Hello everyone. I'm Paolo Ardoino, I'm the CEO at Tether and I'm very excited to be here with you today, unfortunately not physically, at the Istanbul Blockchain Week 2026. As I'm sure many of you know, Tether is the company that created the first stablecoin in 2014 with a simple idea of bringing digital dollars onto an amazing new technology called blockchain. And that stablecoin is USDT and for the last several years, initially slowly and more faster over time, became extremely popular. As of today, USDT grew to have 573 million users across all the emerging markets, developing countries and grew to 189.5 billion in market cap making it the most used and biggest digital dollar in the world. So I'm very proud of what Tether as a company did. We built the digital rails for all the people in the emerging markets in developing countries that have been left behind by the traditional banking system. We built solutions and liquidity that would allow fathers and mothers of families living in the developing countries to be included in the digital economy. That's something that didn't ever happen and to me it's very troubling because if you think about it, if you check the numbers publicly, there are around 4 billion people in the world they don't have access to basic financial services. So half of the population of the world does not have access to basic financial services. Not because this half of the population of the world is made by bad people. They are great people, amazing people, emerging market, great entrepreneurs, local entrepreneurs, great workers, hard workers, normal people. And the problem simply is that they don't bring enough revenues to the banking system to justify their onboarding, to justify the banking industry bringing them as part of their customer base. And that is very sad and is extremely problematic. This is something that Tether is aiming to change. And actually I believe Tether is the biggest financial inclusion success story in the history of humanity. In the last 12 years we made more for financial inclusion that probably most of the rest of the companies combined in the last 50 years. And again think about it. If a small company like us, we have less than 300 people working for Tether, were able to have these important achievements. It tells a lot about where we should ask ourselves where all the money that was spent for 50 years by NGOs and charities to try to change the status quo of financial inclusion. So I think this is the testament not only of what we did but the entire crypto industry, the blockchain industry, that's why it's very important in conferences like this one to discuss the topic, to be proud of the achievements, the actual results, the visible results that we obtain all together working pushing this technology forward despite all the attacks that came from the last 10 years. I think it's very evident that for the last 10, 15 years this industry went through the different steps of acceptance: first no one cares about what you build, then they mock, they make jokes about what you build, third they fear you and hence they attack you, and fourth eventually they have to throw the towel and they have to accept you. And so this is what happened. I feel with the entire blockchain industry and web 3 and crypto and bitcoin this is something that I think we should again be proud of ourselves but the work is not done yet. There is still so much to build. Tether USDT has 573 million users and we still have 3.5 billion users to go if we want to complete our mission in terms of financial inclusion but what I want to share with you today is a bit broader concept. What we learned at Tether in the last many years is the general concept of disintermediation. Disintermediation means how we can take an industry that for every single financial transaction has several intermediaries that each one of them needs to make money hence is milking some fees out of every user pocket. How we can remove all the unnecessary intermediaries, make the transaction efficiency go higher, make the speed faster and at the same time reduce the cost for the end user saving them money. That is I feel what USDT taught to all of us. And so if we think about the concept of disintermediation and this is the next leg of growth of our company Tether, we thought a lot, well if we were able to be successful in the digital asset industry but also in the general financial industry, if we were successful in removing intermediaries from the equation, what we can do to bring the same concept of disintermediation into other industries that are heavily intermediated like for example the communications industry or the AI industry. In the communication industry, it's very clear that there are too many intermediaries for every single text message, every photo, every video we share with friends. There are many intermediaries that are basically the companies hosting the data and providing those services to connect us. Like think about the biggest messaging platforms that are hosting and relaying our data to our friends but they have access to our data, they use our data, they milk our data to make revenues that is very worrying because that again is a number of unnecessary intermediaries. Think about internet was built to be peer-to-peer, was built to be point-to-point. If today you want to send on for example WhatsApp a message from Istanbul to another friend in Istanbul, that message will not go directly from your phone to your friend's phone or will not even remain within the boundaries of Istanbul but it will be probably routed to Frankfurt or Dublin. So imagine you send a message to your friend, you're in Istanbul, you send a message to your friend and that message goes from Istanbul to Dublin to Istanbul, how crazy is that. That speaks of intermediation, too much intermediation. So with Tether we thought about building protocols, communication protocols that could bring back the internet as was designed at the beginning and it's not rocket science if you think about it. I mean, there are beautiful, incredible successful protocols like BitTorrent that was able to prove that a peer-to-peer network of tens of millions of nodes and computers could share zettabytes and exabytes of data among themselves without any central server. And so very proud that Tether for the last years worked on this protocol called Holepunch and released it publicly, is fully open source and allows every developer to build any application that mobile, desktop, working on any device that is able directly in a very secure way to connect devices with the shortest routing path. This is, I completely recommend you guys to go and check it out. The Holepunch protocol is available. It's open source. It's easy to integrate in anything you're building and completely cuts the intermediaries that are out there trying to take part of your business and part of your users' information. And similarly on the side, we understand today AI has the huge risk of becoming fully intermediated. Only the big AI platforms are able to monetize their users. They're doing it in the most vicious way. They're taking people's data and they're also training new models on people's data and that is not sustainable. And again on the Tether side we look at what we should be doing, how we can help AI to start in the right way to not fall in the trap of heavy intermediation and so we built Qwen and we released open-source SDK, a software development kit that is almost like a Lego building block that contains primitives for OCR, for text to speech, for speech to text, for basic chatting services like chatting experience with your preferred LLMs. We support hundreds of open source LLMs. We built our open source LLMs like Med-PaLM that is a medical health model that was released just a couple of weeks ago that is designed to work locally on any smartphone or any laptop that competes with the flagship state-of-the-art AI models like the Google Med-Gemma 27 billion parameters and even beats that one. So our Med-PaLM 4 billion parameters is more efficient and more accurate by a good margin compared to the much bigger, seven times bigger Google Med-Gemma 27 billion parameters model. So these are the things that we're doing at Tether, we want to democratize access to intelligence. At the core of the blockchain industry and bitcoin industry there is the concept of not your keys not your coins. I would go as far as saying not your AI not your intelligence. That's why it's important to understand that if you use someone else's AI, it's not you becoming more intelligent, it's someone else becoming more intelligent. And so that's why I think that with the ethos, with the philosophy of this industry, of the blockchain and bitcoin industry, we need to learn from our successes and bring our learnings into new nascent industries like AI. I stop here. I hope that you enjoyed this short story about Tether and I hope that you're going to enjoy the conference. Have a great day. Thank you very much.
