Paolo Ardoino - Tether - A Once in a Century Company - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

Hello everyone. I'm Palardino. I'm the CEO at Tedar and I'm very excited to be here also this year at talk 2049. Um this is a very bold bold title for for the presentation and um might sounds um arrogant but today I want to walk you through the train of thoughts that push me to write that title and I want to explain to you why we think that Tedar is a very unique company. why we think that is one of the best companies in this world and has unique properties and I want to share them with you and I would like to love and I would love your feedback to understand what we are doing right what we are doing wrong so um let's start from a little bit of numbers um we start in 2014 ter is the company that created the stable coin industry we lu the first stable coin USD in 2014 completely different market, completely different uh ecosystem in crypto.

Today we just passed $148 billion. That is a huge mark. I wish I could claim is because we were great. Actually, you made it right. That is the huge difference is because of you.

It's not because of us. Um it's your trust, it's your adoption, is the way you use it in your day-to-day life. We have we are going to see it a bit. We have 400 million people plus in the emerging markets in developing countries using USDT to save themselves and their families from high inflation from failing national currencies and for remittances and you name it. Some more numbers.

Last year was great for us. Um 13 billion uh in profits. um we have almost 120 billion in US treasuries exposure. Now I think that we're at a stage where we could say that from 19th largest country in the world um in whole as holder of US treasuries now we are the 18th largest one. We surpassed Germany.

How crazy is that right? So a small company like Tedar like now holds more treasuries than than Germany uh I think than UAE than uh than Spain uh and Australia and so on. Very humbling. We have all we also hold more than 100,000 Bitcoin and 50 tons of gold. Um that is very very relevant because we are seeing how you know the potential future instability of the world or at least the current one um is um uh would uh bring these two assets to be at the perfect edge to whatever craziness and apocalypse could happen in the next few years.

But you know, of course, we are talking about numbers. We're talking about profits. But you know about those $13 billion, how much we distributed last year to our shareholders? Less than 5%. Right?

Which company, which VC, which Silicon Valley based company would share? These are profits and not revenues. Which one would share so little? Why we share so little? Right.

to our shareholders. The reason is that we believe we are a company that is based on passion on ethos philosophy. We come from the Bitcoin world. The reason why we have so many Bitcoin is because we believe that Bitcoin is one of the best assets. It's the only asset that is governed by math is not governed by humans.

Humans mess up. um every four or five years or few years in the central banks in each central bank there is a new person or new human or group of humans that will change the rules. The only certainty that we have in the universe is math and bitcoin is the only currency that is governed by math. So thank you. So we distributed 5% we keep the rest of 95% in the company to build adoption to build infrastructure all focus in emerging markets developing countries.

We also do some more long-term investments more let's say speculative or futuristic investments in artificial intelligence and so on. We invest in energy production invest in Bitcoin mining. We believe in the importance of the decentralization of Bitcoin mining. Um we invest in biotech in brain computer interface. You will see in a bit but our focus is how a company that started from a small idea uh in 2014 can be a net positive for the world and trying to be the real not be evil company, right?

How we can also force ourselves to not be evil ever. So we think that um we studied and we thought a lot about it and we think that the reason why um we can do this is that we have a very interesting set of incentives. So we have three three key things in the company. We have philosophy. We come from the Bitcoin world.

So philosophy and ethos is is truly important to us. We have attack vision. We are building some crazy technology. I want to show it later. And we have the capital.

Right? So if you have only two of these three things uh then actually it's very hard to run a company that is um ethos driven and is uh like society improvement driven. Let me explain you why. Right? So if you have the philosophy, let's say that you have the best intentions and you have the best technology in mind, but you you lack the capital, you go to a VC, you ask for money, and the VC will ask you, all right, how you can hook your customers to you?

How you can jail your customers with with you in order for them never to leave so that you can milk them until the 10 time. So if you have the two things without the capital never work. Of course if you have the capital and tech vision probably you are going to build some glasses that spy people and learn I was reading today that on Twitter that you do that type of stuff and uh if you have capital and and philosophy good luck in in building something meaningful. So I like to to split basically how I see Treadfi and what we did USDT to Treadfi and also to Bittech and what our aim with Bittech. So I I think that with Treadfi um we have been seeing how every single transaction that we are doing and still doing a traditional financial system has too many intermediaries, right?

Every single bit of information, financial information goes through multiple intermediaries. Each one of them will milk a little bit of a fee out of your transaction making it ab absolutely inefficient, slow and costly. Right? I I I've write here death by 10,000 intermediaries. Big tech the same.

Right? Imagine today you are in this room you take out your phone and you send a WhatsApp message to your neighbor on the on the same chair. What is happening is that that message will travel thousands and thousands of miles to Ireland and then back here. Right? So imagine every single call, every single WhatsApp message, every single video, every single photo that you put there will travel dozens and dozens of miles in a useless way because you are sitting nearby the guy, right?

So this is why the the servers in the tech industry and the big tech industry are the intermediaries. So finance and tech suffer from the main the same issue too many intermediaries. With Tedar we want to fix that. We want to actually we did that with USDT. We are removing all the unnecessary intermediaries from the financial system.

There are so many new stable coins, so many new products in the crypto industry and the digital asset industry that will continue to foster this initiative that was started in 2014 by Tether. In the end, I believe that the next 10 years, every single asset will be on chain. Every single asset will be available to everyone in a fair way, in a more democratic way. And that's something that the big banks will never were never prepared to and that's something that will completely change the rules of the game. So I think that um the other the other realization is that what we the way we are building um Tedar and the way we are considering also the next steps of what Tet is building is creating unstoppable technology.

We we are building technological layers um SDKs, products, all open source that are going to create opportunities for to all the developers to build on technology that is free and will always remain free even if tatter dies tomorrow. That is the thing that I I think every single day. I want to build something as a legacy for Tedar. Whenever we create something new, we are thinking okay, will that survive to an apocalypse? Will that survive to the wrath of God?

That is what I think everyone of us should ask when we build something new in when we say we oh I work in the decentralized ecosystem. Ask yourself this simple question. Will this resist to an apocalypse? If not, you probably should go should go back to the whiteboard and trying to redesign in a way that is more resilient. Because my problem as a coder since I was an young age is that everything that we have in our life in technology will only work in the best case scenario will all fail us in the worst case scenario.

Everyone every one of the apps that you have on your smartphone will fail you whenever there is an apocalypse. Whenever there is a huge issue when there is a natural cataclysm whatever you name it there is a a huge war you think that you can rely on technology. But that is exactly the moment when you will realize that technology will not be there to help you. So the incentives that are actually driving that it's quite funny it's quite interesting is that our success any most of the companies whenever they they create a new product they create a product a new product with the idea to sell that product directly to the market so that they can c capture the user. So it's basically a direct um a kind of a direct relationship between the product that you create and the return that you have on that specific product.

Tedar works in a different way if you think about it. And again sorry if this sounds boring or or um a bit obnoxious but I I didn't mean that way. It's purely I want to drive you through the train of thoughts that you have every day in the company because openness to me and transparency is also also telling you how we think about our company. So on one side you have you know the normal state of art is companies that create a product and sell the product. So they have a vested interest making sure that that product is is the the one that will retain retain the control over the users and we found ourselves and again not because we were super smart.

is because how we what we created took its own life and grew up in hundreds and thousands different directions in you know with with word of mouth so we started so what I'm telling you again is not oh we thought it from the beginning no it's actually we studied what happened and so we find ourselves in this situation where empowering the users with the most freedom tech With open and unstoppable platforms that we are building next in ter we can actually create an ecosystem that is empowering our other products making them more successful. So the more free that is the technology that we create the more returns our company will have. So to me is very exciting thing and so that we are applying this to everything that we do. We have an educational platform that we are developing. We have a biotech arm called Teter AO that stands for evolution.

We have Tedar data invest in AI invest in um in brain computer interfaces and similar uh we have Tedar power we invested more than $2 billion in um in energy and Bitcoin mining and we have Tedar finance that is basically what powers everything. So um US everyone knows it I will skip it. Some other interesting data points is we have 400 million users. In Q1 2025, USDT wallet base grew 13% around 46 million new wallets in just one quarter. It's just crazy.

It's like almost is a social media platform. And 30% the thing that makes me more proud is that 37% of this user base is using USDT as a savings account. USDT is used by all the young bank. All the people that are left behind by the traditional financial system. They are the poor people that are too poor of being of interest of JP Morgan or CV or you name it.

They they are not generating enough commissions per year to justify their bank account open and you know sometimes you hear talking about them as a niche. There are three billion people half of the population of the world how they can be considered a niche but they have been left behind and they with word of mouth until 2022 Tedar didn't even have a marketing team with a word of mouth Tedar USDT gained hundreds of millions of users so when I say it's not because of us the success it's truly because everyone of you everyone of your family and friends that made this happen this is the growth in the user base Um, you can see I'm very bad with the clicker, right? Um, well, we're going to skip that. It's growing. Um, 60% of the exchange volumes um are accounted USDT.

The average fee on a blockchain uh to send up to $500 is 022. And that corresponds to basically one basis point. Let's see. You can use US in hundreds of different ways. um you know savings uh hedging against inflation paying suppliers globally um uh mobile and utilities banking the unbanked as I said uh remittances uh trade finance and you name it we also create another interesting product that is uh very interesting in this uh moment in time it's called Tedar gold um again this this thing is quite interesting because with Tedar gold while we make money and in on the interest rates on USDT is impossible to make money on tether gold because you have gold reserves, physical gold reserves in a vault.

So, Tedar creates technology or creates financial products that in our opinion are just meant for the people for society. We don't care about their profitability in um you know when when we launch them. We just care that they are the right thing at the right time for for society. Um, Tedar owns 50 tons of gold and the Tedar gold as a stable coin has around 70 7.7 um uh 7.

7 uh tons of gold as backing for 800 around $800 million and as the 50 tons of gold that owns are part of its own um ownership. Um Hedram we created the tokenization platform uh everyone is talking now about real world assets. We created the tokenization as um platform that is fully non-custodial. You find it at hdron.tar.

to. So here again we created a platform that is fully non-custodial so that you have the control over the smart contracts that are powering your real world asset. You don't like the product, you go away, you find another provider, you build your own interface. We don't care, right? We just want you to have the best tool for your job and we never want to hook you to our product.

You should be free to choose whatever this other product is very cool. So it's called WDK's wallet development kit is um an open source platform. We are going to release the new version that is probably 100 times more cool and complete. It does everything from well supports USDT and um in all the different chains plus USDT0 supports Bitcoin. We are going to support also light network and um you can extend it to support any token you want but already support more than 10 different blockchains.

Um the beauty of it is that we believe the future will require to have billions or trillions of wallets. AI agents will have their own nonuda wallets. By the way, this library you can create any wallet without any API key. I really dislike when you know I have to use a new platform or a new software development kit and I've been asked to sign up and get an API key so that I will be uh stuck forever on that service on that product right I want to give you the tools we want to give you the tools so that you will remain free you have the source code you have everything your life to build the best experience you whatever product you are creating is a wallet is a website you want to add the uh a wallet experience in a website. You want to create an AI agent with a wallet.

That wallet should be non-custodial and we are giving you the tools to do it and you can support whatever token you want out of this. We built kit that is a peer-to-peer telecommunication platform, highly scalable um completely unstoppable work here, work uh anywhere. Uh you can do calls here, voice calls, video calls, file sharing is again completely peer-to-peer without servers. the data stays on your smartphones is the thing that you know in the apocalypse that is a perfect example if in an apocalypse you use kit that is probably the only thing that will continue to work. Um we are you know every one of you would be probably familiar with what happened in Spain.

We are adding a feature to kit so that even if um electricity blows up and nothing will work, you can still use kit as peer-to-peer system with your neighbors and to chat and communicate, right? This is very important principle for everything that we build at Tar. We invested in Ramble, great company. We invested um around $775 million to support their quest in freedom of speech. We really believe in the importance freedom of speech.

Unfortunately, not many believe in that. at least in Europe among the European countries. So we wanted to support them. Um and we are investing a lot in education, Bitcoin education first, but in general online education, digital education as part of Kit and our whole punch efforts and the tele peer-to-peer telecommunication system. We want to make education unstoppable so that you can make sure that people will not tell you or force you to learn certain things certain ways.

you can always access to the best education possible that will make you independent and self-s sovereign yourself. We invested in um um great company called Tetarivo. This is my one of my pre preferred investments. Is actually a brain computer interface. We believe that we are much more advanced than Neurolink.

We have around 42 patients. Our technology can read 92 words per minute from your brain. And um it's um it's fully will will allow us to create what I call the brain operating system will be a fully open- source operating system that we want to create to help people to build on this uh on this product that can be integrated with and help people that have disabilities that have ALS and other diseases degenerative diseases. Right? But we believe in the importance that such an important that this critical technology should be open for everyone.

Coming soon we have um we are heavily invested in um in um in ter AI is will be a peer-to-peer AI platform. No API keys, no question asks, no email, nothing. You will have an SDK that can allow you to run any model on your smartphone, a $30 smartphone, on a watch, and a Garmin watch on um on a iOS uh Android device, a laptop service, doesn't matter. Everything private to you, local to you. We will never get your data.

We don't want your data. That's how technology should be and how what want what internet was supposed to be. Um I just believe that that's point at this point we realize that terror is more than a stable coin but is actually the stable company. Everything that we are building in technology for us is about the stability of society. With stability of society we can grow together.

We can we are becoming unstoppable together. Thank you very much for your time and I hope that you enjoyed my presentation. Thank you.