Paolo Ardoino on El Salvador
From 2156: Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Tether and Bitfinex Discusses Plan B · · Neil C. Hughes
“This is the first time in history that a government raise Capital through a mean that is not the top banks in the world or the IMF right again this goes towards you know the Financial Freedom so we have seen so many times in the history how lending money between countries is leading has led to colonialism basically in a simple word.”
On , Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Bitfinex & Tether, spoke about El Salvador during 2156: Paolo Ardoino, CTO at Tether and Bitfinex Discusses Plan B on Neil C. Hughes.
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.