If you read the news, you might have noticed a trend this past week. In addition to splashy features in Fortune and Bloomberg, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino talked with Reuters, He also talked with TechCrunch. Why did the man behind the stablecoin that everyone loves to hate launch a full-scale media blitz?
The timing isn’t arbitrary. This week, Tether launched USAT, a U.S.-regulated stablecoin issued through Anchorage Digital Bank — its first product designed to comply with new federal rules and compete directly with Circle’s USDC. Fidelity Investments also just launched a competing stablecoin on Wednesday, joining JPMorgan Chase and PayPal in a broadening race.
Then there’s Howard Lutnick, the former Cantor Fitzgerald CEO. With Lutnick now a year into his role as Commerce Secretary and Cantor Fitzgerald managing Tether’s reserves, Ardoino appears to be seizing the moment to reposition Tether as not only legitimate but essential.
It’s a big shift from one extreme to the other. For years, Ardoino avoided the United States, watching from offshore as regulators circled and prosecutors investigated. His company was portrayed as opaque, possibly fraudulent, and, according to a piece by The Economist last summer, a “money launderer’s dream.”
But when Ardoino and I chatted by video call this week, it was clear those days are over. Tether is meeting with White House officials, collaborating with the FBI and Secret Service, and betting USAT can break Circle’s grip on the U.S. market. (USAT is separate from Tether’s flagship USDT, which has $187 billion in circulation globally but doesn’t meet new U.S. regulatory requirements.) Speaking from Lugano, Switzerland, where Tether maintains an office, the 41-year-old – who joined the company just two months after its 2014 launch – spent over an hour describing Tether’s transformation from a crypto play to mainstream acceptance.
Its momentum is undeniable, certainly. Tether’s USDT — essentially a digital dollar that uses blockchain technology to move across borders without being tied to any single institution — has a market capitalization of $187 billion, larger than of its stablecoin competitors combined. It also has some 536 million users, growing at 30 million per quarter. “It’s growing at a pace more like Facebook rather than any other fintech application,” Ardoino tells m …