Tether CEO on USAT, Bitcoin, and Why 2025 Was the Right Time for Entering US: 99Bitcoins Event Coverage
Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, launched USAT in the US in September 2025. “I understand now why the US is called the land of opportunity,” said Ardoino on 25 October 2025, as he took the stage at the Lugano PlanB conference. “There is still opportunity for good innovators and for free thinkers,” he said. “That’s why I’m very grateful that we had the opportunity to think about our main product, USDT, in the context of the US.”
Brandon Lutnick, Cantor Fitzgerald Chairman, weighed in. He said, “I think USAT is going to be an incredible initiative. And that’s what makes me so excited for Tether – the world’s greatest crypto company on Earth, and without even real perfect US penetration. If that’s not what A-plus potential is, I don’t know what is?”
“I’m very grateful to have entered the US market in 2025 and not in 2014,” said Ardoino.
“After all the learnings that we had in all the merchant markets and seeing Argentina, Turkey, Vietnam, Nigeria, and indonesia – we were prepared to understand also how our technology could scale to from the the countries and the regions that have the the lowest efficiency in terms of financial rails to region that is US where the financial rails are almost perfect.”
USAT is being led by Bo Hines, who is the former head of US President Donald Trump’s Council of Advisers on Digital Assets. “He’s a great guy,” said Ardoino about Hines. 2He’s going to drive the product with high success. But most importantly, he’s a Bitcoiner.”
DISCOVER:
“Bitcoin is the greatest commodity on earth,” Said Cantor Fitzgerald Chairman
“I think that 2024 was the first big year for institutional adoption of Bitcoin with the first ETFs. But I think we are still early. There is a lot of skeptics in the world. I still meet a lot of fans, a lot of companies that are afraid to touch Bitcoin with a 10-foot pole,” Cantor Fitzgerald Chairman said. “It’s clear how Bitcoin is becoming more and more a hedge against all the darkness that is happening in the world. And it doesn’t hurt to study, to educate, to understand it. I think as an industry and also from the institutional point of view, we need to do a better job to make it more accessible.”
“Cantor is one of 25 US primary dealers. So we will be custodying all the USAT assets, like we custody already a lot of the USDT assets,” said Lutnick. “It’s just the beginning for the US. And you’re going to see a lot of real tradified companies catch up to what Cantor’s been trying to do.”
“We were just trying to bring real credibility to the space as a real classic institution”
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Tether Launches Local AI Platform QVAC
Describing his newest launch, Ardoino said, “We launched our new product called , that is a local AI platform. The term QVAC comes from my preferred author – Isaac Asimov. He’s one of the most prolific authors in sci-fi and in history. And QVAC is a soon to be open source platform that aims to bring the execution, the inference and the fine tuning of artificial intelligence models directly on any device from embedded devices to any smartphone.”
“We should not have master. We should not have people in big tech companies that intermediate our intelligence because that’s how we become dumber as a society, rather than more intelligent,” said Tether CEO
“I predict that in the next five years – for more than 90% of the use cases of AI, you will be able to run them locally, maintaining your privacy, preserving your independence,” he added.
“ I think not knowing what is behind the scenes of your AI models – that you are executing with your own data and you’re feeding your own data to – is going to be very detrimental to our freedom and our privacy. I think that we are going to see that more and more, and it will be one of the biggest societal challenges in the history of humanity,” he added. “So, we wanted to prove to the world that as for cloud, you don’t need cloud for 99% of the use cases, yet we use cloud for 100% of the time. But really, you need cloud only as a backup, not as a connector among people. Internet is built and was built from the beginning to be peer-to-peer. And we believe that AI also should be peer-to-peer.”
Tether’s Quiet Revolution: From Stablecoins to Peer-to-Peer AI Workbenches
The cryptocurrency giant Tether, best known for its global stablecoin USDT, has entered a completely new frontier — edge AI computing — through its initiative QVAC Workbench and the PEAR peer-to-peer…
— Javed Alam (@jalam1001)
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Key Takeaways
Both Tether CEO And Cantor Fitzgerald CEO agree on AI, Bitcoin potential.
“I think that 2024 was the first big year for institutional adoption of Bitcoin with the first ETFs,” said Cantor Fitzgerald Chairman
