Paolo Ardoino says he is a simple man. He visited the U.S. for the first time this month, and took delight in New York’s Central Park Zoo and seeing the Empire State Building, which made him recall the Ghostbusters movie of his childhood. Ardoino says he feels at home here and that he wants to use his company, Tether, to help America stay on top.
It’s a lovely sentiment. But Tether is no ordinary firm, and not everyone is sure it has the best interests of the U.S. at heart. That’s because Tether’s business involves amassing billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. Treasury bills to issue USDT—a type of cryptocurrency known as a stablecoin that is backed one to one with U.S. dollars. Critics of Tether, which is headquartered in El Salvador and has in the past been lax when it comes to anti-money-laundering measures, worry the company and its hoard of T-bills could one day pose a financial or geopolitical threat.
Ardoino says such fears are unfounded. In a recent interview with Fortune, he made the case that Tether’s dollar-backed USDT is, in fact, a strategic asset that will help the U.S. preserve the greenback’s dominance in markets like Africa and South America, where China is flexing influence. He also provided an update on a long-delayed audit, addressed growing competition in the stablecoin market—and reminisced about tasting the tomatoes and olive oil on his parents’ farm.
‘Only Tether’ can stop de-dollarization
Ardoino is handsome with intense blue eyes, and he speaks with a musical accent from the Savona region of northern Italy. He is in good spirits when we chat. Perhaps he is feeling upbeat from his recent sightseeing—or maybe he’s just basking in Tether’s recent good fortune. Last year, the firm reported an eye-popping $20 billion in profits, and its prospects have only grown brighter thanks to the arrival of a pro-crypto U.S. president who tapped a key Tether ally to be his commerce secretary.
There is no denying Tether is a massively successful company. But it is also a controversial one: USDT’s popularity with South Asian criminal gangs made Tether and its executive the prime villains in a recent anti-crypto book by a Bloomberg journalist. Ardoino, though, says such concerns are outdated, and points out that Tether now closely collaborates with U.S. law enforcement.
Even if concerns of Tether and money laundering are overblown, the company faces other existential questions about its future. Specifically, will U.S. officials grow uncomfortable with a loosely regulated foreign firm making huge profits by issuing a synthetic version of the dollar? Or could they come to regard Tether’s massive hoard of Treasuries—the company bought more T-bills last year than all but six countries—as a threat since the company could dump them on the market anytime?
Ardoino doesn’t see it this way. He points out that Tether would never dump Treasuries since that would risk breaking USDT’s one-to-one peg with the dollar that is critical to its success. More boldly, he makes the case that Tether is helping U.S. interests since the adoption of USDT decentralizes ownership of the dollar—a good thing when it comes to preserving its role as a global reserve currency.
Ardoino notes that billions of USDT are held by the likes of taxi drivers in Nigeria or small business owners in Argentina—all of whom have a vested interest in the ongoing viability of the dollar. Tether, in this view, is a source of soft power for Uncle Sam.
“We are actually the last stronghold for U.S. dollar hegemony out there,” says Ardoino. “If you go to Africa, if you go to central South America, you don’t see the U.S. there. You see a lot of libraries and schools and highways built by China.”
He adds that China and others are actively challenging the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency—a status that lets the U.S. borrow cheaply and that gives it massive influence over the global financial system. Ardoino cites the proposal by BRICS countries late last year (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) to launch a combined currency to displace the dollar.
That proposal has so far sputtered, but Ardoino notes that China is now pushing a related initiative to circulate a gold-backed currency to undermine the greenback. In this context, he says, Tether can be a force for dollar diplomacy—and he may have a point at a time when the U.S. is forsaking aid, trade, and other traditional forms of soft power.
“If there is a huge push for de-dollarization in the emerging markets, there is only Tether that is pushing out there, that is building infrastructure to prevent that,” notes Ardoino.
It’s a compelling argument, but also one that should be taken with a grain of salt. Steven Kelly, associate director of research at the Yale Program on Financial Stability, says that Tether and other stablecoins, which have a total market cap of around $237 billion, are just not big enough to have a profound influence on U.S. policy one way or the other.
“JPMorgan could buy the entire stablecoin system by lunch tomorrow, and it would be a rounding error on its balance sheet,” said Kelly, adding that the dollar’s central role in the global oil and banking industry is far more important to U.S. influence than stablecoins. He also questioned whether an entity like Tether, whose lack of transparency has long made it an object of suspicion, is a fit ambassador for U.S. currency.
Still, Kelly acknowledged that U.S. policymakers should prepare for a world where stablecoins mushroom in popularity and move to put appropriate guardrails in place—including by requiring stablecoin issuers to park their reserves on U.S. soil, and subject themselves to a proper audit. These safeguards are among the measures being contemplated by Congress, which is expected to advance a closely watched stablecoin bill later this month.
Competition and an overdue audit
Under the Biden administration, U.S. regulators viewed crypto much like cigarettes or a noxious pollutant, and sought to stamp it out. Now, in a dramatic reversal, crypto has become a pet industry of Trump and his Republican allies in Congress, and Tether is set to benefit—provided it can come under the emerging U.S. regulatory umbrella.
And that raises the question of an audit. For years, Tether has sought to demonstrate its financial bona fides with “attestations,” but failed to produce a full-blown audit by a Big Four accounting firm—a measure that is the gold standard when it comes to corporate trust and transparency.
Ardoino argues this is not for lack of trying. During the Biden administration, he says, powerful crypto opponents like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) pressured the Big Four not to do business with firms like Tether. Now, though, the company says it has signed an engagement letter with one of the big accounting firms (he declined to say which one) and has hired a CFO it says has navigated complex audits in the past.
At a time when Tether’s prime competitor, Circle, is moving to go public, producing an audit is likely to be crucial to gaining trust with U.S. regulators and others. For now, though, Tether is more dominant than it’s ever been. Its stablecoin market share of $147 billion is more than double Circle’s $60 billion, while no other competitors have more than $6 billion.
Circle, though, is closely aligned with Coinbase, which shares in its revenue, and has huge clout on Capitol Hill—giving it a potential inside track when it comes to lobbying on the impending stablecoin bill, and freezing Tether out of the U.S. market.
Ardoino, though, says this is not a big concern for Tether since its core customers have always been in developing markets. He adds that his company is also better positioned for the long term since it is less exposed to pressure, which is growing on stablecoin issuers in the U.S. and Europe, to share yields on reserves with customers.
Meanwhile, he says, Tether is also developing other business lines for USDT beyond simply collecting interest. Those include building solar-powered kiosks in Africa, where customers pay a few stablecoins each month to rent batteries—part of a larger technology empire Ardoino dreams of building.
“We can build the best telecommunication network that is truly unstoppable and resistant to an asteroid or the apocalypse,” he says. “I want to build artificial intelligence that will not steal people’s data and will not kill humans.”
‘The tastiest tomatoes you can imagine’
Ardoino says he is a simple man, but this is hard to reconcile with his professed goal of expanding Tether’s stablecoin empire to AI, telecommunications, and media. What does he want exactly? I put this to him directly.
Ardoino says there is no contradiction between his world-spanning ambitions and his personal view of life. For him, it comes to his love for tech (“I am very humble usually, but when it comes to technology, I have a very, very good perspective”) and the lessons he learned on his family farm.
The Tether CEO is famous for his work ethic even in a crypto industry defined by workaholics, but he says his toil pales in comparison to what he saw from his parents and grandparents. He is also nostalgic for the flavors of home.
“My grandparents were growing the tastiest tomatoes that you could even imagine, and the rosemary and the sage, and then there is the olive oil that my family makes … If you could taste that olive oil, it’s the end,” he says wistfully.
It’s a poignant story—the CEO of a powerful financial company who wants to bequeath a set of helpful technologies to humanity and then unwind with the culinary delights of Italy. Time will tell if the story becomes truth or fiction.
