Why Tether’s CEO is everywhere right now

If you've been following the business and crypto press lately, a clear pattern has emerged. Over the past week, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino has appeared in high-profile features and interviews in Fortune, Bloomberg, and Reuters. The sudden ubiquity raises an obvious question: why is the leader of the world's most controversial stablecoin embarking on a full-scale media tour right now?

The timing is deliberate. This week, Tether unveiled USAT, a U.S.-regulated stablecoin issued via Anchorage Digital Bank, marking the company's first product designed to comply with new federal rules and directly challenge Circle's USDC on American soil. At the same time, Fidelity Investments rolled out its own stablecoin, joining JPMorgan Chase and PayPal in an intensifying race among financial heavyweights. Overlay that with the political context — former Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, now one year into his tenure as U.S. Commerce Secretary, while Cantor manages Tether's reserves — and Ardoino appears to be capitalising on a rare opening to recast Tether as not just legitimate, but indispensable.

It represents a dramatic pivot. For years, Ardoino kept his distance from the United States, operating primarily offshore while regulators scrutinised the company, and prosecutors probed the stablecoin sector. Tether was often described as opaque at best, and potentially fraudulent at worst. Last summer, The Economist went so far as to label it a "money launderer's dream."

That era, Ardoino insists, is over. When we spoke by video this week, he outlined a company eager to work openly with U.S. institutions. Tether, he said, is now meeting with White House officials, coordinating with the FBI and the Secret Service, and positioning USAT as a compliant alternative capable of loosening Circle's hold on the U.S. market. USAT, he emphasised, is distinct from Tether's flagship USDT, which has roughly $187 billion in circulation globally but does not meet new American regulatory standards.

Speaking from Lugano, Switzerland — where Tether maintains an office — the 41-year-old executive, who joined the firm just two months after its 2014 founding, spent more than an hour describing what he sees as Tether's evolution from a crypto-native experiment into a mainstream financial infrastructure.

By the numbers, Tether's scale is hard to ignore. USDT functions as a digital version of the U.S. dollar that can move across borders via blockchain without reliance on a single institution. Its market capitalisation now surpasses that of all rival stablecoins combined. Ardoino says the platform serves 536 million users and adds roughly 30 million new users every quarter. "It's growing at a pace that looks more like Facebook than any traditional fintech product," he said.

Competition, however, is heating up fast. Fidelity's entry into the stablecoin market underscores how aggressively major financial firms are moving into dollar-pegged digital assets, following earlier efforts by JPMorgan and PayPal.

Ardoino argues that Tether's true advantage lies not in Wall Street adoption, but in its impact on countries with unstable currencies. "In Argentina, the peso has lost 94.5% of its value against the dollar over the past five years," he noted. "In Haiti, the average daily income is about $1.34. These people were never really part of the global financial system."

"What Tether built," he continued, "is the largest financial inclusion success story in human history." He added that the company now works with nearly 300 law enforcement agencies across more than 60 countries, and that blockchain transparency makes tracking illicit activity easier than in traditional banking.

That claim remains contentious. Last year, reporting by The Economist detailed how alleged Russian money launderer Ekaterina Zhdanova used Tether to link British drug gangs, Russian hackers, sanctioned oligarchs, and intelligence operatives.

Ardoino dismisses the scale of those allegations. The sums involved, he said, were "a drop in the ocean." The overwhelming majority of USDT usage, he argued, is legitimate. "Criminals use iPhones; Criminals use Toyotas. That doesn't make the products criminal," he said.

He goes further, contending that USDT is actually more effective for law enforcement than cash. "If pallets of cash worth hundreds of billions are moving around the world, there's almost nothing authorities can do," he said. "With USDT, we can freeze funds quickly and transparently."

According to Ardoino, Tether has frozen approximately $3.5 billion in tokens, most of which is tied to stolen or scam-related funds. In one case in 2023, he says the company identified and immobilised $225 million linked to an enormous pig-butchering scam after traditional financial systems failed to detect it.

"We've onboarded the FBI and the Secret Service," he said. "We comply with OFAC."

Scepticism persists. Just three months ago, S&P Global Ratings described USDT's stability as weak. Ardoino waved off the criticism. "If that's the same S&P that missed the subprime crisis," he said, "I'm proud they consider us weak."

He pointed instead to the spring of 2022, when the TerraUSD stablecoin collapsed, erasing $40 billion in value and triggering panic across the sector. During the turmoil, hedge funds bet that Tether would be the next to fail. "We processed $7 billion in redemptions in 48 hours," Ardoino said. "Then $20 billion over 20 days. No bank in the world could handle that. We did."

He also alluded to a competitor that struggled during a separate crisis — widely understood to be Circle, whose USDC briefly lost its peg after revealing $3 billion in exposure to Silicon Valley Bank in 2023. When asked directly about Circle, Ardoino's team cut in, and he limited his response: "Sometimes you're portrayed differently when you don't bend the knee to Wall Street."

Today, Ardoino says Tether holds $30 billion in excess reserves beyond what's required to redeem all tokens. Those reserves are managed by Cantor Fitzgerald, whose former CEO now helps shape U.S. commerce policy. Lutnick has publicly defended Tether, while Cantor earns fees from overseeing its Treasury holdings — a relationship that has drawn scrutiny.

Ardoino insists Tether is safer than traditional banks. "Banks operate on fractional reserves of around 90%," he said. "If you deposit $1 million, only $100,000 is actually there. Even if Bitcoin went to zero, Tether would still have more assets than all USDT in circulation."

Those reserves are also enormously profitable. Fortune reports that Tether generated over $15 billion in profit in 2025, mainly from interest on reserves that are not shared with users. Ardoino says interest payouts are not a priority for Tether's core audience. For users facing daily currency erosion, preserving value matters more than yield.

Regulation may soon settle the issue anyway. The proposed CLARITY Act would bar stablecoin issuers from paying interest, a measure backed by banking groups concerned about deposit flight. For Tether, the rule would normalise its current model.

Beyond stablecoins.

Ardoino's ambitions are expanding. Tether Gold, launched in 2020, now represents $2.6 billion in tokenised gold. More broadly, Ardoino told Bloomberg that Tether holds roughly 140 tons of physical gold, worth about $24 billion, making it one of the world's largest private gold holders.

The company is also pushing into artificial intelligence. About nine months ago, Tether launched Qvac, a decentralised AI platform named after Isaac Asimov's short story The Last Question. Ardoino sees parallels between AI access and financial inclusion, arguing that centralised AI subscriptions will exclude billions.

Qvac, he says, is designed to run locally on smartphones, enabling widespread access as devices become more powerful and affordable across Africa and South America. In his view, USDT will eventually underpin the world's largest decentralised AI ecosystem.

Tether's investment portfolio reflects this ambition. According to Fortune, the company has committed over $1 billion to German robotics firm Neura, $775 million to social platform Rumble, and hundreds of millions more to satellites, data centres, agriculture, and even the Juventus soccer club. The magazine likened Tether's evolution to that of a sovereign wealth fund.

To Ardoino, the strategy is coherent. "Our goal is stability," he said. "Land, agriculture, gold, technology — they all serve the same purpose: ensuring Tether remains a cornerstone for our users."

Political risk remains, particularly in Washington. Ardoino, however, is unfazed. "Bringing more than 500 million people onto the dollar is something both parties should support," he said. "It's ultimately a matter of education."