Paolo Ardoino on AI sovereignty
From Opening Remarks by Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether - Paolo Ardoino (IBW 2026) · · Istanbul Blockchain Week
“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 AI is not you becoming more intelligent is someone else becoming more intelligent.”
On , Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Bitfinex & Tether, spoke about AI sovereignty during Opening Remarks by Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether - Paolo Ardoino (IBW 2026) on Istanbul Blockchain Week.
About Paolo Ardoino
Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, has been promoting the company's expansion into decentralized artificial intelligence. In a June 2026 address at Istanbul Blockchain Week, he described Tether's goal of applying the concept of disintermediation—removing unnecessary intermediaries to reduce costs—to industries such as communications and AI. He introduced a platform called QVAC, which he said runs AI models locally on devices, and claimed that a 4-billion-parameter medical model from Tether outperformed Google's 27-billion-parameter Med-Gemini model. Ardoino stated that the company aims to democratize access to intelligence, arguing that reliance on centralized AI services means "someone else becoming more intelligent." Ardoino has also discussed Tether's stablecoin USDT, which he said has 573 million users and a market cap of $189.5 billion, calling it "the biggest financial inclusion success story in the history of humanity." He expressed concern that exchange-traded funds (ETFs) could concentrate Bitcoin custody, undermining the principle of self-custody. In a March 2026 podcast, he suggested that owning one Bitcoin could be a meaningful goal, and predicted that AI agents would use stablecoins as a programmable payment layer. He also noted that Bitfinex removed trading fees for retail users, arguing that fee structures often disadvantage smaller traders.