Paolo Ardoino has had quite a run. As CEO of Tether, he has helped the world’s biggest stablecoin issuer grow to a market cap of nearly $139 billion, and become a profits machine. On Friday, Tether announced a staggering $13.7 billion in profit for the year 2024 and a global user base of 400 million users.
I sat down with Ardoino shortly after the announcement to ask about Tether’s recent strategic decisions, including the establishment of a headquarters in El Salvador. He also explained his ambitious plans for new product launches and focus on real-world applications of blockchain technology.
The conversation underscored Ardroino’s belief that Tether—even as it works to overcome longstanding questions about transparency and governance—wants to not only maintain its position as the leading stablecoin, but also to expand its social and political influence. The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Anna Tutova: Why did you select El Salvador as your headquarters?
Paolo Ardoino: El Salvador is a great country. We started coming here in 2021. We saw the country before the activity that the President did in order to make it more secure.
In 2021 El Salvador was considered the murder capital of the world. And in 2022, the President decided to give a new life to his own citizens, bringing stability, peace, security, removing the gang members, putting them in jail, making the country very secure.
Now it’s considered the safest country in the Americas and one of the safest countries in the world. This shows that if you have the right politician that cares about the country, his own population, he can make wonders, he can actually change the status quo, he can change history. And I believe that El Salvador is going through a renaissance moment, so we are just excited to be part of this new chapter of the country. Look, I’m a citizen now here as well, but I’m Italian and I wish we had such great politicians in Italy.
AT: El Salvador, as part of a recent loan package with the IMF, had to rescind its designation of Bitcoin as legal tender, meaning merchants no longer have to accept it. What do you think about this shift?
PA: So I think given the philosophy of Bitcoin, it should never be pushed down the throat of people. It should have been optional from the beginning. But most importantly, the country is buying Bitcoin every single day with their treasury so while they reach an agreement with the IMF, the commitment of the country to Bitcoin is not changing, they are doubling down on education and crypto payment infrastructure.
We don’t want Bitcoiners to be equal to the fiat maximalists that are forcing fiat to everyone and forcing acceptance of fiat to everyone. We want Bitcoin to be optional, to be chosen because it’s the best way to pay, not because it’s the forced way to pay.
AT: The United States now has a pro-crypto President Trump. How do you see the development of crypto regulation there now? Will Tether consider expanding its presence in the U.S.?
PA: So, the U.S. is going to be a very interesting development. With USDT we don’t have at this moment plans to enter the US, but we definitely are planning to meet the requirements, if any, that will be included in the upcoming stablecoin legislation.
We believe that the US is going to be very, very important mostly as a jurisdiction that all the other countries are looking at. The previous administration was kind of against it but now it was made very clear from the new administration that crypto and artificial intelligence are high priorities for the country.
So while we don’t plan to enter the US at this moment, we believe that this clarity at the level of regulation, legislation and support from the administration is very important and will also allow the adoption of USDT outside the US at a much faster and higher rate.
AT: Why don’t you have plans to expand in the U.S.? Is it because of the current regulations?
PA: Not really. I think that every company needs to pick its own battles. There are 1.3 billion people in the world that don’t have bank accounts, they are called unbanked. They are not bad people, but they are just too poor of interest to banks.
The U.S. is a market that has 20-30 payment ways that you can pay with: PayPal, cash, bank wires, credit card, debit cards, you name it. So there is an incredible competition. And outside the U.S. it’s very difficult to pay in dollars, and everyone wants U.S. dollars. So anytime you build a company, you have to think about who your audience is and which battles you should pick.
AT: Getting back to El Salvador, can you tell how you see the crypto ecosystem here?
PA: I think that we are going to see a growth in the crypto ecosystem, a very rapid one in the next few years. Especially our move here to El Salvador raised a lot of excitement. We are going to build a tower, a very tall tower, probably 70 floors, the biggest tower in El Salvador and one of the biggest and highest in the region.
So that tower will be filled by great companies that will want to make El Salvaldor and Latin America great. Sometimes you just need one company that takes the first steps and then it gives the courage to everyone else to follow.
AT: You deployed over $1 billion dollars last year into AI, BCI(brain computer interface), Bitcoin mining, as well even agriculture and food company Adecoagro. Can you say more about that?
PA: I think that it’s important as a company to build technology and build an ecosystem that is very resilient. Tether is as also an educational company, so all these things that we are doing: artificial intelligence, we are building AI software, AI platforms and AI applications that we are going to release next few months but most importantly we are going to open source a lot of it because we want to educate people on the importance of keeping their personal information.
Everyone is giving their most private personal information to ChatGPT, and that is a cloud company that is reusing that information for their own purposes. So we are building all these tools. While they might seem scattered from the outside, they have their part of the same story: how to make people more resilient, how to make people more independent and how we can empower people.
AT: You mentioned plans to invest half of Tether’s profits this year. What are the industries you plan to invest in, and what’s your decision-making process?
PA: I prefer to invest in real-world projects like artificial intelligence, not necessarily related to crypto. Honestly, I think that there are so many opportunities in the real world and I think the success of crypto is actually in the real world.
I much prefer to focus on building, using the technological rails that we learn from, using blockchain: for example, to track food, to track land ownership and all these types of things, rather than launching memecoins. So that is where I see the biggest utility for humanity.
AT: You mentioned the launch of your AI platform, so can you tell more about this and what features can users anticipate?
PA: I wanted to create a platform that would empower the people. So we’re going to open source soon what we call an AI SDK, a software development kit, that works on mobile phones, laptops, servers, mainframes, and allows every developer to build privacy-oriented AI and also peer-to-peer AI.
It’s basically the decentralization for AI done properly without any blockchain or scammy tokens, where every single developer can decide what to build, they will own the code, but people that run the applications can keep control over their own data. We are creating AI that can run locally on your devices to keep everything about yourself.
