Tether CEO: Building open-source underlying infrastructure to achieve financial inclusion

Organized by Jinse Finance

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino delivered a speech at the 2026 Las Vegas Bitcoin Conference. In his speech, Paolo Ardoino introduced The Resilience Stack, newly released by Tether, integrating its peer-to-peer communications protocol HolePunch, decentralized communications app Keet, open-source self-custody wallet toolkit WDK, and a local AI development platform QVAC into a unified infrastructure system for people who cannot access basic financial and communications services. Among them, Keet had not been open-sourced previously; Ardoino officially pledged to push for open source, and the relevant documentation and modules are being prepared. Additionally, Paolo Ardoino stated that Tether has launched a Bitcoin faucet (BTC Faucet). After users download the Tether wallet app, they can reply as required to the post on Tether Wallet to instantly receive a small amount of Bitcoin via the Lightning Network.

In this speech, Paolo Ardoino used psychohistory—the theory from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series—as the core opening metaphor to explain that Tether’s underlying mission is not only to issue the USDT stablecoin and hold Bitcoin long term, but also to address today’s global societal chaos, systemic turmoil, inflation, financial exclusion, and power monopolies—this “global dark crisis”—by building a long-term technological system to enhance social resilience and narrow the development gap.

Paolo Ardoino pointed out that multiple real-world crises have already emerged around the world: power supply instability affects hundreds of millions of people, large numbers of people are excluded from traditional financial systems, and big enterprises and institutions monopolize technology to exploit users unilaterally. Society is falling into a slow and continuous loss of stability. Meanwhile, nearly half of the population cannot access basic financial services, and the rapid development of AI technology will further widen the global wealth and digital capability gap, aggravating social division. Paolo Ardoino stated that the core of combating systemic decline is not short-term resistance, but building long-lasting, decentralized, censorship-resistant foundational infrastructure—and this is the core intent behind Tether’s creation of The Resilience Stack.

Paolo Ardoino stated that, around The Resilience Stack, Tether is rolling out an end-to-end open-source technology ecosystem, building a decentralized system layer by layer: at the bottom is the HolePunch peer-to-peer communications protocol—no central servers, resistant to censorship/blocking, highly scalable, reshaping decentralized network transmission capabilities; on top of that is the censorship-resistant instant messaging app Keet, enabling secure and private global communications, which will be fully open-sourced later; relying on the open-source wallet library WDK, it promotes self-custody wallets, adapting to the Bitcoin peer-to-peer payment needs of ordinary people, smart devices, and AI Agnet, providing solutions for high-frequency microtransactions in the era of ubiquitous connectivity; at the top layer, QVAC is deployed as a local decentralized AI tool, safeguarding user data privacy, adapted for low-spec devices and use in remote areas, and putting into practice the philosophy “AI that isn’t yours isn’t your intelligence.”

In addition, Paolo Ardoino also stated that Tether has a large global user base, covering 160 countries with more than 573 million users. Its ecosystem scale is growing rapidly, and it continues to increase investment in open-source development, with more than a thousand open-source projects already launched. Tether plans to attract developers worldwide through funding support, hackathons, and other methods to help co-build the ecosystem. In his speech, Paolo Ardoino emphasized that Tether’s long-term vision is to rely on an integrated open-source technology stack combining communications, finance, and decentralized AI; break corporate and institutional monopolies; achieve financial inclusion, free communications, and controllable privacy; and rely on the public and decentralized technologies to build stable order—offsetting potential global risks and completing long-term repair and innovation at the societal level.

The following is the full transcript of Paolo Ardoino’s speech, compiled by Jinse Finance (with assistance from Deepseek).

I’m very happy to be here again this year. Why are we showing this video? I want to do my best to explain how we think about Tether. Tether is a very well-known stablecoin company that issues USDT, and it is a buyer of Bitcoin. We hold more than 130,000, 140,000 Bitcoin. We’ve been buying. Right now, we’ve launched a Bitcoin faucet. If you go on Twitter and Tether has a BTC account, you can use your Tether.me email address (which you get when downloading the Tether wallet app). Just operate it, and reply to the requirements in the post on Tether Wallet—you will directly receive a small amount of Bitcoin into your wallet for free immediately. Yes, we do all these things, but I want to explain to you why Tether is far more than this. The best way I can think of is to draw inspiration from Isaac Asimov—he is my favorite writer in history. If you’ve read Asimov’s Foundation series, there’s a person, a mathematician, named Hari Seldon, who created a theory called psychohistory.

Psychohistory is a theory—a combination of mathematics, statistics, physics, sociology, and political science. It is a complete science used to understand how human beings and society will transform, shape, and change over hundreds of years, thousands of years, and millions of years. This is an excerpt from the book. We use this to express—just as Asimov described it so brilliantly in the book—that you can use science to predict and analyze what is happening in the universe, and predict the outcomes; and while predicting those outcomes, you should also try to think about how to use the same science to steer things—to push them in different directions, to change the course of societal decline, and to change the potential darkness that may befall all of us. As in the book, Asimov describes this Hari Seldon prediction: after the Empire (the galaxy’s most powerful empire) has existed for 10,000 years, something will happen—an upheaval will occur—followed by 10,000 years of darkness. He also predicts that by using psychohistory, the darkness can be shortened to just a few hundred years.

Why am I telling you this? Why am I bringing up these doomsday discussions at a Bitcoin conference? I believe** my way of thinking about Bitcoin is that it’s the beginning of a technology and a new social structure**, creating a new spark. This spark will survive and resist any darkness because it is designed to be peer-to-peer. It is created by the people—created by the people who use it—and created by the people in every corner of the world who accept it. So if we believe this is indeed the case, and if we believe that Bitcoin is indeed the first element in the potential struggle to resist the coming darkness, what can we learn from it? First, when I think about what Seldon was trying to convey through his psychohistory science, is this just science fiction? Is it only something that happens in books? Then I think the darkness described in Asimov’s books can actually be traced back to Earth, because the darkness in those stories is just chaos and instability in society. You might have heard me say last year that for us—internally, we call it the “stable company”—Tether is a company meant to bring stability to society. In Asimov’s books, Seldon tried to use psychohistory science to solve and reduce the darkness from 10,000 years down to a few hundred. And at Tether, we believe the darkness that is coming in society is right there—we see war, we see inflation, we see national currencies destroyed, we see instability, we see all the signals indicating that our so-called darkness is about to arrive. The world may not be heading toward something better—more chaos, more instability. So I want to use this video to explain how, starting from the universe and science fiction, we can actually trace it back to what is happening on Earth.

Let me continue to the next part. This is a story that not only predicts the future, but also identifies the present. Right now, 700 million people live with intermittent power. They are already in darkness. Generations of families that farmed to sustain their communities are abandoned overnight, because the system deems them economically unviable. In one of the oldest democracies on Earth, people are arrested not for violence, but for speech—because of a meme. Some lessons from governments are already very clear: they don’t need to make us silent; they just need to make sure we can’t pay rent. In the most powerful countries, companies are building machines—not to serve the people, but to exploit them. Darkness does not arrive with an explosion; it arrives with a slow dimming.

So again, coming back from space sci-fi to Earth. The decades-long dark period described in the book—when reduced back to Earth—means society becomes more unstable and unpredictable. Hundreds of millions—actually billions—cannot access basic financial services. They cannot get electricity, cannot get stable telecom services. More importantly, they cannot get—nor will they get—basic intelligent services. Think about it: 4 billion people around the world cannot access basic financial services. They have been abandoned by traditional financial systems. How can we believe that excluding half the world’s population will bring more stability to society? That’s the analogy we are trying to draw from the inspiration of psychohistory: if we don’t do anything about it—if we don’t attempt to build something different using science, technology, and our capabilities—something that can last longer than the darkness, something that can reduce darkness by creating points of light in countries, in cities, and among populations—something that can connect people (no matter where they are) and make them resilient to changes in the world—then that will be the darkness here on Earth.

But you know, with so many words, what does it mean? What is Tether planning to do about it? Let’s keep going.

Seldon understood what most people miss: you don’t fight darkness by winning a battle; you fight it by building systems that can outlast it. That’s what we’re doing. A foundation—real infrastructure—we call The Resilience Stack. This is our answer. The Resilience Stack is an open-source technology stack—like the case of psychohistory—it’s a scientific method for analyzing different problems we see across all operating countries. Remember, Tether operates in hundreds of countries, across 160 different nations. We have teams on the ground. We talk to people. We have a network of 573 million users using USDT, Tether Gold, and all the other services we provide—and that network is still growing. Our network adds 34 million new wallets every quarter. This is unprecedented. This scale proves that the technology we’re building is growing at the speed of social networks. It’s no longer just a fintech company, no longer just a stablecoin. It’s actually becoming a movement—a technology stack that is becoming part of the world’s structure. Part of a world where parents are abandoned by traditional finance, where their ability to communicate safely with their children is lost, and where their homes might not even have electricity. Imagine such a world: half of the world’s population cannot access basic financial services, and they won’t participate in a 100x boost in intelligence brought by AI. If the gaps between society are already so large because of financial inclusion, imagine what will happen when AI truly becomes part of everyone’s lives. This gap—already splitting the world’s two halves of population—will be amplified a hundredfold by AI. The Resilience Stack is our response to this problem. What exactly are the concrete, practical things? What is the real technology? As in the psychohistory case, we can use, build, and apply it to reduce the dark period—from hundreds of years or dozens of years down to just a few years—and create these sparks across society. That way, no matter what happens—no matter how dystopian the future is, no matter the disasters, no matter the pandemics, no matter what— we can still connect. We can trade together with Bitcoin. We can use AI services that serve us, not just a few big companies.

All of this converges into a single story, a single stack. You should take a look at Tether’s GitHub—the open-source code repository. I believe we’ve already passed 1,000 open-source projects there. That’s very unique. It shows that we genuinely care about building something more enduring than our company, because software technology needs to be resilient to its creators as well. That’s also one reason I like Bitcoin: it’s more durable than its creator and will last forever. Of course, we will always remember Satoshi. We are all Satoshi. But that’s the beauty of technology. It means that when a technology is done well, anyone can use it, regardless of who created it. Everyone is essentially that technology’s father.

Let’s look at the very bottom layer—the first part. A peer-to-peer protocol that doesn’t require servers, and doesn’t require any central entity to maintain. We built HolePunch, a fully peer-to-peer telecommunications protocol that can scale to billions of users, billions of machines, and trillions of AI agents. For those of you who are more technical, it’s like the BitTorrent protocol built about 30 years ago—rewritten from scratch, improved, and with added encryption layers—making it highly scalable and adaptive. It’s not only for file sharing, but for any real-time data streams, like video calls, messaging, map rendering, and more. It is completely open source. Everyone should take a look at it, because the HolePunch protocol is the first to allow any developer to build applications that can scale to billions of people and hundreds of thousands of companies without any single central server. On top of that, we’ve already demonstrated—later we’ll see—that we have the capacity to provide truly scalable services for all humanity with no single point of failure. You can build any application on top of it. You can build peer-to-peer Uber, peer-to-peer map systems—you can build anything you want. It’s free. It’s one of the most complex yet easy-to-use software and network stacks, capable of empowering whatever you build for your company, for yourself, for your family, and for friends—in incredible ways. To me, it’s like Bitcoin is to finance. HolePunch is to networks and telecommunications, just as Bitcoin is to finance. On top of that are communications that cannot be suppressed or shut down.

On top of the HolePunch protocol and stack, we built Keet. I’m not sure how many of you have used Keet. It’s an example of a messaging app. It currently has more than 5 million users on desktop and mobile—possibly more, because it’s hard to track given that there is no central server. There are millions of users and chat rooms with tens of thousands of members sharing tens of millions of messages, videos, photos, and more—without any central server. Keet is the first messaging app that can scale to 8 billion people and eventually to machines, with no cost, because it has no data centers. It cannot be blocked. It works anywhere—even under the strictest, most tightly controlled types of internet. We built this for the people. We built this for fathers who want a reliable, secure way to talk to their children; and we also built it for those who work and live in potentially dystopian or authoritarian regions. This is truly the first unstoppable communications app. I want to say one thing. One of the main criticisms of the Keet app has always been: why isn’t it open source? I can assure you—I pledge to open-source it. We are working on all the documentation and all the modules, so that once it is open-sourced, everyone can access it and improve it, build on it, and change it—just by a simple step, you can recreate it. This is an example. This is huge work done by the Tether team to open-source it. We do it wholeheartedly, because we believe that if people can’t talk to each other, if people can’t send messages peer-to-peer—just like society was born—society was born through peer-to-peer communications. We meet on the streets. We meet in city squares. We talk to each other without any intermediaries. Over the past 50 years, intermediaries have taken over the world of finance and communications. That’s why society is in its darkest moment: because we were supposed to use technology to create a more open society, but instead we hijacked technology, allowing a small number of companies to tightly control society. So Keet—and Keet’s open-source—will be one of the most important moments for us. It will be one of the biggest proofs of our dedication to this mission.

Then comes financial tools, driven by WDK, serving humans, machines, and the agents in between, to integrate unstoppable Bitcoin payments. WDK is one of our most successful products. It is an open-source library that allows any developer, any person, any computer, any AI agent to have a self-custody wallet. We believe that in the future, billions of people, billions of machines, and trillions of AI agents will need a self-custody wallet. People need to control their own wealth. They need to be able to transact with whoever they want. So we want to create something everyone can use, supporting any asset, but most importantly supporting Bitcoin. From a purely physics perspective—technology is physics—purely from a technical-physics standpoint, we know the best way to scale future payment demands is that, as AI agents become ubiquitous, trillions of payments will be needed every day, and the current financial transmission layer will not be able to handle it. Technologies like the Lightning Network are the right direction, because the Lightning Network is Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer transaction layer. I’m glad that WDK supports this from the beginning. We want to ensure that your smart refrigerator, smart car, and smartphone can transact in Bitcoin, while protecting your Bitcoin and ensuring it always belongs to you.

At the very top is decentralized AI. Because if it’s not your AI, then it’s not your intelligence. The last part is QVAC. We just released the QVAC SDK, an open-source software development kit that allows anyone to build AI tools that run locally on your smartphone, on your device, and on your laptop—thereby ensuring your privacy. It supports all the best open-source large language models. It can scale from your smallest GPU to your laptop, smartphone, and all the way up to large servers. It embeds the HolePunch protocol, embeds WDK, and embeds everything we saw earlier. Because we drew inspiration from “not your keys, not your coins”—we all know what that means for Bitcoin—we replicated the same concept. We understand that if it’s not your AI, then it’s not your intelligence. We are driven—these days, these weeks, these years—by the belief that AI is one of the most fundamental transformative technologies for society and humanity. But again, if we don’t build AI toolsets that cover the needs of that part of the population—the human beings who lack access to basic financial services—if we pretend that those who can’t afford OpenAI or Anthropic subscription fees are also the ones who can be left behind, then they can’t be left behind. They need tools that can work on their small smartphones—tools that can work in the most remote smallest villages in Africa, in central South America, or in Southeast Asia. We want Tether to build a coherent story—from telecommunications to messaging, from wallets to self-custody wallets, and then to AI—creating a complete, unique, fully open-source stack that empowers the people, not companies, not enterprises, but just the people. Because in the end, going back to the science fiction story: the people will rebuild the universe, the people will rebuild society—or rather, save society on Earth. The people will make society on Earth more stable, without having to look at light-years of distance beyond our solar system.

So I recommend, and I encourage, each and every one of you to take a look at what we’re building. Contribute. Once again, all of this is fully open source on the Tether website. Soon, we will release funding so that everyone can contribute to this technology and build on top of it. We will host hackathons. We will do everything we can to help people own what we build, take pride in contributing, and ensure this technology remains resilient even in the face of divine wrath.

Thank you very much. Enjoy the conference.