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

Organized by: Golden Finance

On April 28, 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 communication protocol HolePunch, the decentralized communication app Keet, the open-source self-custody wallet toolkit WDK, and the local AI development platform QVAC into a foundational infrastructure system aimed at people who cannot obtain basic financial and communication services. Among them, Keet had previously not been open sourced; Ardoino officially pledged to push for open source, and the relevant documentation and modules are being prepared. In addition, Paolo Ardoino stated that Tether has launched a Bitcoin faucet (BTC Faucet). After users download the Tether wallet app, they can reply to a Tether Wallet tweet with the required response on the platform to receive a small amount of Bitcoin instantly via the Lightning Network.

In this speech, Paolo Ardoino used psychohistory 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 respond to today’s global social disorder—systemic turbulence, inflation, financial exclusion, and monopolistic power, among other “global dark crises”—by building a long-term technological system to enhance societal resilience and narrow the development gap.

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

Paolo Ardoino stated that, around The Resilience Stack, Tether has launched an end-to-end open-source technology ecosystem, constructing a decentralized system layer by layer: at the base is the HolePunch peer-to-peer communication protocol—no centralized servers, resistant to shutdowns/lockdowns, highly scalable, reshaping decentralized network transmission capability; on top of that is the no-censorship instant messaging app Keet, enabling secure private communication worldwide, with full open source to follow; relying on the open-source wallet library WDK, it promotes self-custody wallets, adapting to the Bitcoin peer-to-peer payment needs of ordinary users, smart devices, and AI Agnet, providing solutions for high-frequency microtransactions in the Internet of Everything era; at the top, it deploys QVAC local decentralized AI tools to ensure user data privacy, adapt to low-spec devices and remote areas, and put into practice the philosophy, “If the AI isn’t yours, then it isn’t your intelligence.”

In addition, Paolo Ardoino also stated that Tether has a large global user base, with business coverage across 160 countries and more than 573 million users. The ecosystem scale is growing rapidly, while Tether continues to increase its investment in open-source development, with more than 1,000 open-source projects already live. Tether plans to attract developers worldwide to co-build the ecosystem through funding support, hackathons, and other methods. Paolo Ardoino emphasized in his speech that Tether’s long-term vision is to rely on an integrated open-source technology stack that combines communications, finance, and decentralized AI—breaking corporate and institutional monopolies, achieving financial inclusion, freedom of communication, and privacy that is controllable. By building stable order with the public and decentralized technology, it will hedge against potential global risks and complete long-term social repair and innovation.

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

I’m very happy 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 very famous as a stablecoin company. It issues USDT—it’s a buyer of Bitcoin. We hold more than 130,000, 140,000 Bitcoin. We’ve been buying. Right today, we released a Bitcoin faucet. If you’re on Twitter, and Tether has a BTC account, you can use your Tether.me email address (which you get when you download the Tether wallet) to operate, and you will directly receive 10 cents’ worth of Bitcoin for free into your wallet.

Yes, we do all these things, but I want to explain to you why Tether is far more than this.

What Tether learned from Bitcoin

The best way I can think of is to take 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. He created a theory called psychohistory.

Psychohistory is a theory—a combination of mathematics, statistics, physics, sociology, and political science. It’s 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 it to express—just as Asimov expressed it so brilliantly in the book—that you can use science to predict and analyze what’s happening in the universe, predict the outcomes, and, at the same time, try to think about how to use the same science to adjust it—push things in different directions, change the course of societal decline, and alter the potential darkness that might befall all of us. Just like in the book, where Asimov describes that Hari Seldon’s prediction is that after the existence of the Empire (the most powerful empire in the galaxy) for 10,000 years, something will happen—a turmoil will occur—followed by 1,000 years of darkness. He also predicted that by using psychohistory, that darkness could be shortened to just a few hundred years.

So why am I telling you these things? Why am I bringing up these apocalyptic discussions at a Bitcoin conference? I think the way I think 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’s designed to be peer-to-peer. It is created by the people, for the people, and accepted by people from every corner of the world. So if we truly believe that this is indeed the case—if we believe Bitcoin really is the first element in a potential struggle against the coming darkness—what can we learn from it?

First, when I think about what Seldon was trying to convey through his scientific discipline of psychohistory, I wonder: is this just science fiction? Does it happen only 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 merely chaos in society—instability. You might have heard me say this last year: for us at Tether—we internally call it the “stable company.” It’s a company created to bring stability to society. In Asimov’s books, Hari Seldon tried to use psychohistory to solve and reduce that darkness from 10,000 years to a few hundred. And at Tether, we believe the darkness that’s about to come in society—we can see it already. We see war. We see inflation. We see national currencies being destroyed. We see instability. We see all the signals indicating that what we call the so-called darkness is coming soon. The world may not be headed toward a better place; instead, it may become increasingly chaotic and unstable. So I want to explain that starting from the universe and science fiction, we can actually trace it back to what’s happening on Earth.

Let me 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 supply. They are already in darkness. Generations of farming families that supported their communities are abandoned overnight because the system determines that they are no longer economically viable. In one of the oldest democracies on Earth, people are arrested—not for violence, but for speech, for 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 doesn’t arrive with an explosion—it arrives with slow dimming.

So again, returning from science fiction to Earth. The multi-decade period of darkness described in those stories, when traced back to Earth, boils down to society becoming more unstable and unpredictable. Hundreds of millions of people—actually billions—cannot obtain basic financial services. They cannot obtain electricity, cannot obtain stable telecommunications services. More importantly, they cannot obtain—and will never obtain—basic intelligent services. Think about it: there are 4 billion people worldwide who cannot access basic financial services. They’ve been abandoned by the traditional financial system. How can we believe that excluding half the world’s population will bring more stability to society? That is the analogy we draw from the inspiration of 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; build something that is more durable than darkness, that reduces darkness by creating points of light across nations, cities, and among communities; build something that connects people (wherever they are) and makes them resilient to changes in the world—then that would be the darkness on our planet.

But you know, with all these words, what does it mean? What does Tether plan to do about it? Let’s keep going.

The Resilience Stack

Seldon understood something that most people miss: you don’t fight darkness by winning a battle; you fight it by building systems that can last longer than darkness. That’s what we’re doing. A foundation—real infrastructure—we call it The Resilience Stack. That’s our answer.

The Resilience Stack is an open-source technology stack. Just like the psychohistory example, it’s a scientific method to analyze the different problems we see across all operational countries. Remember, Tether operates in hundreds of countries, across 160 different countries/regions. We have field personnel. We talk with people. We have a network of 573 million users using USDT, Tether Gold, and all other services we provide, and this network is growing. Our network grows by 34 million new wallets each quarter. This is unprecedented. This scale proves that the technology we are building is growing at the speed of a social network. It’s no longer just a fintech company, no longer just a stablecoin—actually, it’s 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 financial systems, losing the ability to safely communicate with their children—perhaps their homes don’t even have electricity. Imagine such a world: half the world’s population cannot access basic financial services, and they will not participate in the 100x improvement of intelligence capabilities because of AI. If the gap on both sides of society is already that big due to financial inclusion, imagine what happens when AI truly becomes part of everyone’s life. This gap that is splitting the world’s two halves of population right now will expand a hundredfold because of AI. The resilience stack is our response to this problem. What exactly is the concrete, practical thing? What is the real technology—just like the psychohistory example—by which we can use it, build it, and apply it to reduce dark periods from hundreds of years or decades down to just a few years, and create these sparks throughout society? So that, no matter what happens—no matter what dystopian future, no matter what disaster, no matter what pandemic, no matter what happens—we can still connect. We can trade together with Bitcoin. We can use AI services that serve us, not just a few giant companies.

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 passed 1,000 open-source projects on GitHub. That’s very unique. It shows that we truly care about building something more durable than our company, because software technology also needs resilience for its creators. That’s also one of the reasons I love 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 when a technology is made well, anyone can use it, regardless of who created it. Everyone is essentially the “father” of that technology.

Peer-to-peer telecommunications with HolePunch

Let’s look at the very bottom layer—the first part. A peer-to-peer protocol doesn’t need servers; it doesn’t need a central authority to maintain it. 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, with encryption layers added—making it highly scalable and adaptable. It’s not only for file sharing, but for any real-time data streams: video calls, messaging, map rendering, and more. It’s fully open source. Everyone should take a look, because for the first time the HolePunch protocol allows any developer to build applications that can scale to billions of people and hundreds of thousands of companies without any single centralized server. On top of that, we’ve already demonstrated—later we’ll see—that we ourselves 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. It’s one of the most complex yet easiest-to-use software and network stacks, capable of empowering anything you build for your company, for yourself, for your family, 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. Above it is communication that cannot be suppressed or shut down.

Messaging app Keet

On top of the HolePunch protocol and stack, we built Keet. I don’t know 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 count since there is no centralized server. There are millions of users and chat rooms with tens of thousands of users, sharing tens of millions of messages, videos, photos, and more, all without any centralized servers. Keet is the first messaging app capable of scaling to 8 billion people and ultimately scaling to machines. It has no cost because it has no data centers. It can’t be blocked. It works anywhere, even under the strictest forms of internet control. We built this for the people. We built this for fathers who want a reliable and secure way to talk with their children, but we also built it for people who work and live in places that might be dystopian or under authoritarian regimes. This is truly the first unstoppable communications app. There’s one thing I want to say. One of the main criticisms of the Keet app has always been: why isn’t it open source? I can assure you that I’m committed to making it open source. We are working through all the documentation and all the modules so that once it’s open sourced, everyone can access it, improve it, and build on it—change it—and just with a simple step, recreate it. This is an example. It’s the enormous work done by the Tether team to open source it. We do this from the bottom of our hearts because we believe that if people can’t talk to each other, if people can’t send messages to each other peer-to-peer, if we block the ability of peer-to-peer communication—just like society is born through peer-to-peer communication. 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 both the financial world and the communications world. 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 and made society tightly controlled by a handful of companies. So Keet, and the open-sourcing of Keet, will be one of the most important moments for us—one of the greatest proofs of our dedication to this mission.

Open-source wallet library WDK

Then comes the financial tool, powered by WDK, serving humans, machines, and the agents between them, to enable unstoppable Bitcoin payments. WDK is one of our most successful products. It is an open-source library that lets any developer, any person, any computer, any AI agent 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. People need to be able to transact with anyone they want. So we want to create something that everyone can use, supporting any asset—but most importantly, supporting Bitcoin. From a purely physics perspective—technology is physics—purely from the standpoint of technical physics, we know the best way to scale future payment demand is that when AI agents are everywhere, they will need trillions of payments every day, and the current financial transfer layer will not be able to handle it. Things like Lightning Network are the right direction, because the Lightning Network is Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer transaction layer. I’m glad to see that WDK supports this from the start. We want to ensure that your smart refrigerator, smart car, and smart phone can transact using Bitcoin, while protecting your Bitcoin and ensuring it always belongs to you.

Decentralized AI QVAC

At the very top is decentralized AI. Because if it’s not your AI, then it isn’t your intelligence. The final part is QVAC**. We have just released the QVAC SDK, an open-source software development kit that allows anyone to build AI tools that run locally on your smartphone, your device, and your laptop—thereby ensuring 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 to large mainframes. It embeds the HolePunch protocol, embeds WDK, and embeds everything we just looked at. Because we were inspired by “not your keys, not your coins.” We all know what that phrase means for Bitcoin. We replicated the same concept. We understand that if it’s not your AI, then it isn’t your intelligence. We are driven—these days, these weeks, these years—by the understanding that AI is one of the most fundamental transformative technologies for society and for humanity. But again, emphasizing once more: if we don’t build AI tools that cover the needs of that segment of the population—the human half that lacks basic financial services—if we pretend that those who can’t access basic financial services are also those who can’t afford OpenAI or Anthropic subscription fees—then those people cannot be left behind. They need tools that work on their small smartphones, tools that can work in the most remote small villages in Africa, Central/South America, or Southeast Asia. We want Tether to build a coherent story—from telecommunications, to messaging, to wallets and self-custody wallets, to AI—creating a complete, unique, fully open-source stack that empowers people, not companies, not enterprises—just people. Because ultimately, returning to the science fiction story: people will rebuild the universe; people will rebuild society—or rather, save society on Earth. People will make society on Earth more stable, without focusing on the light-years distance beyond our solar system.

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

Thank you very much. Enjoy the conference.