I'm here in Lano at the Plan B Forum, which this year is being a real success. And now talking to Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether. Before we get into the interview, remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on social media to stay up to date with our news and interviews. We are on a mission to educate people about Bitcoin, and also we love your support and feedback, so please reach out to us. Paolo, over the last couple of years, Tether has been diversifying beyond the stablecoin product USDT. Can you expand on your investment strategy, especially I would like to hear your thoughts on the future of finance, Bitcoin mining, energy, as well as culture?
So Bitcoin to me is not just a currency, but it's more than a currency. It's an idea. It's what actually Plan B stands for. We want to not think about just a finite currency as Bitcoin as the end goal of this journey, but we want to think about how the teachings of Bitcoin can be replicated in tech, from artificial intelligence, telecommunications, education, and so on. So that's why with Tether we started expanding our investment in different areas. In the last two years, we made 12 billion dollars in profits, and we distributed almost a very small amount of money out of those profits because we want to keep the majority of these profits in the company to keep investing in areas where there's too much intermediation. The success of USDT as a currency as well is the fact that it's helping to disintermediate financial transactions and help people to be their own bank, have their own checking accounts. Almost 400 million people now are using Tether on a daily basis as their checking account and savings account, people that never had that opportunity before. There are 3 billion people in the world that don't have bank accounts, that are unbanked, not because they are bad people, they are just too poor for being of interest to the banks because they don't generate enough fees. So what USDT did really well is remove intermediaries from the equation and go directly to the last mile. But we can do the same thing with education, we can do the same thing with telecommunication. There are too many intermediaries, all the data centers, all the big tech companies, they're all unnecessary intermediaries in the equation. So we think that with the teachings of Bitcoin and what we learn from USDT, we can do the same in other areas.
Interesting that you mention about USDT playing a role in the future of finance. I'm quite interested in looking, for example, at how AI agents could eventually fully manage transactions autonomously using stablecoins, for example. So what role do you see Tether playing in this future?
I'm thinking like AI agents rather than humans increasingly driving rapidity and also decision making in global commerce. It will be part of my speech today at 4 p.m., so stop together. I'm actually just going to describe that in my opinion, in the next 10 years, given the amount of transactions that human beings will do on a daily basis, AI agents, robots, bots will do at least 100 times more transactions on a daily basis than humans. You have self-driving cars that will go around, they can pay themselves for recharging electricity, pay the tolls. You have fridges buying already today your own milk if you finish the milk. You have lights that are paying for their own electricity. So that will be all digital. All those payments will be very, very high frequency. I think the future is giving to all AI agents non-custodial wallets with USDT and Bitcoin potentially to have them being part of the economy and be able to transact and pay each other directly. So I don't think the future is having them... Imagine if all these agents, billions and billions of agents, do you think that they will be connected to PayPal, or do you think that they can be or they should have a non-custodial wallet so that their masters, that should be the humans, can grant them some money and they can spend it through our conditions in the real world economy?
Super interesting. Now I was reading an article on the FT a couple of days ago about Argentina and the billion dollars under the mattress. So I know stablecoins serve as a critical financial tool in emerging markets. One interesting question is, do you see USDT and Tether Gold becoming a substitute for cash in emerging markets?
Yes, the short answer is yes. Because I think it's clear how well we already did it. Cash in emerging markets is cash based on the local currency or is cash US dollars. So there are these two types of cash, but cashing US dollars is more and more difficult over time. It's always harder and harder for people to get cash dollars, and no one wants cash in their own local currency because that is devaluating very fast against the dollar. So that's why everyone, 400 million people already discovered USDT and they're using USDT in their day-to-day lives for that exact reason.
One concern that I have got and I would like to understand how you mitigate that is over-reliance on the US dollar. So what this dependence on the US dollar, especially in this volatile economy, can maybe exacerbate their economic fragility?
Definitely this broader topic on the US dollar hegemony, right? But keep in mind that we recently announced a EURT stablecoin, and we believe in optionality. People should use what they're more comfortable with, what they prefer. I think that among all the currencies in the world, the euro is doing a fantastic job to retain wealth, to grow wealth, and they have very, very little debt. Look at the $36 trillion of debt that the US has, and look at how much debt the euro has, almost nothing. There's like a few hundred billion, not even that. So for that reason, I think that having a stablecoin with the euro is a game changer.
Now if we talk about regulation, I mean, you took a negative stance on MiCA and you shared your views also in a couple of interviews talking to the US audience. Now what the US incoming president can do to promote mass adoption of crypto?
First of all, I'm excited to see that the US finally, Bitcoin is part of the global discussion, also political discussion. So we could say as a community we can say we made it, right? We fought for so many years to get to this point, and now we are at that point. There is an option... If Bitcoin is a crucial part of the political agenda, it means that we made it as an industry, we were successful in making us understood by the most important institutions in the world. Also this year there was the ETF and so on. So I hope that the US, because the world is looking at the US as the place for sensible regulations on new technologies, and historically the US has been precursor of every single technology. So I think that whoever will win in this election, I think that will be a net positive.
