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

Organized by Jinse Finance

On April 28th, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino delivered a speech at the 2026 Las Vegas Bitcoin Conference. 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 access to basic financial and communication services. Keet, previously not open source, Ardoino officially committed to promoting open source, with related documentation and modules in preparation. Additionally, Paolo Ardoino stated that Tether has launched a Bitcoin faucet (BTC Faucet), where users can reply as required to Tether Wallet tweets after downloading the Tether wallet app to receive a small amount of Bitcoin instantly via the Lightning Network.

In his speech, Ardoino used the psychohistorical theory from Isaac Asimov’s “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 responding to the current global chaos, systemic turbulence, inflation, financial exclusion, and monopolistic power—what he calls “global dark crises”—by building a long-term technological system to enhance societal resilience and bridge development gaps.

Ardoino pointed out that multiple crises are already emerging worldwide: hundreds of millions face unstable power supplies, large groups are excluded from traditional finance, and big corporations and institutions monopolize technology to 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 emphasized 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 stated 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, the HolePunch peer-to-peer communication protocol—no central servers, anti-censorship, highly scalable—redefining decentralized network transmission; above it, the uncensored instant messaging app Keet—enabling secure, private global communication, with full open source coming soon; 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, deploying QVAC local decentralized AI tools—ensuring 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 rapid ecosystem growth and ongoing open-source development, having launched over a thousand open-source projects. 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 technology to establish stable order, hedge potential global risks, and accomplish societal long-term repair and innovation.

Below is the full transcript of Ardoino’s speech, organized by Jinse 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, Tether has a BTC account, and you can use your Tether.me email address (which you get when downloading the Tether wallet) to operate—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, and 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 did in his books—that you can use science to predict and analyze what’s happening in the universe, forecast outcomes, and at the same time, 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 as in the book, Asimov describes how Seldon’s prediction—after a thousand years of the Galactic Empire—something will happen, a chaos will occur, followed by a thousand years of darkness. He also predicted that by using psychohistory, this 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 something new. 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, and accepted by people from every corner of the world. So, if we truly believe this, 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 his psychohistorical science, I wonder: is this just science fiction? Does it only happen 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 simply chaos in society—instability. Last year, you might have heard me say that for us—inside our company—we call it “the stable company.” It’s a company aimed at bringing stability to society. Seldon’s attempt in Asimov’s books was to use psychohistory to reduce a thousand years of darkness to a few hundred. And at Tether, we believe the darkness we see approaching in society—it’s already here. We see war, inflation, destruction of national currencies, instability, all signals indicating that the so-called darkness is imminent—society may not be heading toward a better place, but rather into more chaos and 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 not only predicting the future but also recognizing the present. Right now, 700 million people live with intermittent power. They are already in darkness. Generations of families who farmed to sustain their communities are suddenly abandoned overnight 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—because of 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 those stories, when traced to Earth, boils down to society becoming more unstable and unpredictable. Hundreds of millions—actually billions—of people cannot access basic financial services. They lack electricity, stable telecom, and more critically, they cannot access, nor will they ever access, basic intelligent services. Think about it: four billion people worldwide are excluded from 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 use 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 nations, cities, and communities—then that darkness will be on our Earth.

But do you know what all this talk means? 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, we call it The Resilience Stack. That’s our answer.

The Resilience Stack is an open-source tech stack—like psychohistory, it’s a scientific method, an analysis tool for the various 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 families’ parents are abandoned by traditional finance, where they are cut off from safe communication with their children, perhaps even without electricity at home. Imagine such a world: half the people on Earth cannot access basic financial services, and they won’t participate in a 100x intelligence boost via AI. When financial inclusion gaps are already so large, imagine what will happen when AI truly becomes part of everyone’s life. This divide—already splitting the world into two—will be magnified a hundredfold by AI. The resilience stack is our response to this problem. What is the concrete, practical thing? 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 how dystopian the future, no matter what disasters, pandemics, or crises—we can still connect. We can transact with Bitcoin together. We can use AI that serves 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 believe 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 to be resilient for its creators too. That’s one reason I love Bitcoin: it’s more durable than its creator, and 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 telecommunications with HolePunch

Let’s look at the very bottom layer—the first part. A peer-to-peer protocol, no servers needed, no central authority to maintain it. We built HolePunch—a fully peer-to-peer telecommunications 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 hundreds of thousands 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, or anything else you want. It’s free, one of the most complex yet easiest-to-use software and network stacks, capable of empowering anything you build for your company, yourself, your family, or friends—in incredible ways. To me, it’s like Bitcoin for finance. HolePunch for networks and telecommunications, just as Bitcoin is for finance. On top of that, it’s unstoppable and 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 an example of 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 fathers who want a reliable, secure way to talk to their children, but also for those working and living in potentially 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 make it open source. We are working on all the documentation, all modules, so once open, everyone can access, improve, build upon it, and recreate it with just one simple step. This is an example. This is the huge work done by the Tether team, to open source it. We do this wholeheartedly because we believe that if people cannot communicate with each other, if they cannot send messages peer-to-peer—just like society was born—born from peer-to-peer communication. We meet on the streets, in city squares, we talk without intermediaries. Over the past 50 years, intermediaries have taken over finance and communication. That’s why society is in its darkest hour: because 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 the most important moments for us—proof of our dedication to this mission.

Open-source wallet library WDK

Next, the 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 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 control over their wealth. They need to be able to transact with anyone they want. So we want to create something everyone can use, 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 the HolePunch protocol, WDK, and everything we’ve seen before. Because we draw inspiration from the phrase “not your keys, not your coins”—we all know what that means for Bitcoin—we replicate the same concept here: if it’s not your AI, then it’s not your intelligence. We are driven—these days, weeks, and years—by the understanding that AI is 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 who lack access to basic financial services—if we pretend that those who can’t afford OpenAI or Anthropic subscriptions are somehow left behind—that’s wrong. They need tools that work on their small smartphones, in remote villages in Africa, South America, or Southeast Asia. We want Tether to tell a coherent story—from telecommunications, messaging, wallets, self-custody, to AI—creating a complete, unique, fully open-source stack that empowers the people, not corporations, not enterprises, just the people. Because ultimately, back to science fiction: the people will rebuild the universe, rebuild society, or rather, save society on Earth. The people will make society more stable on Earth, without needing to look light-years beyond our solar system.

So I suggest and recommend that each of you take a look at what we’re building. Contribute. Again, all of this is fully open source, on the Tether website. Soon, we will release funding to enable everyone to contribute to this technology, to build upon 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.