Paolo Ardoino - Tether - Let There Be Light - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

very excited to be here today. The first time for me 20125 in Singapore. I would like to introduce to you today well a little bit of a history of Tedar USDT and what's next. something that we introduced just a couple of weeks ago, but I want to use this opportunity to be in probably the biggest hub in in Asia for digital assets and cryptocurrency to talk about it. Just a few months ago, I was invited I had the honor to be invited to the uh white house to discuss about um the signing of the genius act that is the stable coin bill that is a is a huge success for the entire industry.

Um it happened in July. Uh many uh industry leaders were there. Um I'm very proud as you know Tedar being the company that created the first stable coin uh in 2014 after 11 years you get the most important country in the world the United States to recognize the importance of uh uh the technology. Uh we all remember the past administration United States how aggressive was against crypto companies. Um and um we are very thankful to the new administration to have changed uh that.

Um we have um we have been seeing a dramatic also change from um the regulators. Uh think about the SEC dropping many cases. Uh the OCC being more um upfront in uh in supporting banks that are give access to crypto companies. That's that's also beautiful to see you know and um all happen in one single year right for after 11 years that this technology have been around uh in one single year everything changed and I believe that is uh the year that is going to set the pace for the growth of uh the stable coin industry to trillions and trillions of dollars. So um USDT is um the u digital dollar for the emerging markets is uh a dollar that is used today by 500 billion people in all the developing countries.

The reason for that has been um mainly the necessity of people, communities, families, fathers, mothers of families living in high inflation countries to have access to a stable currency. Of course, if you live maybe in the United States and Europe where inflation is 3 4% per year, you know, although we complain about it, I'm I'm Italian still, we complain about inflation being at 4%. um we don't see much the need of of of stable coins but the reality is that three billion people in the world that's half of the population of the world are underbanked or unbanked or live in countries where the inflation is 50% yearoveryear where the devaluation of the local currency is insane if you take Turkey uh the Turkish devaluated against the US dollar around 80% around the la in the last five years against the US dollar in Argentina The Argentinian peso lost 98% of its value against the US dollar in the last 10 years. So imagine to be a father of a family in Argentina uh or a mother of family in Turkey. You you want to save in something that will protect your kids from from the inflation, will protect your ability to bring move to to offer them school and good schooling and to buy groceries and all that.

So that's why the biggest realization that we had at Tedar is that crypto is an amazing industry but the potential of u um stable coins and in general crypto is actually outside of our crowd. uh we live in ourself all of us that are mostly here live have have the luck to be in a situation where we have a lot of time to to to spend to understand the complexity of crypto the technology but 99.9% of the population of the world does not have that luck does not have that time they just need something that will protect their families that protect wealth because what they have available in their countries is not good enough and So here's the chart of the growth of uh of uh of US uh DT. You can see um when it started going parabolic it started going parabolic when um something very dramatic happened that thing is the pandemic. So in 2020 March 2020 you can see that very clearly from the growth in March 2020 the pandemic hit and suddenly immediately the market cap of USDT went parabolic.

Why is that? You know we understood this you understood the reason of um this parabolic growth only two years ago. It's 2025. It happened 2020. But actually the dynamics that made it that made it happen were clear became clear to us only two years ago because we started studying.

We wanted to understand and what we discovered is that if you think you if you think about the emerging markets, you have two very common things. There is an higher percentage of youth. So there are more kids. population on average is younger. Second, they're still very digital.

So the kids from 2017 to 2020 were uh the ones that and being kids being more prone to change and technology were the ones in the emerging markets that learned about crypto. And when the pandemic hit in 2020, you had entire economies, entire countries suffering a lot. You had all nations suffered from the pandemic. Also rich nations. But of course, the poor nations suffered more.

And you know in these nations what parents were used to do was simply going out in the streets in the black market and buy cash dollars. Think about again Argentina, Turkey, Vietnam, Nigeria. So everyone to before stable coins to escape the inflation of their countries and the uh devaluation of their national currencies were just getting in the streets by cash dollar putting them under the matters. But guess what? During the pandemic is March 2020, if you try to go out in the streets, what happens?

You catch the virus. Everyone is panicking. You cannot go out. In many countries, you cannot go out from the house. So what do you do?

You talk to your kids. You talk about it. And your kids are saying are replying to you, well mom, well dad, I have a better version of the dollar. I can keep it on a smartphone. So that single thing triggered that enormous growth that you can see from 2020, from March 2020.

I believe that is very humbling because I didn't realize it immediately when it happened and is is humbling to see how a technology can actually change the lives of hundreds of millions of people. To to say this, I believe that um one other important feature of of money is that is the ultimate social network. Money is um a way for people to interact with each other to agree on things to establish trust and so realizing that money is the ultimate social network you know better form and worst form of money but is a way to think about it as the backbone of humanity. money is peer-to-peer allows and especially with blockchain money became or went back to be peer-to-peer. Most of the money that we had in the last 30 years before blockchain, before crypto, you know, money was uh pushed towards a centralization um like cloud in in internet.

But with blockchain technology and and the stable coins, we are successfully bringing back money to be peer-to-peer to be the fuel of that human interaction that is very important in society. These are some examples of of u uh use cases that USDT solved uh in Lebanon and uh in Brazil, in Argentina and all these countries that where I was talking about the the growth of um of our user base has been astonishing. Half a million um half a billion users, 500 million users. Um the crazy statistic we're going to see in the next slide is that USDT uh user base has been growing parabolic as well. Now is about word of mouth.

We have reinvested we are very lucky as a company. We're very pro profitable and we're invested most of our profits to expand this distribution network into the emerging markets. We have digital and physical distribution u means uh physical for example we own chains of hundreds of thousands uh of ATMs kiosks um bodeas in central South America in um and in Asia. We are building kiosks in Africa to provide local electricity through solar panels and rechargeable batteries to local communities. And on top of that all that economy that we are creating these villages in Africa and among these villages in Africa is settled in USDT.

So to protect them farther from so we give them energy but also a better form of money that what they're used to in their country. And so when I say money is a social network is money is actually what brings people together and allow them to also start creating interaction across all these villages and also globally. Right? So you bring through a stable coin through USDT. We are seeing that entire villages comes come come online and are now able to interact and um deal with the rest of the world into a global economy.

I think one interesting statistic is that USDT customer base or user base grows by 30 million new wallets per quarter. That's again why I say is almost like a social network because it's almost like it's growing at the pace of Facebook. Word of mouth, friends talking to their friends, explaining how important is to have access to your own wealth and keep control over your own wealth. Um, couple other statistics. Um, $174 billion in market cap.

It's all thank to you. Thank you very much for trusting us with uh um with this incredible number. We are very humbled. In 2014 when uh USDT was created, our most um hopeful uh statistics of growth were telling us that USDT would become between $100 million and $1 billion market cap. And now we're 174 billion.

And again, this is a testament of when you create a product that is very simple but solve a very life-changing use case, it just grows like a weed. 45 billion uh dollars in daily transfer volume on average. The other statistic that I like a lot is 35% of the USDT users are using USDT um actually of the USDT supply. So it's a huge number is using USDT as a savings account. Again, this speaks to the fact that not everyone is um so lucky to have a bank account, a credit card, a debit card, a cash app, zel, you name it.

Not everyone has that luxury. And actually half of the people of of the world don't have that luxury. you know some journalists um especially from um some media US media outlets attacked Tedar for for such a long time saying that we were servicing a niche. So we were not very serious people because you know sure you know we are not servicing the big wall street guys we are servicing a niche like three billion people half of the population of the world for these guys were a niche so you can feel the arrogance there um thank you [Applause] uh we are not a nation but if was a nation we would be the 18th largest holder of US treasuries. We have more than $130 billion in US treasuries.

Um 70 million transactions per day. Uh I think we have approached if not reached already 100 tons of gold of ownership. So we we are not a country but if we were a country would be top 35 in gold ownership. and as well we have more than 110,000 bitcoin um in um in our tetar group. To us we want tether to represent a story of stability not just stability as a company but stability for society.

Um the aim for tedar and you know a journalist asked me what uh how I can define tedar um in just few words and he suggested the stable coin company my answer was no it's the stable company so how we can through finance and technology we can bring stability to entire communities the world because I think that is what we did what we realized we did with USDT and I wish I could say oh we predicted everything from the beginning we did everything right? No, absolutely not. We make a lot of mistakes. We we didn't do everything perfectly from the beginning and still now we are making many mistakes. But I think is uh what I'm here today is trying to analyze with you what happened and again it's not because we were great.

It's simply because it happened because people needed that. is almost like the success of Tedar is directly proportional to the insuccess of many monetary policies that uh uh were chosen and implemented by many central banks in the emerging markets and unfortunately also now today in wealthier countries. So it's kind of an an hedge against the instability of the world. Um you can use USDT for many things from uh remittances um that is a cor the remittances corridor in USDT is growing um very fast. We already seen corridors where USD of remittancies uh for example between the United States and Turkey or between um UA and India where USDT is a sizable percentage of that market.

So tens of millions of dollars are being used every month to send money back home. Imagine you are a father of a family. You work far from your children and you work abroad. You need to send money to your family and you char we get charged between 10 and 25% from the remittances companies to send money back home. So you pay taxes plus you work one day a week for the remittances company.

How unfair is that? That does not make any sense. That should be changed and that is one of the things I'm most proud proud of in US. We are completely changing that incentive scheme where the incentive should be able the incent the real incentive is allow people to interact with each other as a social network allowing fathers and mothers to send money back home to sustain their families so that we bring up everyone together. Thank you.

It's a savings tool. As I said, 35% of all the USDT users uh and supply is about uh savings for all the people that don't have access to saving accounts um and banking. Uh online commerce is growing as well. Um the gig economy is growing as a huge case very very strong. Um crossber payments again we see enormous amount of US used as a as a tool to settle invoice internationally.

Um trade finance is something that is uh also growing. We see um commodity trading firms using USDT more and more daily to send money uh to buy oil, gold and all the other commodities. The reason is that if you are a commodity trading firm uh the the way you make money is to optimizing your balance sheet and turn it around as many times as possible. If you have to wait seven days for sending money from you know I don't know Germany to uh a country in Africa then of course you can auto optimize your balance sheet at the same time you are not uh helping the global economy to scale. So USDT is growing by the tens of billions of dollars per day in volume into in um in trade finance.

There are gazillion other different use cases. Uh now I want to use the last minute before I get kicked out here to talk about the expansion in the United States because I think that uh um it's all about you know keeping this innovation pace. Um I think being the creators of the stable coin industry we should continue to innovate and think about how to perfect what we created and adapt it to the different use cases in different jurisdictions. So I don't know if we are going to see a video or not.

In 2014, Tether created something the world had never seen. The first stable coin, a digital dollar. For the first time, millions gained fast borderless access to dollars. Not through banks, but through code. USDT changed the way money moves 24/7 without friction, without permission.

Now we're bringing that same invention home to the US. To the builders, the creators, the earners, those who've been left behind for far too long. Meet USA, the stable coin made for Americans. Fast, stable, and backed one to one with liquid and stable reserves. Because Tether didn't just invent stable coins.

We built a system to put dollars in your hands instantly and in your control. Tether powering dollars for the next generation.

Thank you. So when the genius act passed um and this is also thanks to Bohines I think is here in the room somewhere but um and a huge unlock happened and now we are seeing hundreds and hundreds of companies willing to launch stable coins coins be interest to launch stable coins and we are very happy we don't fear competition we embrace competition we believe at uh creating use cases and empowering people through new technologies is the only way to go. So I thank you very much for your time today for listening to me. I hope that was interesting and uh see you soon. Thank you.