Paolo Ardoino on financial inclusion
From Opening Remarks by Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether - Paolo Ardoino (IBW 2026) · · Istanbul Blockchain Week
“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 is made by bad people. They are great people, amazing people, extremist market, great great um entrepreneurs, local entrepreneurs, great uh workers, hard workers, um you know, normal people. And the problem simply is that they don't bring enough revenues to the banking system to justify their on boarding, to justify the banking industry bringing them as part of their customer base.”
On , Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Bitfinex & Tether, spoke about financial inclusion 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.