Paolo Ardoino on Tether profitability
From What is Tether Planning in Georgia? - Interview with Paolo Ardoino · · Business Media Georgia
“The company made $4.5 billion dollar in profit considering that is a company that has slightly less than 100 employees. It's been named the probably the most the company with the highest profit per person in the world ever.”
On , Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Bitfinex & Tether, spoke about Tether profitability during What is Tether Planning in Georgia? - Interview with Paolo Ardoino on Business Media Georgia.
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.