Tether CEO：Tether为什么要打造The Resilience Stack

Summary: Golden Finance

On April 28th, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino delivered a speech at the 2026 Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas. In his speech, Ardoino introduced The Resilience Stack, recently released by Tether, which integrates its peer-to-peer communication protocol HolePunch, decentralized messaging app Keet, open-source self-custody wallet toolkit WDK, and local AI development platform QVAC into a foundational infrastructure system aimed at populations lacking basic financial and communication services. Notably, Keet was previously not open source; Ardoino officially committed to promoting open source, with relevant documentation and modules in preparation. Additionally, Paolo Ardoino announced that Tether has launched a Bitcoin faucet, where users can download the Tether Wallet app, reply to the tweet as instructed, and instantly receive a small amount of Bitcoin via the Lightning Network.

In his speech, Ardoino used Asimov’s psychohistory theory from the Foundation series as a core metaphor to explain that Tether’s underlying mission is not just issuing USDT stablecoins and accumulating Bitcoin long-term, but also addressing current global societal chaos, systemic turbulence, inflation, financial exclusion, and power monopolies—what he called “global dark crises”—by building a long-term technological system to enhance social resilience and bridge development gaps.

Ardoino pointed out that multiple crises are already emerging worldwide: hundreds of millions face unstable electricity supply, large groups are excluded from traditional finance, and big corporations and institutions monopolize technology and exploit users unilaterally, leading society into slow and ongoing instability. Meanwhile, nearly half the population cannot access basic financial services, and rapid AI development will further widen global wealth and digital divides, exacerbating social fragmentation. Ardoino stated that combating systemic decay is not about short-term resistance but about building a long-lasting, decentralized, censorship-resistant foundational infrastructure, which is the core purpose behind Tether’s creation of The Resilience Stack.

Ardoino explained that around The Resilience Stack, Tether is launching a full-chain open-source technological ecosystem, layer by layer constructing a decentralized system: at the base is HolePunch, a peer-to-peer communication protocol with no central servers, resistant to censorship, highly scalable, redefining decentralized network transmission; on top is the uncensored instant messaging app Keet, enabling secure private global communication, which will be fully open sourced later; relying on the open-source wallet library WDK, promoting self-custody wallets, supporting Bitcoin peer-to-peer payments for ordinary users, smart devices, and AI agents, providing solutions for high-frequency microtransactions in the era of IoT; at the top is the local decentralized AI tool QVAC, safeguarding user data privacy, compatible with low-end devices and remote areas, embodying the philosophy “AI that isn’t yours isn’t your intelligence.”

Furthermore, Ardoino mentioned that Tether has a large global user base, covering 160 countries with over 573 million users, with a rapidly growing ecosystem and over a thousand open-source projects launched. Tether plans to attract global developers through funding, hackathons, and other initiatives to co-build the ecosystem. He emphasized that Tether’s long-term vision is to leverage an integrated open-source stack of communication, finance, and decentralized AI to break corporate and institutional monopolies, achieve financial inclusion, free communication, and privacy control, rely on the public and decentralized tech to build stable order, hedge potential global risks, and accomplish long-term social repair and innovation.

Below is the full transcript of Ardoino’s speech, compiled by Golden Finance (assisted by Deepseek).

I’m very pleased to be here again this year. Why am I showing this video? I want to do my best to explain how we think about Tether.

Tether is famous as a stablecoin company, issuing USDT, and as a buyer of Bitcoin. We hold over 130k, 140k Bitcoins. We’ve been buying. Today, we launched a Bitcoin faucet. If you go to Twitter, and Tether has a BTC account, you can use your Tether.me email (which you get when downloading the Tether Wallet) to operate, and you will receive a small amount of Bitcoin directly into your wallet for free.

Yes, we do all these things, but I want to explain why Tether is much more than that.

What Tether has learned from Bitcoin

The best way I can think of is to borrow inspiration from Isaac Asimov, who is my favorite author in history. If you’ve read Asimov’s Foundation series, there’s a character—a mathematician—named Hari Seldon, who created a theory called psychohistory.

Psychohistory is a theory—a combination of mathematics, statistics, physics, sociology, political science—a complete science used to understand how humanity and society will transform, shape, and change over hundreds, thousands, or millions of years. Here’s an excerpt from the book. We use this to express—just as Asimov eloquently described—that you can use science to predict and analyze what’s happening in the universe, forecast outcomes, and simultaneously think about how to use the same science to steer it, to push things in different directions, to alter the course of societal decline, and to shorten the potential darkness looming over us all. Just like in the book, Asimov describes how Seldon’s psychohistory predicts that after ten thousand years of the Galactic Empire’s existence, something will happen—a chaos, a upheaval—and then ten thousand years of darkness. He also predicts that by using psychohistory, that darkness could be shortened to just a few centuries.

Why am I telling you this? Why am I bringing up these apocalyptic ideas 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—a spark that’s creating a new flame. This spark will survive and resist any darkness because it’s designed to be peer-to-peer. It’s created by the people, for the people, accepted by people from every corner of the world. So, if we believe this is true, if we believe Bitcoin is indeed the first element in a potential fight against the coming darkness, what can we learn from it?

First, when I think about what Seldon tried to convey through psychohistory, I wonder: is this just science fiction? Does it only happen in books? Then I think, the darkness described in Asimov’s books can be traced back to Earth, because that darkness is simply chaos in society, instability in social systems. You might have heard me say last year that for us—inside our company—we call it “the stable company.” It’s a company aimed at bringing stability to society. Seldon in Asimov’s books tried to use psychohistory to solve and reduce that darkness from ten thousand years to a few hundred. And at Tether, we believe that the darkness we see in our society—it’s already here. We see war, inflation, destruction of national currencies, instability, signals that the so-called darkness is approaching—society may not be heading toward a better place, but into more chaos, more instability. So I want to explain how, starting from the universe and science fiction, we can actually trace it back to what’s happening on Earth.

Let’s move 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 farming families supporting their communities overnight are abandoned because the system deems them economically unviable. In one of the oldest democracies on Earth, people are being arrested not for violence, but for speech, for a meme. Some lessons from governments are very clear: they don’t need to silence us—they just need to make sure we can’t pay rent. In the most powerful countries, corporations are building machines not to serve the people but to exploit them. Darkness doesn’t arrive with an explosion; it arrives with slow dimming.

So, again, returning from science fiction to Earth. The decades-long dark period described in the universe of the books, when traced to Earth, boils down to society becoming more unstable and unpredictable. Hundreds of millions—actually billions—are unable to access basic financial services. They can’t get electricity, they can’t get stable telecom. More importantly, they can’t get, and won’t get, basic intelligent services. Think about it: four billion people worldwide lack access to basic financial services. They’ve been abandoned by traditional finance. How can we believe that leaving half the world’s population out will bring more stability? That’s the analogy we draw from psychohistory: if we do nothing, if we don’t act, if we don’t try to leverage science, technology, and our capabilities to build something different—something that can outlast the darkness, that can create stability, that can reduce darkness by creating light in countries, cities, and communities—that can connect people (wherever they are) and make them resilient to changes in the world—that will be the darkness on our planet.

But you know, all this talk—what does it mean? What does Tether plan to do about it? Let’s keep going.

The Resilience Stack

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, which we call The Resilience Stack. That’s our answer.

The Resilience Stack is an open-source tech stack—like psychohistory, it’s a scientific approach analyzing the different issues we see across all operational countries. Remember, Tether operates in hundreds of countries, in 160 different nations. We have on-the-ground teams. We talk to people. We have a network of 573 million users, using USDT, Tether Gold, and all our other services, and that network is growing. Our network adds 34 million new wallets every quarter. That’s unprecedented. This scale proves that the technology we’re building is growing at the speed of a social network. It’s no longer just a fintech company, no longer just a stablecoin; it’s becoming a movement, a tech stack that’s becoming part of the world’s fabric. Part of a world where parents are abandoned by traditional finance, where they are cut off from safe communication with their children, perhaps even in homes without electricity. Imagine a world where half the population can’t access basic financial services and won’t participate in 100x intelligent enhancement via AI. When financial inclusion gaps are already so large, imagine what will happen when AI truly becomes a part of everyone’s life. That divide—already splitting the world’s populations—will be magnified a hundredfold by AI. The Resilience Stack is our response to this problem. What are the concrete, practical things? What is the actual technology, like psychohistory, that we can use, build, and apply to reduce dark ages from hundreds or decades to just a few years, and create sparks across society? So that, no matter what happens—no matter what dystopian future, what disaster, what pandemic— we can still connect. We can transact with Bitcoin together. We can use AI services that serve us, not just a few big corporations.

All of this converges into a single story, a single stack. You should check out Tether’s GitHub, the open-source code repository. I think we’ve already crossed 1,000 open-source projects there. That’s very unique. It shows we genuinely care about building something more enduring than just our company, because software technology needs resilience for its creators too. That’s one reason I love Bitcoin: it’s more durable than its creator, it will last forever. Of course, we will always remember Satoshi. We are all Satoshi. But that’s the beauty of technology: when a technology is well-made, anyone can use it, regardless of who created it. Everyone is essentially a parent of that technology.

Peer-to-peer Telecom with HolePunch

Let’s look at the very bottom layer. A peer-to-peer protocol, with no servers, no central authority needed to sustain it. We built HolePunch, a fully peer-to-peer telecom protocol capable of scaling to billions of users, billions of devices, and trillions of AI agents. For those of you more technically inclined, it’s like the BitTorrent protocol built about 30 years ago, rewritten from scratch, improved, with added encryption layers, making it highly scalable and adaptable—not just for file sharing, but for any real-time data streams—video calls, messaging, mapping, and more. It’s fully open source. Everyone should look at it, because the HolePunch protocol allows any developer to build applications that can scale to billions of people and millions of companies without any single central server. Based on this, 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. Similarly, you can build peer-to-peer Uber, peer-to-peer mapping systems, anything you want. It’s free, one of the most complex yet easiest-to-use software and network stacks, empowering whatever you build for your company, yourself, your family, your friends—in incredible ways. To me, it’s like Bitcoin for finance. HolePunch for networks and telecom, just as Bitcoin is for finance. On top of that, it’s unstoppable, uncensorable communication.

Messaging App Keet

On top of the HolePunch protocol and stack, we built Keet. I’m not sure how many of you have used Keet. It’s a messaging app with over 5 million users on desktop and mobile, maybe more, because it’s hard to track—no central server. Millions of users, thousands of chat rooms, sharing tens of millions of messages, videos, photos, and more, all without any central server. Keet is the first messaging app capable of scaling 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 internet controls. We built this for the people. For parents who want a reliable, secure way to talk to their children, but also for those working and living in dystopian or authoritarian regions. This is truly the first unstoppable communication app. I want to say one thing: one of the main criticisms of Keet has always been: why isn’t it open source? I can assure you, I promise to open source it. We are working on all the documentation, all modules, so once open, everyone can access, improve, build on it, and recreate it with a simple step. That’s an example. That’s the huge work done by the Tether team, to open source it. We do this wholeheartedly because we believe that if people can’t communicate with each other, if they can’t send messages peer-to-peer—just like society was born—through peer-to-peer communication. We meet on the streets, in city squares, talk to each other without intermediaries. Over the past 50 years, intermediaries have taken over finance and communication. That’s why society is in its darkest hour: we should have used technology to create a more open society, but instead, we hijacked technology, allowing a few companies to control society tightly. So Keet, and its open source, will be one of our most important moments, a testament to our dedication to this mission.

Open-Source Wallet Library WDK

Next, a financial tool driven by WDK, serving humans, machines, and their agents, to enable unstoppable Bitcoin payments. WDK is one of our most successful products: an open-source library allowing 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 control over their wealth. They need to be able to transact with whomever they want. So we want to create something accessible to everyone, supporting any asset, but most importantly supporting Bitcoin. From a purely physics—meaning technical—perspective, we know the best way to scale future payment needs is that, as AI agents become ubiquitous, trillions of transactions will be needed daily, and current financial transmission layers won’t handle it. Technologies like the Lightning Network are the right direction because they are Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer transaction layer. I’m glad WDK has supported this from the start. We want to ensure your smart fridge, smart car, and smartphone can transact in Bitcoin, while keeping your Bitcoin safe and always under your control.

Decentralized AI QVAC

At the very top is decentralized AI. Because if it’s not yours, then it’s not your intelligence. The final 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, device, or laptop, ensuring your privacy. It supports all the best open-source large language models. It can scale from your minimal GPU to your laptop, smartphone, and up to large servers. It embeds HolePunch, WDK, and everything we’ve seen before. Because we drew inspiration from “not your keys, not your coins”—we all know what that means for Bitcoin—we replicated the same concept: if it’s not your AI, then it’s not your intelligence. We are driven—these days, these weeks, these years—to talk about AI. We know it’s one of the most fundamental transformative technologies for society and humanity. But again, if we don’t build AI tools that cover the needs of that part of the population—those half who lack access to basic financial services—if we pretend that those who can’t access basic finance are also those who can’t afford OpenAI or Anthropic subscriptions, they shouldn’t be left behind. They need tools that work on their small smartphones, in remote villages in Africa, Central South America, Southeast Asia. We want Tether to tell a coherent story—from telecom, messaging, wallets, self-custody, to AI—creating a complete, unique, fully open-source stack that empowers people, not corporations, not enterprises, just people. Because ultimately, back to science fiction: people will rebuild the universe, rebuild society, or rather, save society on Earth. People will make society more stable, without looking beyond the light-years outside our solar system.

So I suggest and recommend that each of you look at what we’re building. Contribute. Again, all of this is fully open source, on the Tether website. We will soon release funding to enable everyone to contribute to this technology, to build on it.** We will host hackathons, 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.