The hack was one of them the pivotal moments of bitfinex That was incredible. I think by by in seven months I think by by April 2017 all the outstanding the effects tokens were either, you know Converted redeemed or or converted in inequities the really simple idea around Tether was okay. Let's reuse the incredible Technology that Bitcoin created the cold blockchain. Let's just put The US dollar
because it's the most used currency in the world. I always say that Before 2022 we never had even a marketing team for tether so tether USDT has becoming Really important for hundreds of millions of people across the board especially in emerging markets and developing countries This Episode is brought to you by gnosis Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the ethereum ecosystem
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chorus dot one Welcome to ebsenner the show which talks about the technology projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm Brian Crane and I'm today here with Frederica Ernst Today we speak with Paulo Ardourino who is the CEO and co -founder of tether and CTO of Bitfinex And also working on another new thing called hole punch which we'll talk about so Of course some enormously
influential projects in the crypto space most important most of this tether So really excited to get to get into this. Well, thanks so much for coming on. It's really great to have you Thank you for having me We're gay right into it. I mean you've been in crypto for a really long time and Have worked on and many different things, but how
did it all start? Like how did you become interested in crypto and what triggered your
imagination? so 2024 is my 10th year in business in crypto, you know, I discovered Bitcoin in 2013 So I've been a developer all my life Now I'm focusing more on business and Strategy but I was born as a developer since I was eight years old like was coding No, I was living in a really small town outside of the city and Didn't have many friends around so, you know, I spend almost all
of my afternoons with a computer so fast forward went to the university in Genoa in Italy and the study math applied to computer science and and my I'm also big sci -fi fan, so my Dream and my interest in technology was all about building things building technological solutions that would be
Resisting to apocalypse, right? So, you know in the house sci -fi you there's always problems for the world, you know Things getting for going for the worst You have either wars or you have aliens or you have to abandon the earth and go somewhere else and so on so That's that thing in in always Was sticking to my mind on how, you know, whatever we do whatever we build should not be built
for the best case scenario But should be built for the worst case scenario And so, you know, I started as
soon as I graduated with from the university. I was a researcher in the university So I was building resilient telecommunications systems for distressed situations like battlefields and You know that taught me how to be you can build Really resilient networks that are you know, really critical and crucial in certain moments Then as most of the time happens in Italy, you don't pay you don't
get paid too much so, you know the That's the unfortunately situation of Italy, so I decided to move to a field that I thought was More rewarding at least in economical pay that was finance So I got my first job in finance in in actually in Switzerland And then I decided to move in London to London to open my startup to build the financial software so in 2012 I opened the startup and in 2013 I I
was Already really annoyed by the outdated technology that the financial system was relying on If you haven't worked with Banks or hedge funds and so you know that every time They trade anytime a trader trades for an institution for a hedge fund At the end of the day, you have to reconcile all the positions all the trades all the cash balances across multiple trading venues across multiple banks
and custodians and All that is speaking tense of different protocols is kept together by rubber and bands is all Really outdated feels like he's all still written in Kabul 40 years ago, so in 2013 I got to the chance to learn about Bitcoin and The first thing that I thought about Bitcoin was okay. This is really cool This is not
not just I didn't get immediately. Honestly the Humanitarian and social implications but I Got the technology aspect and I thought that Bitcoin could be the solution for The financial board in terms of having a common settlement network across all the institutions across all the governments the beautiful thing about Bitcoin as a blockchain is that you can Everyone had that has a synced note. She's
the same thing, right? So you you cannot have ever seen reconciliation and so on so it's beautiful prevents double spending and and and so on so I was really excited about it and then at the end of 2013 I thought really I was really deep in the rabbit hole and so I started understanding more How Bitcoin is actually a game changer as a currency for and its social impact could be incredible so long story
short in 2014 I got the chance of of working for Bitveen X so Bitveen X was one of the first trading platforms Was really one of probably the only and first trading platform that at the time was offering margin trading on Bitcoin and so The CFO Jack Alivazzini of Bitveen X contacted me through a common friend and we He asked my Help in in making sure that between a scoot scale with a demand right
2014 is not 2024 of course we are seeing today that a huge demand of Bitcoin You know brought by by ETFs and so on but in 2014 still there was an increasing demand for for for accessing Bitcoin trading and so most of the exchanges in 2014 were built by Amateur is not the right term is is not about you know being But we're more mostly almost e -commerce is for Bitcoin rather than high performance
trading platforms today We are used to have super low latency high frequency trading and so on but back in time was kind of different So I brought my expertise in in building in building the you know the Bitveen X platform and the setting up team in 2016 I became the CTO of Bitveen X and in 2017 I became the C is CTO of also tether and then from there I started working also on the stable coin side for
tether and more recently I started to care more about long -term strategy vision and Grow with all the teams and execution of the strategy for for tether while still I am the CTO for Bitveen X So I would take care of the tech platform and all the trading tools built around Bitveen X So this is just me in ten and five minutes probably more but yeah, no no, thank you so much for for that I'm curious Like
going a little bit into Sort of the story of Bitveen X. What do you think it was that
helped? Bitveen X Succeed and and actually there's maybe one episode that really be curious to talk if you girls talk about I think some people will So remember it right because once you guys have this massive hack and then you had this very interesting way of like Dealing with the hack that I think ended up working out really well But I'd also love if you could sort of talk through that
episode and What happened then I think this right I think The hack was one of them the people tell moments of Bitveen X Remember that The word was coming. Well the Bitcoin word was coming from a big hack that was the Montgauss hack, right?
So at that time when Bitcoin Phoenix was hacked it was Personally a devastating moment Also for of course for the company for for our customers, but look we had two choices either let it go and let Bit Phoenix potentially die or We could roll up our sleeves and make sure that our customers would get whole right So at that time when between it be Phoenix was hard was the second of
August 2016 Bitcoin was around six hundred dollars So they're total loss of of Bitcoin it was around
72 million dollars around 119 ,000 Bitcoin. So we decided so I remember those days really well because After the first day or so of assessment of what happened and how we could have happened so on we Decided to come up with a plan to resume trading and make everyone whole the way that we use was actually new and I think was extremely intelligent and forward -thinking so We dollarized the 72 million
dollars and we issued the so -called BFX tokens and we distributed the BFX tokens across product across the users and So also we open a market for these BFX tokens So that people could trade their Their Basically is how you use the interesting thing is that these tokens had multiple functions Right so people could take these tokens and convert them into equity if they believe that Bit Phoenix would be
successful in longer They could trade them on the market so sell them for example and They could also
wait for the redemption. So we Committed to redeeming those tokens at $1 face value with their avenues of the exchange So as soon as the market started so after one week So it took one week to bring back the platform up and running I remember that probably slept two hours in a week I was completely destroyed after after seven days, but you know, we had to make it We had to put everything we had to To to start
trading again because if you wait too much you don't have you know People will just disappear will go away and you know, there is no chance of success anymore So we knew that we have to restart trading within one week So when as soon as we started trading the BFX token people started selling their BFX tokens and the price went from one to 20 cents, you know that they thought well these guys will never make
it but After the first days we had the first days we had a huge outflow of Bitcoin from the platform You know customers of course where we're drawing in panic but After a few days after 10 days 15 days, we were back the first exchange by trading volume So at the end of June at the end of August We were the first again the biggest exchange by trading volume and so by the end of September We
redeemed the first BFX tokens So people were like only cow these guys these guys are making money They are buying back the tokens and so the price on the secondary market for this BFX token started to go up And so then October came November came we we kept making more money because also that coincided with the bull run Right the start at bull run by the end of 2016 going to 2017 That was one of the most
incredible years for for Bitcoin in the crypto ecosystem So we were making really good profits buying back the FFX tokens so more and more people start to Convert their BFX tokens into equity. So that's how basically we got almost 300 shareholders for
for for I -finex and That was incredible. I think by by in seven months I think by by April 2017 all the outstanding BFX tokens were either You know converted redeemed or or converted in in in
equity. So it's I really like and love to think about that part of the story because I think that in In these moments of weakness is how you really assess the team and I must say that no one in our team Left the company everyone was focused on make sure that the platform would be profitable to make everyone fall Yeah, to this day, it's one of the biggest comebacks in in crypto history and I also
really appreciated The story of the BFX token and how kind of you use crypto economics to kind of to make it work for you guys So yeah tipping my head to you guys So you talked about kind of, you know switching out the financial rails and kind of settling things on Blockchain because it makes sense and I conquer 100 % so kind of we have recently started building financial infrastructure that kind of
crosses the chasm from blockchain to legacy finance and with noses pay and other such integrations and I was Absolutely flabbergasted at the stack that kind of like the financial world runs on it.
It's unbelievable So you guys in that vein you guys started a decentralized exchange in 2017 back when these were kind of still fairly marginal so It was each venex and it later rebranded to diversify and then now rhinofi How do you juggle this so basically in terms of?
Trustlessness and so on obviously having a dex is preferable to having a centralized exchange in some sense because kind of like everything is Transparent kind of the spirit is there. So how do you see the coexistence of both of these bronze branches? So I think that the beauty of of big venex and this group that is always You know, there is this meme
of being in for for the tech, right? So then you know, you have people with big gold chains and and so on but We have been always really in in
this field for for the tech, right? We always try to push the boundaries of tech even when Dexys were not a thing we thought how we could Make sure that people if people are not comfortable in leaving their tokens and their money on the exchanges how we can make the Experience their user experience great in a sense that centralized exchanges have the advantage of being extremely fast in
execution because the Think about the fact that now the average latency of an order on beat phoenix is around in the internal system is around the ten Microseconds between ten and twenty microseconds, right?
So that's how you scale you can handle any sort of volume the and so and you can only do that through a centralized platform because Even the fastest blockchains like so Anna, they have a block time of 400 milliseconds So that is incredibly incredibly longer is like an eternity compared to the latency that you have in a centralized system But you know the problem there is
just something in physics called the speed of light,
right? The information goes up to the speed of light and so you cannot Move information if you have multiple nodes that have to concur to the same information they have to agree they have to exchange information that speed is the speed of light and so as Fast as it can be if you have to have two different Do different round trips around the world because you one node could be Tokyo one
could be Switzerland the other one could be in the US Then you know you get to four hundred five hundred milliseconds of a minimum time that is needed for a blockchain and So for a DAX to in terms of latency Now so the way we approach this is what are the pros and cons of a DAX compared to a
centralized exchange? And for us the most important part was the having the ability of keeping it Your own custody while trading so being able to trade as fast as fast as you can with the normal centralized user experience, but at the same time keeping control over your custody I think that is the holy grail of of finance if I have to think it through of course the the other important part is The transparency
right so you want to make sure that people don't front around you and so on but I think that the transparency Can be on one side of course on the DAX is you have transparency, but you have a normal latency So you can also we had there were also cases in which people were front -run because you know they you looking at the mem pool looking at you know the you know have even the The the validators for
example who can front -run people because they receive the transactions a little bit sooner So there are also problems like that in index right so to me the holy grail and the big Advantage of a DAX is the ability of letting people control their own funds So that's why we started fnx in that way as of today.
I think you know the There is another Or there was another interesting kind of advantage of DAX is versus centralized exchanges that is privacy or Anonymity if you want if you will right so with DAX is you usually log in with you with your metamask and so you know or whatever other wallet you have and Then you you can start trading
immediately. You don't have to go through KYC ML and so on but My opinion as of today seen also Mika and the other regulations that part that advantage of DAX is will come to an end I think is you know regulators make it made it abundant and clear that if you trade against Someone else and that someone else is a person that is sanctioned The fact that you are using a DAX is not going to save you
or create a justification for you So basically what will end up in my opinion and from what I gather Being the only advantage of DAX is that is still a great advantage Is the ability to keep in your own custody of the funds and not be subject to a potential exchange hacks So we'll see the future is Will will tell us who you know power thing these
things will develop. I Relate in a bit to the sort of big for next journey, but also like more generally if you journey like as an entrepreneur I mean you mentioned sort of like how the team sort of made it through all of that and and like You mentioned also like how you you have to focus on tech I'm curious like how do you think about you know building an organization and like company culture and
like what are sort of the main learnings you've had in that regard so far Between Bitfinex and tether We had a really really really low Number of defections. I think in I don't know in in in ten years. We could count it less than You know two or three percent People stick here.
I Think the reason is the culture the culture is really about openness Kindness We there is a first rule that I have so myself and and couple other people in them in the Chief positions we do every single final interview Right, so we still do all the final interviews.
Although we are growing the number one rule is never hired don't hire a toxic person So you sometimes have amazing talent, but to be every early Could be challenging for the team Right, you don't if you hire the wrong person if that person will affect 10 10 people around them,
right? So the ability sometimes, you know, and as I said I've been a developer sometimes you see developers that get all cocky because you know, they are right and everyone else is wrong or because they have you know the They they are all the only ones that That have the truth on how things should
be architect, right? And so We are really careful in in hiring people that understand the value of collaboration within the teams and that's something that So far over time allowed Bitfinex to remain one of the top platforms in the crypto ecosystem while having probably one tenth to one fifth of the the headcount of of other platforms, so That's that's of something about you know creating and healthy team
healthy responsibilities and chain of responsibilities people really committed to the success of the company and So I think you know the the biggest Take away from from my career is focus on the team focus on the people and you will have success Now I really appreciate you saying that let's talk about Ted or
like how how did Teddy get started? Ted are starting 2014 as a really simple product a simple idea in 2014 they were Just few exchanges right you could count, you know the exchange of the crypto currency exchange is on the on the Fingers of
two hands. There was Bitfinex of course beat stamp kraken coin base there was ok coin and BTCC not not many others at least not many relevant others and so There was a mean to the at the end of 2013 It was also the first moment in history that Bitcoin broke one thousand dollar in price and Across multiple trading venues right so you had maybe one point two thousand dollars at any point in time There
was a huge spread across exchanges Up to 20 % right so some exchanges were at one point two K others were at 950 others were at one thousand there isn't is that By then the work of the arbitrageurs was not possible the arbitrageurs are those kind of traders that sell Bitcoin where on the exchange where the price is higher they send it for dollars They take the dollars they move the dollars on the exchange
where the price is lower They use these dollars to buy Bitcoin and then send the Bitcoin on the exchange where the price is higher and so on and so forth They do it in the loop so that this the the spread across these Exchanges will go down and they all get aligned In order to do this you have to you need to be able to move Bitcoin From one exchange exchange to the other but also you need to be able to move
dollars from one exchange to another but Moving dot moving Bitcoin takes the minutes right the average block that Bitcoin is the minutes but moving dollars is extremely More difficult sometimes, you know international wires might take one days two days three days seven days and there is the weekend so Your trading opportunity your arbitrage opportunity is long gone if you wait so much So the really
simple idea around Tatter was okay. Let's reuse the incredible Technology that Bitcoin
created the cold blockchain. Let's just put The US dollar because it's the most used currency in the world simple as that Back in back in at that time, you know, there was no it here yet So the way to do it the only platform that allowed that was called Omni layer that is a color coin system That is based on Bitcoin So tatter was born on Omni layer fast forward many years and you
know tatter started as a Simple project to allow art to make more efficient crypto trading but in 2019 2020 with a pandemic something changed you know with the economies of the world especially in emerging markets developing countries They they started to Have big issues who are seen argentina, turkey vietnam, venezuela so many others, you know all these National currencies are re devaluating against the
dollar really really quickly in some cases. I think that argentina paces lost 98 against the us dollar in five years and More than 80 was lost by
the turkish leader. So All the people people living those countries where You know these people need needed solution needed the way out needed the way to save their wealth right who is not about speculation here is about A father of a family that works the entire year to earn for example turkish leaders at the end of the year is poorer Compared to the beginning of the year just because it's national his
national currency went down the bin and so people have A survival instinct and so they started to look at solutions and usd t was already the most used solution That that could help them so usd t became basically this this This currency that the world started to use and to To build on all the in all the emerging markets now if you go in argentina and Buenos iris You have find ton of places where you
can be campaigned usd t Same happens in venezuela in so many other countries and i must say we didn't envision that we didn't think about it When we created tether was really a simple idea and so we are humbled by the success of of usd t I always say that Before 2022 we never had even a marketing team for tether and so You know people started using our product in the way they saw more fit And in the
way that was more helpful to them. So that that is really exciting Can you give us
an idea of how it's used today? So kind of in in percentage kind of like what what percentage is kind of like What i would call normie use so kind of like the the turkish father or The argentinian family mother who kind of keeps their salary in tether in order to spend it as efficiently a couple of months later So it's really Just to say it's really hard to pinpoint the exact figures
because in you know, we are living in a decentralized world And so information is captured but um as of today, I think that at least 50 of the tether in circulation the usd t in circulations in circulation are kept as savings and not necessarily used for trading so That is a great achievement because I think it changed It happened in in four years right in four years people had this incredible
bad situation of suffering financial suffering and I always say that we are Kind of an weird weird weird situation at tether because we We see that if we have more success means that the world Is going towards a worse place right because you know the That's the the reason for all these countries to look at the dollar is because something is not working their own country and the Easiest way to have access
to the dollar is usd t so In one way someone could see of course is a success for a company But is is um it's had anything to see that you know to understand that success is also determined by In parting competency uh from from um, you know um financial management for of many countries and uh, you know, um the inability To preserve preserve wealth From government in these countries that led people
to fly towards a more a safer currency You've moved um stack or you have kind of added stacks over The last couple of years so as you said kind of you guys started out on omni And then you added ethereum and now you see usd t is natively issued on a number of networks How do you determine which chains to?
Um to issue natively on so basically basically if you if you look at Payments on chain tether on tron this kind of where it's at at the moment So how how how do you kind of see these movements? How do they happen? Um, do you plan them? yeah so We listen to communities and Every time we deploy usd t on the chain We do an enormous amount of the divisions that goes from
the security of of the blockchain. So how is you know the um the technology is built to the interest of a real community And the actual ecosystem around such blockchain Right is pointless to list to add usd t to a chain that doesn't have Users or interests because then you know, we we expose ourselves to risks while not You know getting any benefit in terms of adoption so The interesting and I get this question a
lot an interesting thing about tron is that you know, we launched first ethereum Well, first there was a tether omni then There was usd t was launched on ethereum and then was launched on on tron People choose whatever they want, right? So people choose the transport layer of usd t they want We just to be clear. We are centralized stablecoin.
So all our Features and capabilities are shared across the different Blockshins for example, we can freeze us at seats. It's public right? We can freeze wallets working for working with law enforcement That is something that applies to all the different blockchains and so People
just choose the transport layer. So the blockchain for usd t that is more fitting to them and 99 % of of the people would always choose something that is faster and something that is cheaper Let's think about how what I said before so tether usd t has becoming Really important for hundreds of millions of people across the board, especially in emerging markets and developing
countries you know, we we don't support us customers and I don't think europeans need stablecoins either.
That is that is my take So the vast vast majority of tether users is all in emerging markets and developing countries Countries that we as we said They you know, their initial currencies is losing really quickly as the dollar and where you know One every dollar or transaction fee is extremely important We have we have seen after 2018 2017 how many times the theorem gas
fees they grew through, you know from $2 to 50 dollars to 100 dollars right every time there is some excitement the gas fees goes go crazy high and so Tron had really low gas fees For for a long time right tron had this Is more centralized as this system of validators and for a long time had You know proof of stake compared to proof of work the theorem moved from proof of work to proof of
stake more recently So, you know the throne was a simplified approach to evm that was extremely effectful because you know all this In think about africa and south america and the central america certain countries of asia You know even 50 cents of transaction fees are really high right So maybe they earn 50 dollars to 200 dollars in a month And if they have to spend five dollars every time they
send a transaction that is not a product for them the interesting and sometimes, you know the the ethereal community criticized Us a little bit because you know the tron is still heavily used the reality is that Ethereum had to for ethereal took four years to come up with the layer two solutions That would bring down the fees to a variable Value right for the vast majority of the users of blockchain And so
for if you give to a competitor that would be tron in this case four years of first mover advantage Of course, it's really hard to take it back Especially when also all these layers two solutions built on ethereum are completely Are anyway
competing with each other as well. It's like, you know the sims on me where you know with the scots where basically um in the end everyone hates each other and The the reality is that we um, we are seeing You know, we we think that it is really important for usc t to be more diversified on different blockchains Is important that although these blockchains will start to grow an ecosystem will
keep transaction fees low And will keep the transaction speed high in order to fulfill the interest and the need of um of emerging markets populations Um tron transaction fees, um I have moved up Significantly though, right? So basically a tsc 20 transfer currently is around a dollar 50 So it's it should be impacting the people That are surfed best by by tether. Yes,
exactly. And that's why we are seeing opportunities on Launching ladder chains recently we launched on selo Well, today's ago we launched on selo that has lower transaction fees is bm compatible And we are also looking at polygon and
other uh layer twos. What I'm saying is that Now that hundreds well actually tens of thousands of integrators like merchants payment solutions have adopted Tron is really hard for the layer two solutions
only fear to compete, right? You They had four years of first mover advantage So you started you started kind of right focusing on this arbitrage use case and now There is you know kind of tether is like branched out and there's a lot of this, you know Payments use cases or people using it
as a store of value. I heard in some Into you you talked about Tether as a sort of over collateralized bank account I'm curious if you think of like the long -term vision for a tether like where do you see it going? so tether evolved a lot, I mean We We were the black sheep of of crypto Maybe we still are and I'm not realizing it but Um, we were the the the black sheep of crypto for a long
time. Um Is that we we thought that? Keeping your head down and you know not being you know not entering and not entering in public disputes and not being you know present on twitter and so on would Would work for us, um, you know, it's like okay If I work if I keep my head down and do a good job People will be okay with me will will be happy and we realize that we are good people And then you know that that
didn't work well and you know, we started to understand that people needed And no, I'm heavy quantities of transparency and I think you know, it's it is rightful to to us for that and um, so We changed I think heavily in the last years the amount of information that we publish The way we managed our services much more public We came up We were the first ones to to to come up with an attestation
with a breakdown of the reserve showing how much we have in different things We were subject to many critics that we took well and we applied to the company so that we could Improve also our service, you know, I'm sure you remember the commercial paper part You know, although there were a lot of nonsense like we had ever grand day and you know all the chinese papers and so on that was Really
stupid, but anyway Um, we we proved that we could convert everything or almost everything in us t bills as of today So the community was asking us to
do changes and we always listen to the community. We made these changes Um as of today, I think we have well as the 31st of december 2023 we had 80 .3 billion dollar c us treasury bills that would put us at the 20th as the 20th country in the world as own owners of us depth and um when it comes I
think to the three months Treasury bills owners. We are the third one as in terms of holdings so Our the majority of our t bills are all short terms like within 90 days and so Now nowadays in the last attestation we published um other numbers like we have we had 5 .2 billion On top of the 100 reserves that are covering all the issued usd t tokens so means meaning that we had Tatters making good money right in
a quarter we made almost three billion dollars and We could have dividend at any other company any other normal company imagine a bank that would make three billion dollars in profits Oh my god, they would Distribute these profits left and right to all the shareholders up to the last cent But no we tether we decided to keep the vast majority of these profits within the company up to 5 .2 billion as the last
quarter so that Ren tether end up in being a 5 .2 billion over collateralized so Of course banks are upset because you know banks are lending out 90 percent of their portfolio and their balance sheet and tether instead is doing the opposite is actually accruing more money and keeping it to show that
You can build something that's in safe. You can build a financial tool That is that is safe and doesn't need to lend out people's money and so that's That's what I what I like about tether right disability of of revolutionizing how you know Some certain things in finance are not so the yield on US Treasury belt has gone up enormously over
the last year or so. Have you ever thought about kind of making USCT in some form yield bearing and letting people who actually use it and hold it participate in that windfall so That is a really interesting one right so I get this a lot as well The reason why there are two different reasons why we cannot do it and doesn't make sense for us to do it Is the first one is that if you start
giving out interest and share interest that becomes
a financial product That then becomes a security. So that's something that is I don't think is is is a good approach So I think that many other products that are the stablecoins that are Trying to do a stablecoin that provides an interest are going to hand up in having some issues with the with the us regulators and other regulators, but also You know, I'm I consider myself a scientific person and
when I create a product. I always think How for whom This product is created for and who should who is going to use this product? If you live in Argentina where the intraday volatility of the the Argentine basis is higher than 4 to 5 percent Does this really matter that at the end of the
year you get 4 percent? And on the other side if we get that 4 percent we can create a really incredible stable product That can that is helping hundreds of millions of people So that's why I think, you know, if you are in the
us You have already the best banking rails. You have already the us dollar So if you put money in a stablecoin you expect to receive An interest right because that's a constant of a saving account and a checking account on a saving account You want to have an interest but everywhere else outside the
u .s For all the people outside the u .s The interest is in especially the ones living in the merchant markets and developing countries that are the actual users of a stablecoin Then that 4 percent is not really meaningful because what they care about is to have something that protect themselves from a much worse situation So I I totally understand That reasoning of course one
thing that did happen like a few years ago That's sort of like along these lines, right is that a lot of The usage of tether or of usd t was that people hold it on exchanges right the trade And and then I think you know finance created their b usd And you know, I think it was because they say like well all these people holding, you know usd t there and of course the sort of profits of that You're a
crew of tether and they were like, okay Let's if we can swap this out with our own stablecoin right we
can we can capture that So I'm curious. Do you think that might be a path for basically usd t would incentivize like some of these large platforms where massive amounts of Usd t get held or dc that as a sort of competitive threat Well, I know that some of our our biggest competitors are kind of doing that right so, you know, I know that From that some of our competitors are paying big
institutions and exchanges to hold their stablecoin again To me and to you know, many legal teams that we told to That ends up in you are giving interest to someone else hence Can become or can be considered security. So The point is that tether today is 102 billion dollars in market cap Maybe
we'll go down. Maybe someone else will create a better solution But we are not Look again, we are here for the tech We are keen for the innovation if we become the second biggest stablecoin or third biggest stablecoin as long as is safe As long as it follows our ethos. That's fine. We
are happy with it, right? So we don't We don't have to be forever the first We need What we like is to leave a sign in terms of innovation a utility and how with our Technology with our passion we can we can change the world and if someone will create something better. That's fine but I believe that creating trying to You know be to compete and trying to Reduce the security also
in this case from a the legal side, right? So if you if you start doing more and more things if you can if you keep adding flavors To the stablecoin and you start doing this and that because you are scared to become the second or the third or losing market cap Or losing market share look, I mean That's
not us, right? So we we believe that the simpler it is The safer it is So if you start adding all these nuances Eventually you will fall in an issue and that could endanger the stablecoin So again tether has more than 300 million users across the world And so the only thing we do care about is that is safe Your main um usd stablecoin competitors usdc Um, how how do you see the differences between usc t
and usdc? Well, they are focusing mostly And historically they have been focusing a lot on the us to me and and and europe now to me is um If you look at the us and if you look at europe or switzerland Everyone has two credit cards in or debit cards in their pocket have cash have two bank accounts You know, there is no need To me, I always described like trying to sell an ice cream to an skimmy's,
right? So there is no point When you create a product again, you have to create it for for for the people that really need it You know, and those are the ones That don't have access to a bank account the there are billions of people in the world They don't have access to a bank account. There are billions of people that that are They're not bad people. They're
really good people. They're nice people, but they are Not really interesting for the banking system Because for the banking system if you're not profitable enough as a human being They will you will not not be on board Right, if you'll not put in all your salary and if your salary is not enough is not big enough to justify You know, they're outdated You know financial infrastructure Then they will never accept you
as a customer for all those people there is usd We were clear, you know, when we saw the pandemic and all these emerging markets issues happening We
were clear that is our crowd. That is the people we want to serve We see our competitors always trying to Play the game of wall street and be want to be, you know The stable coin of institutions, but institutions have already the best banking rails So I think there is a big so the biggest difference in I think is strategy So we want to be the last the stable coin the dollar for
the last mile, right for for the For the normal people, um, we think that bankers have already too much What are your thoughts on decentralized, um, stables? So basically Things like die Rye, I mean, so basically there's different flavors,
right? Like fully collateralized collateralized with Acids that may be difficult to get a price feed for under collateralized agro -rhythmic and so on Do you see those gaining ground in any way because kind of the way that centralized stable coins work is we leverage heavily the existing financial infrastructure and kind of are Exposed to financial infrastructure risk that kind of pertains to
the to the legacy system How do you see that play out in the future? Let's go with a little bit of history, right? So While we think about algorithmic stable coins, we think about terraluna We
all know how it ended up, right? So I was quite vocal in the months before Saying to many people look terraluna is is gonna be gonna blow up And many answer me. Well, you are only saying that because terraluna is going to eat up all tether market share and um, but the the interesting fact is that It's easy to create a stable coin that is, you know, one million market cap to billion, three billion, five billion If
you get to 10 billion or I think 17 to 18 billion was terraluna at the peak Every the liquid it has to
be there, right? You have to be able to pay out immediately you have to be able to redeem in um in 2022 was april may when terraluna blew up There was you could see the difference between an algorithmic stable coin that was uh That was made through some, um, you know, we are the incentivization mechanisms and tether so terraluna Fell because they couldn't sustain haver dameships So everything
started to blow up a reason after after terraluna blew up Uh publicly a group of hedge funds started to short USDT on the secondary markets So you could see And recently I think dcg came out or neither where some Some disclosures during a class action showing that also dcg shorted uh during those times USDT for 400 million dollars And uh, but there are other hedge funds like fear tree and and others
they they they shorted billions of dollars in all together across all these groups In few days of USDT they kept the price of USDT below one dollar on
the secondary markets. Why they did that? Of course, they did that because they wanted to cause a bank run That is what what basically happened on on terraluna So they wanted to cause a bank run where people you know, if you keep the price of USDT below the dollar Or a stable coin below the
dollar or what happens is that? Market makers are coming in on the secondary markets and buying The stable coin for cheap Going to the stable
connoisseur i .e in this case tether Redeeming for one dollar getting the dollar going moving the dollar back on the exchange buying cheap stable coin going to the stable connoisseur redeem it and so on and so forth that cause that is In the banking world the start of a bank run So what happened with tether in 2022 in may was that tether was able to pay Out in 48 hours seven billion
dollars That was 10 percent of our reserves and in 20 days we paid around 20 to 25 billion dollars of redemptions So that was 25 percent of our market cap So there are a few banks in in in the history that have been subject to a bank run Washington Mutual 2008 10 percent redemption they went belly up Silicon Valley bank sinchure silver gate all these guys Didn't survive two bank runs You know, we are seeing
recently also another bank in these days had issues so the the difference between A stable coin that is backed by liquid And real world assets and an algorithm is stable coin is enormous I don't think an algorithm is stable coin makes sense that war can grow Above a certain threshold because otherwise become to risky It's it becomes attackable by
attackers. They tried it with us. They couldn't make it And they lost enormous amount of money because in we we were backed and we were solid they They had and when they tried to attack terraluna they succeeded it blew up really really fast So when it comes to the other times like Collateralize like die. I think they're really
interesting concepts. The issue is how you grow the market cap We having extremely volatile assets in your portfolio like if you have If you have Bitcoin in theory as part of your collateral that becomes hard because we have seen how in the last four years
Bitcoin in theory lost 80 % of their value, right? So it's really really tricky So that pushed die into my understanding to move towards tbls as well but you know, if you Are have if you start to using tbls as part of your collateral, you are no different than than tether or or the other You know centralized
stable coins. So I think in a way die decided to Decided that the model of of tether was probably the right one and more more scalable one in the long term Yeah, they added usdc as collateral fast So usdc the tbls. I think this is something that's kind of slowly ramping up. But for for um sometime 70 % of die collateral was
actually usdc And so it's just a proxy, right? So I think look the the point is And the question that people should ask themselves is Why you need a stable coin? so what you want to get from a stable coin because if you want to have an asset that is resistant to the wrath of god that no one can take away from you and so on that is bitcoin,
right? So you have already something that is digital that that is Unconfiscatable that is built to survive to you know all the crazy monetary policies that that work is going is going into If you want a stable coin that quacks like a dollar probably, you know, you are still bound to the Fiat
word. So you need for a specific use case a dollar So why you are forcing why you are why we are trying to push all these crazy mechanisms to try to to recreate a dollar And not using you know, if you want a dollar if you're trying to recreate the dollar It means you need the dollar for something and you need at some point
to exchange that dollar for a dollar, right? For a real world dollar So if you are in that situation probably you just want something that has that is backed by a dollar or backed by The closest proxy to a dollar that is your stb So, you know you you you why putting Bitcoin in ethereum to recreate them to recreate the dollar I mean when eventually that dollar that you created through bitcoin in ethereum
You have to sell it for a dollar that is backed by the real dollars or by the us economy that would be tether Right, you cannot cash out easily die. You have to sell it for us You cannot redeem it
directly for us dollars. And so that's the point of the stable coin is to be able to To have a link to the physical world or to the fiat world So that's that's my small rant around the stable coins It's just it's not that we didn't think about how we can create something matter Well, we have some ideas that are quite interesting But the the reality is that nothing is really proven to to be
able to become so big as usdT And maintain its stability no matter what that without using a heavy amount of physical assets So us dollars, I mean especially in this crowd they are heavily criticized and kind of They're often made out to be something
that kind of could collapse any day now, right? So have you thought about adding an additional product that kind of doesn't just use us dollars or treasury bills as as the underlying Collateral about kind of having some sort of basket of currencies or kind of like some sort of Special drawing rights and Yes, basically adding like the swiss franc and the euro and the yen and so on to the mix So this is a
Great question and there is a lot of unpack the the thing is that So again, if you are scared about the the us dollar Is probably you don't in there isn't why you should be scared is that eventually like in the weimar republic You might be able to buy a
loaf of bread with one billion dollars, right? but I can tell you and if the dollar gets to that point the euro is long gone And that's not about speak about the japanese yen Well, the swiss frac is probably the only thing that will remain and will survive because swiss people understand finance better than anyone else but There is no other basket the only thing that would make sense is gold What about a
basket of kind of like stocks and you know in principle, I mean you would ask yourself Where would the value go? Right and basically physical values would still be there. So kind of wouldn't you want like shares in companies and Actual physical goods like Goals of and I mean though there are representations of those on
chain as well, right? Well, if the dollar goes bust That is the entire Nasdaq and the New York store exchange and all this the american markets are the biggest ones So do you want ready to have some some stocks in the u .s. Market? I think if we are thinking and I like the you know this thought right so about you know What will happen if something happens to the u .s. Dollar?
But that means that the entire world economy is going towards a reset and there are only two things that will save you Bitcoin and gold so every Human humanity go went through many resets and they will They always were done through gold never through fiat currency Now we have also bitcoin as as a great alternative and gold asteroids, but here's the thing right so USdT has to represent a dollar So with
one usdT you shouldn't be able to buy what more than one dollar right so for us The usdT is a representation of dollar that is representation of
the u .s economy If again with the dollar you can buy if we you know you need one billion dollars to buy a loaf of bread You will need one billion usdT to buy it off of bread is not our business to make the dollar Prettier and and more solid than the dollar itself right so it's just a representation of dollar if you really want something that is better Then you should you might want to use bitcoin or
gold? Yeah, I mean I think a huge part of the value Of you know something like usdT is also well I mean let's say in crypto usdT or usdT is used a lot right like let's say you invest in some company or do something like that It's mostly done with stablecoins and of course the nice thing is you will have a contract and in a contract it says oh $50 ,000 $70 ,000 something like that and
you can just send 70 ,000 usdT and there's no
complexity. There's no conversion Accounting is simple So like I think even if you created some kind of other stablecoin that you know, let's say tracked inflation and It's it's from a practical perspective It will be less useful right then something that just mirrors the dollar I completely agree the point the question that people should always ask themselves is what i'm using this for so if
you're using it to just to Have a dollar then you should go for the closest thing to a dollar that you can find And that will quack as a dollar and also in the accounting as you said So for the rest there is plenty of other options that that we created in the last many years Cool. Well, let's let's maybe move on to the last topic because I mean we've talked about bitfinex We've talked about
tether. So I mean you already are doing a lot, but then I think you started another thing Which is called hole punch Which is focused on building P2P applications Can you talk a little bit about what is hole punch and and you know the kind of related things to hole punch and like What's the
vision behind that? Sure, so with tether we we came from this enormous learning curve on How the world is going bust and it's not not just us right so then one of the main reasons of crypto is that we think at least many of us think that um economy is the real world economy is going towards a direction where you know countries Are more and more at war among themselves The economy is getting more unpredictable
and so we created A solution or to to that that is you know bitcoin or blockchain based products and so on but You know we have this concept in crypto that is called individual sovereignty Where you should be of course, we all live in a society But you should have financial freedom So you need to you you you want to have the direct to interact with whoever you want, but the individual sovereignty that
Through financial freedom is incomplete. You need also freedom of speech to achieve that because if you have Individual sovereignty, but you cannot say anything to anyone because otherwise you get censored or or going jail That doesn't matter much right um and vice versa If you have freedom of speech But then you don't have financial freedom Whatever you say can be used to seize your funds or or
make sure that you you are not really free to use your own money so Five six years ago Myself and matias boost the you know both developers both Really enjoying the the concept peer -to -peer communications as we are enjoying the concept of bitcoin as peer -to -peer money um, we both came through from a background of a file sharing system like bit torrent, you know and all the predecessors And we
know there is an interesting aspect of file sharing systems that I think is really was comparable and is comparable to um blockchain and and money systems So you might be familiar with nubster the first file sharing system, you know went bust closed and all through with different iterations uh developers try to create different solutions to make file sharing more decentralized exactly as We
are we try to do with money so Different attempts right from um, you had line wire you have a kazam You have a donkey you have a mule and then you finally you have bit torrent The difference across all these different Approaches is that all the different approaches before bit torrent they had a centralization point they had You know if you were using kazam or or line wire you wanted to look
for a movie you had to connect to a centralized index like or certain servers that had all the list of all the files so you can find download the files, right? And all these centralized servers were shut down, right? So then people Jumped to a next version trying to decentralize file sharing a bit more And son is for
sorry. So that was the history of file sharing arrived to the point where with bit torrent Everything was really decentralized from
the indexes. So the list of all the files Where they centralized through a system called distributed hash table dht You know the file sharing itself the the exchange of the files was completed peer to peer And then son is for now with um, but yes myself Really were fun of bit torrent and so we thought what if We took the very same technology around bit torrent But we improve it we make it
available for not only for file sharing but for real real time streams In the world almost everything is a real time stream this Chat on or ever sorry the riverside is a real time stream, right? So we have how tens of streams audio video when we browse is uh, the internet is a real time stream And so we thought if we can take those protocols and we can create a new set of protocols that are free
That are open source that are private. So we took also all the learnings from blockchain to create a Identity to use that encryption that we learned from blockchain to make it more Secure than
bit torrent was and and is right? So we we spend five years to recreate the basic protocol technology to create a better layer for internet I I think personally, you know when you know the I'm a technologist and I think that one something that really annoys me is the fact that Internet change from the beginning from the real purpose it was born for when the internet was born was Born to allow
people to talk to each other and share information to each other with each other Every computer had an IP address and still today has an IP address So that every computer could directly interact with the others but more and more after the year 2000 centralized System were born by can so google of course then email Supercentralize and then you know, what's up telegram all all these communication systems are
incredibly centralized They are going actually against and all the cloud providers are incredibly centralized now 70 of the entire traffic intern Is provided
by service that are running on the top three? cloud providers aws Microsoft google So is that really The future that we want So what happens is and now we go back to the beginning of this this this chart We we we are building internet for the best case scenario where everyone is friendly to each other What if tomorrow and you should we should learn from history?
What if tomorrow? Italian friends will not be friends with each other or I don't know Germany and Spain or I don't know the US and another country so what if and we we built and you know the reality is that All these solutions like whatsapp are built by specific company single company And he's using data centers in specific locations in specific geographic locations, so You
might see a future where data will be held hostage and use against other countries If you if you live in europe use whatsapp if you live in Rome You know if use whatsapp Every single time you send a small message If we go to frown fort and go back to
Rome, right? So 90 percent of the people for 90 percent of their time are talking to people that are within You know two kilometers from where they live yet every time we chat Data travels thousands and thousands of miles just to go back You know to our neighbor or to be to go back to be two
kilometers for months Is that intelligent? Not of course imagine how much Governments are spending in internet infrastructure just to create beefier lines bigger internet lines for People that are talking for most of the time with their neighbors or with their families that are living in the same area
That is really utterly stupid. Sorry to say that but it is And so this is done because centralized companies and big tech providers are Need that amount of information every day to milk that information To make money to sustain additional growth new data centers is like You know a circle that that goes around and keep growing is like And it's feeding itself without us sharing more information
more photos. They be you know, they they will never survive The the cost of maintaining their infrastructure will crush them And so this long story to say that we there isn't why we created whole punching kit Is to showcase that you know this this interview could have been done through kit completely bearded pier without any central server If a whole punch the company that is building kit would die
tomorrow kit will keep working imagine If you are in a country, right? So kit is serverless Allows you to do a chat. We have we created a bitcoin chat On kit with there are 1 .5 thousand people today. There is no central server. They are talking real time. They're sharing files You can share any Size of file you want because there is no limit. It's
just your bandwidth. You are interacting with each other You don't need if you share a file On zoom you are limited to one other megabyte because otherwise if everyone was sharing two big files Then you would crush You know telegram or zoom or
whatever, right? But When peer -to -peer you don't have those limitations So what we wanted to create with kit on whole punch is we want to Wanted to prove to the world and to all the developers that you can build peer -to -peer applications with a great user experience Without having to have central servers And so kit now is being used by my many people Have much better quality video quality much
better out of quality just because if you if you are talking to a person With leaving the same area It feels like you have that person in front of you Because the latency is the smallest it can ever be Because the message is the data packets will find the shortest path between you and that person and that between of course you the two devices Is not magic if intern was built in that way, but there was
never an incentive by anyone To build it to use it in that way because The companies that had the most money had the incentive to make it centralized and all the rest all the nerds let's say like us They never had the money to build, you know highly successful applications To prove that internet can be become Server -free in a way for or at least most of it can become server -free And so that long
story short That are found recently as we chatted a little bit about it With an important profitability So since we are as I said, we are in for the technology. We wanted to create the freest free as in freedom a chat solution That is unstoppable that is private and doesn't need doesn't need any
central server Super cool. So I get key this kind of like basically decentralized peer -to -peer, you know alternative to like sort of whatsapp and telegram Do you see the same protocol?
also as a foundation for You know very different types of applications Sure you can on the same protocols you can build peer -to -peer uber One of the scariest things is like imagine that you know, this baby comes where Uh, that you you monitor your children, you know, they are all the data passed through a central server that you
don't know How scary is that? You you should be able to connect directly from your phone to your home device without crazy configure needing crazy configurations All that is possible through hole punch and You can build, you know peer -to -peer mapping you can whatever you think is built today You can build a hole punch. You
don't know how many when I talk to other developers. I I tell them I showcase Hole punch you can I showcase how you can build You know interaction between two devices without any middle server providing, you know one device provides some services to another device Without both phones, maybe without any central server And even developers are mind blown and that tells a lot about our education So as developers
when we go to the reverse in university we are taught that The client server model is the only moderate
model existing. You always need a server for for many clients That's not true And we wanted to prove it and we are going to invest a lot of money to make sure that education will pick up this new pattern Because we want an horde of developers to build peer -to -peer applications that desentalize applications to reduce the dominance of the any tari big tech companies I I hear on of that and I'm a
big fan. I will definitely check out hole punch The the one thing that kind of always got me about these peer -to -peer platforms like BitTorrent was that that there was an incentive layer missing so kind of people Basically was very sensitive to kind of people who would Explore who would exploit it by kind of downloading and not seeding So in principle kind of like on any crypto
infrastructure. You can kind of build in An incentive layer said happening with hole punch
as well No, not really. So, I mean hole punch is space protocols It doesn't have a token will never have a token because I believe that is a simple protocol that can well It's quite complex, but it's a protocol that can be taken by everyone and you can build whatever you want on it now I agree that there were with BitTorrent Most of the people wanted only to download but never give
up their upload bandwidth This is completely true, but let's think about the other side, right? If you are building like a peer -to -peer chat And you you want to use a chart your incentive is to talk
to people So there is no actual cost for you. It's not that you are running and know that that allow people to run their traffic through you so the difference between a hole punch and a blockchain is that in a blockchain you have a global share state So if you run node, you will see all the traffic you will see, you know the mempool data and so on With the hole punch You only choose to to talk and
to connect to the people you want to because you are creating a network with them So hole punch is not a huge big network But is a protocol to create your own small network with only the people you want to talk to because you are interacting with them Without any central server That's the only way to make something scalable blockchains are Need to use a global share state because you need to make
sure that no one is double spending right But you don't need that you don't need in in if you are creating a communication system You don't want to receive messages from someone from the other side of the world to route them somewhere else, right? So it doesn't matter. You shouldn't be a server yourself There is now this other program project called noster They use, you know, they use relays centralized
relays. I always make the comparison between Noster and then and kit as in with noster you have relays And so you need to provide incentives
to people to run a relays. Otherwise nothing will work Well with the hole punch, you don't need relays So hence you have a simpler more simplified network And you don't have to have incentives because the incentive of people is already talking to each other For example, now you are in Imagine that you were in ua in dubai you cannot use telegram or whatsapp to call your friends and family Because you know the telegram
whatsapp are blocked you can use kit to talk to anyone and from from from there and to there because that's um Because the beautiful kit is because it's peer -to -peer in order to block pe key you will need to block the entire internet Because it's not predictable where you connect to Super interesting. So is is the underlying technologies at some sort of whisper network or how
does it work? It's used the same concept of bit torrent in order to Find each other we use the same concept of bit torrent called dhd the distributed hash table so that um The distributed hash table is uh In in bit torrent arrived to 10 million nodes
in size at the peak, right? So you have all these 10 million nodes that are acting as um, not connection points, but are Temporary database temporary databases Is basically they are key value stores that are storing part of the global index in a really resilient way so if If you shut down a part of the network even 1 million nodes the network will keep surviving and will adapt to
the new set of nodes So is really the most sophisticated resilient Uh distributed database ever created and we used it in order to allow people to find each other through the four key Because if we added a centralized index to key to that would be centralized the The point was centralization is that you cannot just add just a little bit of centralization Right. So either you are centralized
or not. There is no there's no in between because the moment you are a bit centralized
that you are centralized I'm curious. So one of the things one of the projects I've been pretty deeply involved in for quite a while is uh, it's been called orbit which uh, sort of you know, in visions basically a different architecture for like computing and an alternative to the internet where basically All of the computers work in a kind of p2p array where you know applications run
locally Who have you looked at orbit? Do you have any thoughts on the sort of tradeoffs between the whole punch approach versus that So I
really like orbit. I mean I I play with it. I think in 2017 2018 I I don't remember when but I think is a really Not all project in a sense of all but these around since a long time and um, the concept is great I think and the way it is designed is also I really love it I think a whole bunch is creating protocols for the real world, right doesn't Doesn't trying to change the world completely
starting from scratch We already have internet We have we have immediate needs that are creating A layer on top of internet that is secure that is uh that gives sovereignty to people And we are doing in the most simple way in the most modular way because with with orbit you had it was kind of The way I felt it is it's that is a monolithic approach You have to take it all and everything should run on
orbit. Otherwise it would you know What
wouldn't work? But with whole punch is We have more than 100 GitHub projects and libraries you can take bitten pieces And use it and craft it for and integrating in your real application your existing application already Right, so we are taking a different approach in order to change the internet That is giving you the tools to do small steps toward decentralization rather than forcing everyone in a new
completely different ecosystem Yeah, no, absolutely. I absolutely I think that's a fair description Uh in terms of the differences Do you see kids Becoming some kind of business down the line or is it just a sort of public service that you
guys want to develop? I think it will remain public service, I mean The point of kit is not making money, you know, there is this uh, sorry making many references to to memes but Well, you know the from batman joker is not that he said it's not about um The money is about sending message and For us kit is
that right? So we make good money with tether We's not that we have to make money every single time we do something Sometimes it's important to send a message And there is a pun intended because kit sends messages And I think this is a fantastic place to end because it is it is such an iconic You know a message to go out on I will definitely explore kit and hold punch more I think uh, the
entire interview was super fascinating But somehow the whole punch part got me most as kind of like appear to appear in decentralization maxi If people kind of want to learn more about hold punch Or indeed bin finnex or tether where can they go
to where can we send them? so um On x there is um until we replace x with something build on hold punch So that's um disclaimer So you could go on um at tether underscore to or at beat finnex or at All punch underscore to or at kit underscore io Or at paulo ardoino. So name is her name to find all my memes and something about everything that I do Cool. Thanks so much for coming on paulo. I
really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you guys. It was super fun Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week You can find and subscribe to the show on itunes spotify youtube soundcloud or wherever you listen to podcasts And if you have a google home or a lexa device, you can tell it to listen to the latest episode of the
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