Compiled by | Odaily Planet Daily ( @OdailyChina )
Translator | Ethan ( @ethanzhang_web3 )
Translators note: At the Bitcoin 2025 conference, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino s speech may not be as data bombarded or concept-crazed as traditional Web3 executives, but it was unexpectedly real, vivid, and even a bit of black humor. He compared Bitcoin to his childhood idol Wukong, called gold Bitcoin in nature, complained about API keys, emphasized the aesthetics of peer-to-peer architecture, and threw out a sentence: We are one of the largest Bitcoin miners in the world. This time, Paolo Ardoinos keynote speech was more of an expression of technological belief than a company roadshow - Tether is trying to expand the boundaries of stablecoins into a set of decentralized infrastructure systems, including currency (USDT), value anchoring (BTC), communication (Keet), smart platform (KUBA), and even the way identity and sovereignty are built.
Finally, it is appropriate to end with a quote from him: The cloud is not our friend. Bitcoin is.
Note: When translating this speech, we tried our best to retain its first-person perspective and original sense of language, and at the same time, we made appropriate polishing and adjustments to some sentences with reference to the original English manuscript.
The following is the full text of Paolo Ardoino’s speech:
Its really exciting to support Bitcoin. I like it very much. Please pay more attention to it.
I want to start my speech today with this picture. This is my favorite picture. It shows how I feel about Bitcoin: Bitcoin is like Goku. I was born in the 80s, Dragon Ball is part of my childhood memory, and Bitcoin is that powerful partner. And Tether is like another friend on the journey - the power may not be as strong, but it is always reliable and important.
Tether started from nothing in 2014 and created the worlds first stablecoin, USDT. We have been working hard to create products that people really need. I just updated a slide because this morning, our assets just exceeded $153 billion. This is a development that we did not expect when we prepared the slide two days ago.
I want to talk about a moment that made me feel very emotional, which was the moment when the epidemic broke out. Before that, Tether was mainly used as a medium for cryptocurrency transactions. But since the beginning of the epidemic, it has quickly transformed into a digital dollar used by hundreds of millions of people around the world and has become a part of their lives.
What’s more, as of 2022, we don’t even have a formal marketing team. So I can’t say that this growth is achieved by “good operations” or “smart advertising”. The fact is: when you create a product that people really need, it will grow naturally and spread naturally through word of mouth.
Some data that may be of interest to you: Last year we achieved a profit of $13 billion. We currently hold more than $120 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds. In addition, we have also begun to invest heavily in Bitcoin. As a company, we already own more than 100,000 Bitcoins.
We also hold about 50 tons of gold. Yes, I know that many Bitcoin supporters dont like gold very much, and are even reluctant to talk about it, as if gold will threaten the status of Bitcoin. But I dont think so. Bitcoin is perfect, while gold is imperfect. It does not compete with Bitcoin, it competes with fiat currency.
I personally think that gold can almost be regarded as the original Bitcoin in nature. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is the digital gold we created. We have about 420 million users in emerging markets and developing countries around the world, accounting for 62% of decentralized trading volume. More importantly, about 35% of USDT users use it as a savings account - because they live in countries like Turkey, Argentina, and Vietnam, where the local currency is depreciating at an alarming rate, they can only choose to save in US dollars, and USDT is their most realistic choice.
How do I view Tether? I see it as a company that stands in stark contrast to traditional tech companies and financial institutions. Financial and big tech companies often rely on layers of intermediaries: financial intermediaries take fees from every transaction we make, and tech giants control our data. This is essentially the same thing: we lose sovereignty over both money and data.
Tether’s goal is to use technology to provide tools to help people get rid of these intermediaries and achieve true individual sovereignty.
We are a company born out of Bitcoin. Everyone in the company loves Bitcoin. We are based in the country of Bitcoin, El Salvador. This country has been plagued by gangs and violence for 20 years, and now has achieved a transformation under the courageous leadership of the president. Politicians can really make a difference, and we are seeing a similar transformation in the United States: more and more politicians are beginning to understand the importance of Bitcoin to the country and the world.
One thing we are proud of is that we not only buy Bitcoin, we also mine it ourselves. Yes, by the end of this year, we may be the largest Bitcoin miner in the world - more than any public company.
Many people will ask: You already hold so many Bitcoins, why do you still need to mine? The answer is: Bitcoin mining is a means of hedging our own assets. We are not only Bitcoin holders, but also participants in network security. We use our own computing power to protect the security of this network.
We are also promoting infrastructure construction, such as launching WDK (Wallet Development Kit) to help every company, application, website, and AI Agent access non-custodial Bitcoin wallets. I don’t think that future AI Agents should access custodial services through APIs, but should have their own independent wallets, be given assets, perform tasks for humans, and not be restricted by the rules of a certain company.
We recently launched our own AI platform, KUBA, inspired by Asimovs 1956 short story The Last Question. The question we want to answer is: How to reverse the entropy of the universe? This platform focuses on local reasoning and is compatible with any device: from a $30 Android phone in Africa to a high-performance server. The AI we want to create is decentralized and serves society, rather than a tool to extract user data and make profits for enterprises.
We have also invested in the Plan B network and are its biggest supporter. Although Plan B has a different meaning in the United States (laughs), we have given it a new meaning: when Plan A fails, everyone should have their own Plan B - the ability to have monetary sovereignty and communication technology sovereignty.
We also work with universities around the world through the Tether Education Program to popularize Bitcoin education; invest in the BTC Pay Server open source project to promote Bitcoin payment infrastructure; cooperate with the city of Lugano, Switzerland to host the Plan B Summit and sponsor the local football club to bring the Bitcoin brand to European stadiums; and we have teamed up with Fulgur to create a venture capital fund to invest in Bitcoin startups.
We are working with video platform Rumble, who have invested $775 million and have their own Bitcoin vault. We will launch a Bitcoin-centric wallet product to make it easy for more people to get started.
In addition, we have developed a peer-to-peer communication application, Keet. It is still in the alpha testing stage, but it already supports peer-to-peer distribution of high-frequency voice, text, video, files and other content, without a central server. We want to prove that the cloud is not our friend, it is just an illusion imposed on us and a tool to squeeze our data.
Finally, thank you very much. I know I have been speaking for a long time, but I am honored to be here, in the United States, and share this with my colleagues. Together, we will work hard for the future of Bitcoin.
Thank you everyone!
