The title of the presentation is 'The Quest for a Stable Society.' Today I want to tell you about what we are doing at Tether and how we think about what a society should look like and why it is important that we focus on stability.
This is our manifesto that we wrote a couple of years ago. Stability derives from equipotent access to technology and finance. Decentralization of technology and finance makes society resilient to failure and abuse. Technology and finance are a reflection of society. Peer-to-peer for the entire history of humanity, we have been used to talking to each other without intermediaries and transacting among each other without intermediaries.
Cash has always been peer-to-peer. We had in the past different forms of money from silver coins, gold coins, salt, and all the rest. But it has always been peer-to-peer. People were sitting around the table and talking and sharing information and sharing value. But things changed recently. In the last 50 years, if we think about it, both money and information became completely centralized and fully intermediated, not just by one intermediary necessarily, but many more.
How do we think about a stable society? What are the components of a stable society? For us, the components of a stable society are four. One is stable finance. Without predictability of your wealth, without protecting your wealth, without the ability to plan for the growth of your children and your households, it's very hard for any person to have a stable life.
But is money the only thing that matters in this context? No. Because even if you have a stable form of money, if you cannot communicate, if you are in a despotic country, even having stable money doesn't matter because you are still not free. You are not free to build a better future if you cannot communicate and build with your friends, colleagues, and family. So you need stable communications, a form of communication that ensures you can say what you think, as in any democratic state. Unfortunately, we are seeing recently how things are going south in that respect.
Third is stable energy. We all know that without energy we cannot power up phones, communication systems, or monetary systems. And lastly is stable intelligence.
But let's start from stable finance. That is the thing that Tether is mostly known for. This chart says it all. That's why USDT works. On the top of the line, you see the US dollar, that straight line. And then here the others are all the other national currencies, many of the different national currencies of emerging markets.
In the last 5 years, the Turkish Lira lost 80% of its value against the US dollar. In the last 5 years, the Argentinian peso lost 94.5% of its value against the US dollar. So imagine yourself and your family live in Argentina where every year from January to December, at the end of the year you are poorer compared to the beginning of the year. Venezuela's Bolivar lost 99.8% of its value against the US dollar.
You can see here some headlines throughout the last few years how actually stablecoins helped all these people. We are talking about four billion people in the world that don't have access to basic financial services. They're called underbanked or unbanked or underserved. All these people deserve to have... they live in countries where the national currency is devaluing against the US dollar and every single good and product that you buy in these countries is priced in dollars. Oil is priced in dollars. Without oil or gas you cannot create energy. Without the ability to use dollars you cannot purchase phones. Mobile phones are of course imported for most of these countries and they are priced in dollars. So if you don't have a stable currency, your economy will be completely paralyzed.
That's why all these people that need to make sure they can try to give their children a better future, they need to have access to a better form of currency than their national currency. This is the main feature of USDT: it is one-to-one with the dollar. Simple as that.
USDT lets people move dollars around in a digital form. It was born in 2014. For the first few years, the growth was very limited. Today, the market cap of USDT is $186 billion.
You can see it here. This is some stats of our company. Sorry for this bit of bragging, but $186 billion. Last year we operated with a 97% profit margin. I think it's a very unique statistic for any company in the world. And it proves that with efficiency, you can achieve a lot and you don't need huge capitals. Tether was born from nothing with a simple idea, the most basic idea you can think about, a tokenized form of the US dollar. Last year in 2024 we made $13.7 billion in profits. Last year we are still finalizing calculations, but we made more than $10 billion in profits also in 2025.
This is probably the most beautiful chart. We have now 534 million users, among which most of them are in emerging markets and developing countries. These users are the people that are part of the four billion people that I said before. They are the people that have been left behind by the banking system, left behind by any basic financial system, and they needed a lifeline. Those are the 500 million plus people that we have. And it's growing by 34 million new users per quarter. That is Facebook-level growth. That is social network growth. As I said, there are three billion people that are underserved in this moment. If you think about it, it's half of the population of the world. In Europe and the United States we are lucky, but we have to think that really half of the population in the world does not have access to a basic financial system.
That's why I said money is the ultimate social network. Money, especially programmable money like USDT, can transport two types of things: information and value at the same time. So that growth, as I said, is a Facebook-style chart because money is the ultimate social network. While it transports information, it also transports value.
There are many use cases for USDT. We have real-time settlements. Remittances is one of the biggest. All the people working in Europe, the fathers and mothers of families working in Europe and sending money back home. Same in the US. The US is the biggest remittances corridor in the world. A lot of people living in the US send money to Mexico, Argentina, Brazil. A lot of people in Europe send money back to Nigeria, Turkey, the Philippines, and all the other countries. USDT right now is around 9% of the entire remittances business in the world. The volume for remittances is calculated to be $900 billion per year. USDT is around $80 billion per year already, just in two years.
Why? Because if you use a normal remittances company, you are charged between 6% and 26%. Imagine you work the entire week, half of your money goes to pay taxes, and then for one day per week you are working for the remittances company. And if you're lucky, one of the days of the week you are working for your family. With USDT, the fees are zero.
These are other many use cases for why people are using USDT. Another group of statistics: we talked about the user base. 37% of the market cap of the $186 billion of USDT is used for savings. So again, people prefer to save in USDT rather than Nigerian Naira, Turkish Lira, or Argentinian peso. For the chart that we saw at the beginning of the presentation, USDT accounts for 61% of the total market share of stablecoins. That number will go up for many reasons. I will be kicked out from the stage in some minutes, so it will be very hard to explain.
But the other great functionalities that USDT created that are kind of shocking are that we basically also innovated on the US dollar itself. Before, when the US was printing the US dollar, people in emerging markets were taking these dollar bills as cash, putting them in mattresses, and that was okay but not very helpful for the United States. So what USDT is doing now is when people buy USDT, we take their dollars and invest in Treasury bills. When we invest in the Treasury bills, we are helping back the US economy.
But on top of that, we are also doing something that is very unprecedented. Right now you have countries that are antagonistic to the United States, like for example China, that still have $700 billion in US Treasuries, but 30 years ago they had $2 trillion. So there is one decision maker in China that can press a button and sell the US Treasuries. What we have created is 500 million different-thinking people that will not altogether one single day decide to sell the US debt. So in all effects we made the US debt much more resilient, safer, stronger just because we were able to decentralize it across multiple holders.
We are the 17th largest holder of the US debt as a private company. We have a huge active user base. Also, we have a huge investment portfolio. More than 95% of our revenues and profits were not distributed to the shareholders; they were put as part of our portfolio so that we could increase our market share, our distribution network, and we could invest in great opportunities, great companies that are actually pushing forward our mission of building a stable society.
We also built the same thing but with gold. It is growing very fast. Tether Gold grew more than 100% in the last few months in terms of market cap. It's around $2.5 billion. It is the biggest tokenized gold market and digital token. And we're seeing huge adoption again in the emerging markets and developing countries, exactly the same people that love gold. Think about India, the Philippines, Brazil, and so on. But let's move to the rest.
What is the way we think about stability? We talked about four billion people, half of the population of the world, that do not have access to a basic financial system. So you have this huge gap in the world population. That gap will be multiplied by a factor of 100 because of AI. So the same people that cannot have access to basic financial services will not have access to basic AI services.
We all know, as Europeans and Americans, that a topic of the day is how AI will impact our jobs. Will AI take our jobs? How AI will impact the life of the people in our countries? But imagine who does not even have the luck of having a form of money that works for them. So what happens when we talk about stability of societies? What if we have already half of the population of the world that is poor and does not have any opportunity to change their fate? What if we add on top of that, as more fuel on the fire, the fact that they will not participate in the growth of humanity through AI? To me, that is very scary. When we talk about the stability of society, that is the biggest question mark that we have. What will happen if that gap that we discussed before becomes 100 times bigger?
So we built a technological stack. I know there are many technologists here. We built a technological stack that starts from the most complex thing we could do, which is peer-to-peer artificial intelligence, an AI layer that can run directly on a mobile phone for people living in Africa, Central and South America, or Southeast Asia. Something that does not require a connection or big power, so that you can offer very cheap access to basic AI services to the same 500 million people that are our customers today, but eventually the four billion people that are still left behind by the financial system.
That was the most complex thing we could dream about, and we released the first apps for QVAC. But walking back, in order to get there, for the last five years we built a tech protocol and a networking protocol that would allow any device to connect to any device without intermediaries. Remember the concept of removing intermediaries from the equation for money, for communication, for intelligence, for energy. That is the theme of the stable society. That is the theme of Tether.
We built an execution layer that can scale any application on any device, from any smartphone to any laptop to any server. We built a payment layer that is called WDK that allows digital assets to be held self-custodial, to be integrated in any AI agent, any human, and any developer can build on this layer. It is fully open source. All this is fully open source. Anyone can take it and build it for the betterment of humanity and society.
So we have the AI system. Now you guys are going to start with the drums, so I will be kicked out of stage. But we have the payment layer. We have an amazing peer-to-peer chat application that proves that you can have chat rooms with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of people without a single server in the middle.
We built the communication layer and the networking layer that stays behind it. That is the runtime that I was telling you about. And also we built local energy, decentralized energy. We built already 800 kiosks in Africa in selected villages and we're serving already 800,000 people across all these villages where we have these kiosks with solar panels on top and rechargeable batteries inside. We sell for three USDT, so $3 per month you can recharge the battery four times. And for the first time, there are 600 million people in Africa that don't have electricity at home. By 2030 we project to have around 100,000 kiosks, which means 20 million households, 180 million people powered up in Africa. That is a change you can see from space because if you see Central Africa from space now, it is very dark during the night. So that is very ambitious. Thank you very much for your time.
