
And then you enter into great competition with the banking world or...
Exactly. Outside the United States we position ourselves as a savings account, so a savings account, that is, if you are an Argentine, you have the Argentine peso which is your checking account, the account from which you make daily payments for consumer goods, and then you have your savings account which is the American dollar because it already does so well against the Argentine peso. In the United States we position ourselves the opposite.
We are the checking account for the United States when the savings account can be the S&P, the investment portfolio.
But the question is, in America there is the Genius Act, ok...
Which doesn't cover other countries.
Is there a possibility of having a Genius Act for every country? At that point it would become total chaos. That is, you understand? In the sense, if every country makes a regulation law, as I believe Europe is trying to do, at that point it's clear that I know because I have frequented Argentina a lot that you have replaced a lot of people who walked around with dollars and exchanged, did currency exchange which was a whole parallel economy, clearly very, very opaque, right? So, but isn't there a risk of different worldwide regulation, so at that point a sort of craziness happens, right? If every country sets its own rules on digital currency.
Well, many were waiting for the United States and they will copy the Genius Act, that is, the Genius Act will be a bit of the template used by many other states. We, moreover, have a regulatory and compliance team that is fantastic and already works with many states and nations around the world to give advice, to help understand how digital assets work because very often they regulate something they don't understand. Classic example, Europe. That is, Europe made a law that I immediately thought in a very naive way was a law made by someone who doesn't understand the problem, because it's a law that requires those who make stablecoins, who issue stablecoins, to hold in the stablecoin reserves up to, or rather a minimum of 60%, in bank deposits. And an inexperienced person this seems normal, says 'Well, obviously you have to keep the money in bank deposits,' but the problem is that bank deposits are insured only up to €100,000. That is, if I have a stablecoin with 10 billion market capitalization and I put it all as bank deposits in the bank, what does the bank do with these 10 billion? It takes 90% and distributes them to whoever wants to build a house. It needs motorcycle loans, which is what happened with Silicon Valley Bank.
Exactly. For this the two Italians who manage Tether have explained a bit how risk management is maintained on a stablecoin, also explained to the Americans, to the Wall Street guys, because what Circle did was hold 10% of reserves in uninsured bank deposits, that is, I say uninsured because they are above 250,000. Ok.
But that went well for them because it wasn't guaranteed. We instead hold everything in assets that we can control, the majority in US Treasury bonds which are anyway securities, they are bearer securities, so if the bank fails, those all come back to me. Bank deposits go into the bank's bankruptcy process and are distributed proportionally.
So, sorry to finish, I follow Zoltan Pozsar a lot, right? I believe he was even at your conference, who talks about re-dollarization of the system. So you are an agent of re-dollarization of a system that is trying to de-dollarize, but surely the macroeconomics and politics are super complex. If we look at the BRICS system, they are obviously pushing for de-dollarization of the world. On the other hand, Europe is afraid of the American dollar. Clearly the European Central Bank has also declared several times that one of their main fears would be a dollarization of Europe. On the other hand, the United States which are obviously interested in increasing or maintaining the dollarization of the world.
We at this moment, from a data point, there are still 360 billion dollars in cash in banknotes in mattresses in Argentina. Just in Argentina.
And so, so we are modernizing access to the dollar for those who are desperate and who need to have access to the dollar because otherwise they would work from January to December, 12 months, and in December they would be poorer with...
But you are not in conflict with local states, you are not in conflict with...
With, I don't know, Turkey for example, I'm not talking about Turkey with Erdogan, not with the people, that is, in the sense and here it's obvious, right? You are doing it for the people because clearly it's a means of subsistence also to transmit, to send money, but from a central state point of view of an emerging country with a mega inflation problem, you are in a certain sense in conflict with...
No. And I'll explain why, I'll arrive at Turkey, but I'll explain the case from Bolivia. We are not, our team had never been to Bolivia before March 2025. One of our guys, Marco, takes a plane, arrives in Bolivia, enters a random shop and sees all the product prices on the shelves in USDT and is a bit surprised. Goes to the next shop, it's the same thing. Then he meets the president of the Bolivian Central Bank who shows him how USDT has become de facto legal tender, that is, the currency de facto accepted as currency, as national currency, because the problem of emerging markets is the same for everyone. Having a weak currency and all products, especially the main ones, being priced in dollars, Bolivia has reached a point of paralysis. That is, if you first have to put several factors together, if you are an emerging market, good luck receiving dollars through the banking system. That is, if today from Europe you try to send dollars, a wire transfer in dollars to Bolivia, it will never arrive. The same thing applies to El Salvador, to Nicaragua, to Honduras, everything, but it also applies to Brazil and Argentina. That is, there is a desperate need to have access to dollars to be able to buy oil and gas. Without oil, factories don't work, trucks don't run, cars don't run, the entire economy is paralyzed, the same thing, if gas is missing, you can't heat houses, the country dies. We have spoken with dozens and dozens of heads of state and central bank heads in emerging countries who were truly desperate, the economy and the state no longer worked and they are using USDT to bring dollars to restart.
And where do they do the funding though? How do they get there? In the sense, one who works in Bolivia is paid in Bolivar, I don't know what the Bolivar is called.
You have no idea how many people are paid in USDT in Bolivia?
Ok. So they are even paid in...
Yes. We work with the biggest commodity traders in the world and they work with all these emerging countries and they have always tried to, they have always used dollars until a point where dollars no longer worked. The intermediary banks no longer delivered dollars neither in Bolivia, nor in El Salvador, nor in all these countries and they started years ago to use USDT because if they send USDT to a seller of commodity products in Bolivia, this seller can then take these USDT and pay salaries, pay machinery, pay everything. That is, by now USDT has become an integral part of the financial fabric of all these states.
Can we say that you are the bank, that is, you are the central bank of Tether, in the sense that no one can make an account directly with you, but...
You are the central bank.
You could say it. Well, let's move on. Listen Paolo, before getting to a question I know made you angry, we also talked about it on Black Box Morning, the S&P downgrade. I want to ask you two things. The first is about Bitcoin because you inaugurated this 2026 by purchasing about 800 million in value. I want to ask you what is the accumulation strategy for this 2026 and where do you see the price going? What could be the biggest obstacle to the Bitcoin price in this 2026?
Well, first of all we need to contextualize. I am a huge Bitcoin fan. As a mathematician, I think that a currency controlled by the laws of the universe, by mathematics, by physics, is much more interesting and long-lasting than a currency created by a man who is fickle, who changes his mind, who has to answer to many masters. So Bitcoin is that, it's a currency that no one controls because no one can control it so that everyone can use it, and so it's fascinating. In my opinion at this moment Bitcoin is still small, it's more correlated to the stock market than to commodities, so it's behaving completely differently from gold. Now we see that gold almost hit $5,000 and then there, it's all, that would be another 15 episodes on the reason, but...
Must grow. Let's remember it was born in 2008, the first transaction came in early 2009, so let's give it some years because it is competing with national currencies imposed by governments. The beauty of Bitcoin is that it imposes itself on no one. It's a choice, it's an option, it exists as an option to allocate a part of one's wealth to something that is not fickle and is not managed by the gut of two or three people. So in the coming years, in my opinion, we will see a decoupling between the stock market and Bitcoin. At this moment Bitcoin is I believe less than 10% of gold's market cap, so it's still small, so it's subject to much volatility compared to gold and then it needs, in my opinion, a generational change, that is, Bitcoin is understood more by new generations, while, let's say, in power there are people who are less prone to change and unfortunately I hope I do an exercise on myself not to be like that, but the more you go on with age, unfortunately you become less prone to change and to understanding change, the willingness to see something or assimilate something that you don't understand immediately. And so as time passes, as generations pass, Bitcoin will remain there. It will be an anchor of salvation for all those people who see that even the American dollar, despite being the most solid national currency in the world, is subject to inflation.
The real theme and criticism I can make is not related to Bitcoin, it's related to the fact that in a moment of such strong debasement you would have expected a different response from Bitcoin. What you say is correct, that is, Bitcoin trades like the stock market. What worries me, Paolo, is that in this phase of Bitcoin where I want to understand what you think with all the treasuries, you also did 21, there is MicroStrategy and then we read here at Blackbox several times about structured notes from investment banks on Bitcoin that are horrifying because they trade on margins, on volatility spreads etc. This tells you what? It tells you that anyway, finance has a way often to extract value from a good idea, which is to make it its own. Now, making Bitcoin belong to the financial world, BIS with the ETF etc., securitized, is a problem because attaching derivatives to it, especially, can damage Bitcoin's performance in a period that can also be prolonged over time.
But it's interesting, right? The concept is similar with gold, that is, if you think about it, the paper gold market is said to be much larger than the physical gold market, but if you see already in Asia there is a dislocation between the physical gold price and the paper gold.
