How USDT0 Moves $150M Across Blockchains Every Day

Speaker A: I think the big challenge for when agentic payments will really start working and be integrated in our society will not really be a stablecoin challenge, it will be a network challenge. Uh, the amount of transactions per second that an agentic economy will require is absolutely insane. We're probably talking about single digit millions today. We've now hundreds of millions of agents that are talking to each other, playing things between each other and executing stuff on their own. It becomes fundamental to have networks that are highly performant and highly secure.

Speaker B: Foreign. Hello everyone and welcome to episode 90 of Colors of Web 3 and Entrepreneurship. My name is Lum, your host today. For those of you who are new to the Show, Colors of Web 3 and Entrepreneurship is a show highlighting the journeys of builders and innovators in Web3 and entrepreneurship. Uh, some topics, especially in Web3 make it technical, but we do our best to keep it accessible for almost fewer. Uh, here I'm today I'm joined by Lorenzo Romagnoli, he's the co founder of USDT0. Uh, Lorenzo, you want to give a quick introduction?

Speaker A: Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Lem. Uh, my name is Lorenzo. I'm one of the three co founders of USDT0. Been working in the industry for the last six or seven years basically. And uh, yeah, very, very excited to be here and happy to meet you.

Speaker B: Awesome. Cool. Yeah, same as well. And you said like three core us. You've been in the industry for like six years. I think a lot of the audience would be curious about what. Can you share a bit more about your background, what you did before web3 and then like when you walk us back forward.

Speaker A: Yes. So I'm pretty young. I'm um, 27. So basically my entire professional life has been in this crazy industry split between defi and crypto in general. I studied economics and finance in London when I was 2021 and during my second year of university I kind of stumbled across the wider defi ecosystem. We're talking about late 2020, early 2021. So really the infancy of the whole defi industry. And when the first projects were coming out, the first new chains that were EVM compatible were popping out. BNB chain, Fantom and so on and so forth. And uh, yeah, so basically while I was doing university, I kind of completely fell in love with the technology behind defi and the ability to allow people to effectively permission with uh, financial tools and build financial products, uh, basically in a fully decentralized manner. And basically with just a profile picture on telegram, you could build things that are as large as AAVE or yearn and so on and so forth. So I started contributing and I started spending all my nights on Discord, if, you know, uh, just sleeping four hours a day constantly, trying to learn as much as I can. And then I started working with a couple of daos. But yeah, before that I wasn't doing anything because I was literally high school in uni. I often say that I am as definitive as it can get. And it's been a while ride. I've been able to basically witness the infancy of the industry and now the current iteration, if you will, of the industry we were working.

Speaker B: Interesting. Yeah. So it sounds like your entire career has been in the web3 crypto industry, right? And then, I mean you've been growing for like six, seven years. So like, I think you already experienced like two, two cycles already right now, right? Yes. You could learn a lot, a little

Speaker A: bit more, I guess, because, yes, it's been two cycles, but so many things happened in these last six years. FTX blew up, Luna blew up. All this stuff that counts as a cycle on its own, I guess.

Speaker B: Yeah. Crazy cool. So you said you were studying economics and then you stumbled upon Defi and then you started contributing. Uh, what was some of the first thing that you did in web3defi back then?

Speaker A: So basically it's pretty funny. I approached it as somebody who was studying economy finance and was really interested about all of this. And I basically found out that there was an entire industry of crazy dudes that are trying to push the boundaries of what finance looks like in a fully permissionless manner and fully online. Uh, so I started working with a bunch of daos and I mean, I say working, but what I was effectively doing, I was just larping on Discord and trying to understand the details behind it and so on and so forth. Uh, and then I've always known the people from the Tether team, uh, both Giancarlo and Paolo, who are the founders of Tether. And after a while that I've been heavily training in Defi, if you will, and understanding how everything was working, I kind of went to them and I was like, hey, I think it would be very cool if I could help Tether in any way possible. When I started doing stuff, uh, Tether was looking at Defi in a very critical, uh, manner. They never really had a big presence. So when I came in like a crazy dude, basically saying, hey, how about we start doing something? They were very interested and we actually did a bunch of stuff together. The first thing we did together was actually Allui, which is this CDP backed stablecoin done by Tether for which I'm also one of the, one of the co founders that uh, works in a pretty similar way to DAI and all the other decentralized tables that are CDP backed with only one difference which is that it's backed only by Tether Gold. So the idea is that you take Tether gold, you put it into a smart contract and you mint Alloy usdt, which is uh, another version of a stablecoin that just keeps its peg by the underlying backing of Gold itself. You can really think about it as DAI or as Liquidy, um, but uh, only with one collateral which is gold. And I've always been about Gold Bug all my life. I've always been a bitcoin maxi all my life. So it only made sense for me to kind of understand a little bit more how these two things could play together and how Alloy could actually be developed. And we worked like eight months on getting this thing ready. It's been extremely challenging because I uh, wish everybody could try to go speak with the legal team of a very large entity like Tether and try to pitch them permissionless money. It's very funny. The reaction is amazing. So we had to do it fully KYC based, we had to get a lot of regulation done and so on and so forth. But then once we launched it, it actually grew pretty fast. It grew to around $80 million in minted. And uh, the day we launched, it was actually the day that Tether uh, broke its previous all time high initiatives. So after all of this thing we kind of looked at each other. We're like, well this is amazing, but it would also be very, very cool to contribute to what the main product is, which is the US denominated M stablecoin and now the gold ounces denominated stablecoin. So my team and I started working and my founders started working on a bunch of deployments of Tether. Uh, the celo one and the ton one specifically was something that was done by my CTO and co founder Kino who basically wrote the new tokens, ah, brought them into audit and so on and so forth. And while we were basically developing all of these, we realized it was a humongous problem in the way Tether was expanding between blockchains. Right. Like the native standard, the old standard towards which Tether was launching was amazing for certain things, but it was also pretty challenging on others. Mainly the fact that you could not move those token tokens between blockchains in a smooth manner, right? So my co founders and I looked at this problem. We're like, well, this is pretty challenging. We think it's pretty crazy that in 2024, 2023, the largest stablecoin on the planet, doesn't have an underlying interoperability between blockchains protocol. Are we the only one basically thinking this is crazy or is there other people around that actually think the system is broken? So we started working with a lot of defi protocols and we were like, hey, why are you using USDC way more than you're using usdt? What's the main problem there? And the answer was always the same. They were like, most of our growth strategy happen outside of Ethereum mainnet. And on Ethereum mainnet, yes, we're using USDT basically every day. But, uh, when you start going into chains like, uh, Polygon, Arbitrum, uh, Mentor, uh, Avalanche, we have a huge challenge in actually attracting USDT into our chain. Because if every time a user needs to move money into our chain, they need to pay 20, 30, 40bps per transfer using third party bridges, it's challenging. It's something that we cannot scale. So we all sit down on our table and we're like, well, maybe we're onto something. Maybe there is some kind of inefficiency in the tether ecosystem, specifically on what we thought was a niche product, which was this cross chain, cross chain infrastructure. So we started working closely with the layer 0 team. We've known them for a while, and we basically came up with what ended up being, uh, USDT0, which is this, uh, gigantic interoperability layer. Well, now, gigantic, I guess, interoperability layer that connects all of these different siloed blockchains, right? And we launched in January 2025. And it's been probably the most stressful month of my life because, you know, it's all fun and games until you actually have to launch the thing. And then you spend four weeks without sleeping. Constantly. You don't sleep. I have this thing that I always say that some friends of mine were at the Trump gala in the White House, if you remember, the Crypto gala. And it was two days after we launched USDC and I slept like 48 hours straight. And these people were trying to call me, like, yo, Trump is launching a token. You gotta buy it. You gotta buy it. And I was like, it's gonna be a scam. I'm too sleepy. Bye. Bye. And then I woke up the morning after and I missed out on like a ATX or something. I was like, yikes, I'm always lucky on this kind of stuff. But yeah. So we launched it in January 2025. Uh, we started moving 100,000, 200,000 dol every day, which sounded insane, right? Like, I remember the first day we broke a million dollars day. I was like, it's absolutely impossible that there is actually a million dollars worth of people that are transferring between something we built. It's insane. And now fast forward like 15 months. We're now moving steadily more than 100, $150 million every day between chains. And we kind of got used to it. It's still pretty insane every time we think about it.

Speaker B: That's cool. Well, thank you for sharing that whole story. I. I didn't know that Theta was like. I mean, I knew that Theta was like the biggest stable coin, but I didn't know they were like, so what is the word here? Resistant or. They didn't even have like any thought about like, you know, inter op and, you know, trying to go beyond just say, you know, usdt.

Speaker A: It's the right strategy. Right. Because when you are the largest in the market and when you're securing so much money and you're literally having a trillion dollar industry being built on top of you, you need to be very, very careful. And you need to always be very, how can I say, very careful. Yeah, I guess that's the best world on. On how you improve your underlying technology to make sure you don't do anything stupid that could potentially hurt the whole ecosystem. And at the same time, it's very tricky to implement something if you don't know how much it will be used. Because if you had told me 15 months ago that we would have been moving $100 billion in 16 months, I would have told you you were batshit crazy. I'm sorry to say that, but I was like, there's no way in hell we're gonna do it. And instead it actually happened because when you, when you give, uh, better technology to builders and to communities and to ecosystems, that's actually what you get. And it's not really because we have been amazing or anything of the sort. It's just because we've been working with great people and great teams that take a product and make it a thousand times better every time they integrate it within their ecosystem.

Speaker B: That makes sense. Yeah. Cool. Wow. So, well, before we deep dive into the whole story about USDT0 and then the growth of it, and just one side note question. I know you've been working like crazy 247 that's uh, very much a web 3 working culture. But what do you do for fun besides outside of work? What are your hobbies?

Speaker A: That's a good question. So I do three things mainly m. I play video games or I used to play video games because I'm a little bit competitive, right? So if I play video games, I want to win and if I have to win, I have to play six hours a day.

Speaker B: You play like the leagues or you just play with like some friends?

Speaker A: No, I play NBA 2K and call of Duty. Mostly Warzone. Uh, there was a moment when I was with my friends, we were like in the top thousand teams in Warzone. And I was like very proud of that. But then work kind of rocked up and everybody was uh, training and I was working, you know, so, so that, that, that stopped. So I play video games. Uh, I run. I'm. I started doing running and, and marathon training and I have a marathon coming up in October which uh, I am definitely not prepared for. I hope I'm going to be prepar

Speaker B: October, but I mean you still have like half a year, so.

Speaker A: Yeah, hopefully I have half a year. But you know, when you start running 30k a day, I'm like, that's probably not my thing. But I, I kind of signed up to do it and now I cannot, I cannot step back. You know, it's, it's not nice, nice. And I play basketball. That's the only other thing I do. And I used to play way more basketball now, but unfortunately now it's the little time you have. Uh, it's like one game a week if you're lucky and so on. I grew up in a small town in Italy, which funnily enough has absolutely. I mean we have a football team, but the football team is not really famous. And for the longest time when I was a kid, the whole city was looking and watching and playing basketball. Which is very weird for Italy because yeah, 10 years ago nobody gave a crap about basketball in Italy. But yeah, my hometown was, was, was a, uh, was an outlier and we all were playing basketball. All people of my age were playing basketball. I have some friends that went and went on playing in, in the first league and so on and so forth and I'm here doing other stuff.

Speaker B: Nice. Interesting was that because I, I know in your country probably like football is probably the number one, right?

Speaker A: Yeah, football. So that's why everybody watches football. And I'm terrible. As an Italian, I'm terrible because I do not watch football at all. I'm like that's not my thing. I get bored instantly. And every time I say people threaten to take away my m. Passport. But what can you do? I guess.

Speaker B: Crazy. So what, what made the town like so interested in basketball? Like is it maybe the hotel just watch the NBA or. Not really.

Speaker A: So we were this very small town with a very good youth sector that was training people and, and all of the. The young guys were playing in our hometown. Ended up going playing for Milan, for Rome. When Rome used to be a big, a big, big uh, basketball city and so on and so forth. So we kind of didn't have a choice. So when we were a kid, all your friends were playing basketball, so you kind of have to play basketball as well. Right?

Speaker B: I see.

Speaker A: And I played it and I mean I've been playing for like what, 16, 16 years or something. And it uh, was very nice because it's a small town, it's like 30,000 inhabitants. So very, very small compared to other sizes. But yeah, now the basketball team kind of went to shit as well and nobody's playing basketball anymore. But when I was a kid it was a big thing. Like the whole city was going to the stadium to watch the games. There were like 5,000 people every Sunday cheering for the team and we were all playing in the youth sector of this large. Of this. Of what ended up being this large team. And it was cool because you were feeling like you were in an American movie with people cheering and so on and so forth. Uh, now unfortunately it's longer the case, but it's nice.

Speaker B: Yeah. Cool. Yeah. I mean that must be fun though, like playing for the 16 year, that's a long time. So you must be quite good at it, I suppose.

Speaker A: No, I'm terrible. Uh, really, I'm. I'm shorter and I'm a little bit fatter, so I'm literally the worst possible body composition to play basketball right now.

Speaker B: I can't tell you how. Anyway, so you look a bit taller, so.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, like, like uh, 1.7 meters, something like that.

Speaker B: I think that's still relatively okay.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's okay if you play basketball with 2 meter tall as human being that dunk on your head every day every time. Yes, Unfortunate part

Speaker B: Fairfax. Cool. Cool. Yeah. Well, yeah. Without uh, further ado, let's go ahead and deep dive into USDT0. I think people will be interested in knowing about the origin. Maybe we share a bit more about the background of story origin. And then afterwards feel free to share any maybe slide or website that you already have about the.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: I can share with us afterwards.

Speaker A: Yes, I can show you our main, uh, our main website, which is this one. Basically it uh, may or may not be coming with a big revamp pretty soon. Uh, basically the way it works is pretty straightforward, right? Like USD0 is effectively a, ah, single unified network for USDT tokens. What do I mean by that? I mean that if you have USDT tokens on Ethereum Mainnet and you want to send them over on Avalanche, you cannot really do that if you're not using centralized parties like centralized exchanges or Tether itself, or third party bridges that are usually charging a pretty hefty fee. We're talking about 20, uh, 30, 40 bips sometimes, which is very expensive if you're thinking about moving tens of millions of dollars every day.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: We're starting to make a lot of money if you're the bridge provider, but your users were never going to be able to use you. So our take was pretty simple. Our idea was what if we take um, this concept of bridging um, between blockchains and we embed it directly into the token level. What I mean by that is that if you want to move M USDT0 now from USDT on Ethereum mainnet to USDT0 on Arbitrum or Polygon, what happens is that you're locking your USDT on our smart contract on Ethereum Mainnet, which is the third largest holder of USDT globally at $3.7 billion in TVL give or take. You lock those USDT there and then a cross chain message is sent using an infrastructure called layer zero that actually lands on the destination chain. And once it lands on the destination chain, USDT0 tokens are minted from scratches. So in this case, in this scenario you have 10 USDT on Ethereum mainnet being locked into our smart contract and 10 USDT0 on Arbitrum being minted to the user address. So once you're into the USD zero network, you can now move your USDT zero tokens fully freely between blockchains. So if I have them now on Arbitrum and I want to send them over on Polygon, I can burn them on Arbitrum and mint them fresh on Polygon. Uh, what I mean by frictionless is effectively that you can move one USDT or you can move 100 billion USDT and you're always going to pay zero fees other than the gas fee itself, which it's obviously pretty negligible because we're talking about fractions of a center compared to 10, 20, 30bps sometimes, yeah. So this is the way it works. It's pretty elegant and it's pretty simple, but our whole job is to make sure that it works in a smooth way and it works in a efficient way, if you will. And also the most important thing, our goal, which is to make sure that the whole infrastructure is secure enough to be able to use by large institutions like centralized exchanges, hedge funds and the average users. Uh, so yeah, we came up with this idea, uh, in the beginning. We were not sure of which interoperability provider we would have wanted to use. We evaluated all of the multiple options that are in the industry. The wormhole, the chainlink, uh, the Layer zero, the intent based solutions, and so on and so forth. And then we decided to basically land and work with the Layer Zero team because number one, uh, we have known the layerzero team, uh, for the longest time, uh, since before it was called Layer zero, basically. And we really respect them, we respect their management, we respect the way they decide to work. And this was something very important for us. Yes, the technology is important and it's definitely something that needs to be considered fully. But our belief was that we should have worked with like minded people. We should have worked with people that were not trying to bring competitors down or that were trying to uh, just make a lot of money, but they were effectively trying to make the world a better place and they were trying to improve the way um, the web3world actually works. So we went to layer zero, we pitched them this idea and they were like, well, what do you guys think? And they were enthusiastic about it. They said that they thought it could have become the largest thing they've ever built on their network and it turned out to be. But back when they said it, we were not only even ourselves, we're not that sure about it. Okay, so yeah, basically when we decided to work with the Layer Azure team, there were multiple reasons why we decided to do so. One of it was definitely the technological layer. We really, really like the fact that LayerZero allows you to very deeply customize your own security setup and more importantly you can fully own your security setup. But uh, the most important thing for us was that we actually liked working with like minded people. Uh, we liked working with people that were not trying to bring down their competitors or just trying to make a quick buck or anything of the sort. They were actually genuinely trying to make the uh, space that we're working on, um, a little bit better and a little bit easier for you for, for, for the next hundred million people to be on board into. So we immediately hit off and when we pitched them the idea, they, they loved it and they actually saw the potential of USD 0 way before I did. Like, I was making fun of our, with our founders and with my two co founders and we're like, how much money are we going to move in our first year Now I think I, I said something like, if we move, if we move more than $6 billion, I'm going to bring everybody in the company out for dinner. And we ended up moving more than 70 billion in the first year.

Speaker B: More than that, right. 707 0.

Speaker A: We're actually at 92 right now. Ah, we should be able to cross the 100 billion in the next month, hopefully. Which would basically make USDT0 the fastest growing, uh, interoperability infrastructure on the planet. Which is, uh, pretty cool to say. But again, it's not because we did anything right. It's just because when you give a very cool product and a very good tool to the users and to the ecosystems that you like working with, you actually end up being, you actually just get organic demand. Right? That's the history of Tether from the beginning. Tether was invented as a, um, as a tool to arbitrage the price of Bitcoin between exchanges. Because, you know, bank wire used to take three days while a tether transfer on Omni and then later on ethereum was taking 45 minutes. So if you wanted to arbitrage the price of Bitcoin between Bitfinex and Poloniex, for example, the only thing you could use was actually usdt. That's, that's why Tether was built and that's why Tether was born. And then it turned out to be the biggest and most important financial inclusion tool in the history of humankind, in my opinion, because it's all allowing to bring the dollar to hundreds of millions of people that cannot have access to that, right? Hundreds of millions of people that are effectively forced to lose 40, 50, 60% of their saving every year against inflation. People in Turkey, in Latin America, in some parts of Asia, in Africa. What used to be, uh, a simple tool that was meant to do just one thing. It ended up solving problems that the whole world is now facing. So obviously USDT0 is way smaller than what Tether ever will be. And uh, we don't want to compare the two things, but we also did something pretty similar, which was we want to build something that is easy to use. And let's see what happens when we launched into the wild and what happened when we launched into the wild was a pretty insane adoption rate that skyrocketed like crazy. And since January, we've been working with basically every large ecosystem team in the industry and every large network that is trying to get a version of usdt. And in the first six months, it was very, very hard to convince them because they came to me and they were like, well, we don't care about what you're building, we just want usdt. And I, myself and my two co founders, we actually had to sit on tens of hours of calls with all these, all these protocols, basically explaining to them, well, I know that you want the old thing, but how about you give a chance to this one? And 99% of them said no. Until one day we spoke with the Kraken team on their blockchain Inc. And they seemed interested and they were like, well, actually, you know what, let's. Yeah, we'll do it like that. We'll give you guys a chance and we'll see how it goes. And from there on, it just was full on snowball effect. Because after Inc. Parachain, Mega Ether, uh, Arbitrum took over. We took over the contract on Arbitrum, we took over the contract on Polygon, and it just skyrocketed basically fully on its own. And we went from moving 200,000, $300,000 every day to moving on a good day, $300 million every day.

Speaker B: Wow. Crazy.

Speaker A: Which for context is more than most large remitances platforms actually do right now. Like the Western Union and the monogram of this world move around 300 billion dollar every day, every, every year. And USD0 with a team of 20 people and uh, three guys with an idea, basically went on moving 100, 100 billion dollars kind of the same, the same time, which orders of the orders of magnitude start kind of matching. You know, like it's, it's way easier to get from 200 billion to 300 billion than to get from 0 to 100 billion.

Speaker B: So interesting.

Speaker A: Our, our hope is to be able to get hopefully to like a billion dollar a day by the end of 2026. It's pretty, it's pretty aggressive, but we truly believe we can get there.

Speaker B: Crazy. Wow, that's like a m. Meteoric rise. Right? Uh, USDT0 over like you said, like 15, 16 months. Right. Since the launch. That's crazy.

Speaker A: 15. Yeah, I mean 16. I guess it was January, January last year.

Speaker B: Yeah. So 16. Okay.

Speaker A: Yeah. And then multiple times we thought things were going very badly. Right. Because sometimes a large platform gets Hacked. And now, because this is a platform gets hacked, nobody trusts anyone else. Ah. So a large hack happens on a bridging provider and then you're caught in the crosshair because people do not understand the difference between different bridging providers and different bridging infrastructure. So it's really something that surprised us. And we would have never bet in the beginning that we could have grown so faster and so smoothly on all of those ecosystems. But that's kind of what happened. When you give better technology to users, they tend to use quite a lot.

Speaker B: Yeah. So after the, in the past, like last 15 months, can you share maybe like what are the uh, most heavily used segments or the users of USCT zero? I'm sure you probably have like some certain segments, right, who use using this product because that's a big amount. I can't imagine. It's like, I don't know if it's like mainly retail use or mainly other protocol.

Speaker A: There's multiple things, right? So on one side you have to think that USD0 has two sites. There is the interoperability side, which means when users are transferring USDT0 between blockchains and then there is the blockchain layer, which is when users send USDT0 from my address on Arbitrum to your address on Arbitrum. Right. So these two are very different user profiles, the blockchain level. So they onto the same blockchain transfers. Those are extremely close and mimicking M entirely the user base of Tether itself. Which means that uh, people are treating USDT0 in the same way as they treat USDT. There are a lot of users that are transferring very little amount. And then there are a few large entities that are doing 40% of the volumes on a chain. Right. It's used for literally anything. It's used for defi. It's used for payments, it's used for infrastructure for like a gentle payment. It's used for literally every single thing that USDT is being used for right now. What we really like to focus on when we work on a blockchain level is actually real world adoption. So users being able to uh, pay for merch or pay for goods with USDT itself. I live in Lugano. Here in Lugano you uh, can go around and pay with USDT, USD0 and Bitcoin Lightning in like 500 shops around the city in a fully manner.

Speaker B: It's super cool.

Speaker A: But we also see people in Africa and in Asia to basically be able to use plasma and Arbitrum and Polygon mostly literally in Their everyday errands, you know, like you're going to buy a beer, you're paying it with USDT rather than paying it with, with your own fiat currency. So between, into the same blockchain. It's actually pretty close to the tether user profile. When we move on, um, to what, what we really focus on, which is the in between blockchain space. So the transfers between polygon and arbitrary so and so forth, it changes a little bit. Meaning that we have a lot of users and we have a lot of unique transactions. We see give or take between 15,000 and 17,000 transactions on a good day, which most of these transactions are small to medium. So we're talking between 0 and 20,000 USDT and then we have a couple of transactions like 50, 60 a day that are above the million dollar insights. And sometimes we have gigantic outliers. Like for example, one time I uh, think it was Binance, uh, they moved the uh, $800 million over three hours between our infra through the same addresses, which was super stressful because they didn't tell us. So I was sleeping, it was like 4am in the morning in Europe and my pager duty goes off saying hey, something is wrong. There are huge transfers happening and the first thing we thought was like, okay, we got hacked. Crap, what's happening? So we see edit and we realized it wasn't hack, it was actually Binance moving $800 million of their treasury via the Rails that we built. So we all relaxed for a second and we called Binance and we're like, is this you? Yes, that's us. Like, nice. Next time tell us please, because this way I can avoid waking up at 4am Being scared for my life. But yeah, basically the user profile has been different. You have uh, again a lot of small users, but then you have those big outliers that are basically moving uh, huge amounts like hundreds of millions of clipper. It's very interesting to see. Yeah, centralized exchange or hedge funds. Also like if you think about hedge funds that are basically farming in defi, they cannot afford to spend 15 bips to move $100 million because 15 bips, maybe five days of farming. So what do they do? They use us and they do it completely for free. And I remember when we launched it, all of those large hedge funds, they came to me and they were like, you're my new best friend. Thank you for this. I'm like, why? It's like, well because you have a free product that can allow us to now farm with USDT across The entire board of, uh, chains that we want to work on and want to focus on. So, yeah, the user base is very different, but we're literally seeing anything. The only places where we are a little bit less stronger are places in which stablecoins are not really needed, like Europe, like the U.S. uh, those extremely developed countries are places where stablecoins are not really something that people need to use to survive. And therefore they use USDT a little bit less. They prefer using MICA compliant stablecoins or other versions of stable coins that actually meet their needs a little bit more.

Speaker B: I see, yeah, that makes sense. Basically you capture like, basically the rest of the world, except maybe US and Europe, right? Racing.

Speaker A: Yeah. Correct.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And this is for the US dollar denominated product for Tether Gold, which is the other product that we're doing that is a little bit more different because I think gold denominated stable coins are extremely useful also in places like Europe

Speaker B: and the U.S. okay, interesting. But that Tether Gold probably has a different profiles of the user. Right. But I'm curious about that. Who would be like the potential user for that?

Speaker A: Yeah, Tether Gold is still in its infancy.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Like it launched in 2020, but only in the last year, year and a half, we actually seen a lot of growth to the product. I'm going to start by saying that I am very biased, but I think Tether Gold is going to be one of the coolest thing we've ever seen in this industry. We have still not realized the impact that bringing gold into the blockchain can have. Gold has been historically the best store of value in the history of humankind. My, um, my macroeconomics professor, I think it was my micro. Yeah, it was. My macroeconomics professor in my second year of uni told me this story that one ounce of gold back in the Roman Empire could buy you, um, a sword, a pair of sandals. Yeah, an ounce of gold right now can buy you an AR15, a pair of trousers, a pair of shoes and a T shirt. The amount of, like the purchasing power of gold has been increasing at best, uh, if not kept, kept stable basically for the whole history of human life. Like not something in the last thousand years, but we're talking about tens of thousands of years sometimes. But it had limitations. Main limitations being it's expensive to store it. It's expensive to you to bring it around because people can, you know, rob you and go away. It's very difficult. It's very easy to counterfeit in certain situations. And it's not Made, uh, for the, for the age of the Internet, right? Like if I want to buy something in the us what am I going to do? I'm going to mail you a gold coin and you're going to take it and put in your bank. It doesn't, doesn't work. Uh, but tether gold fixes it. Tether gold allows anyone in the same way as they can now access the US dollar, they can now access the gold dominated market and more importantly they can send gold between each other in a fully permissionless way without limitation of size or anything of the sort, via uh, the technology that we've built for the Internet, which is the blockchain. So I'm a huge gold bug. But the product itself is still growing, right? Like it's around $3 billion in market cap right now. It takes a bit of time for it to actually become popular because crypto people sometimes are a bit stupid in my op. Then when you pitch them gold, the first thing they tell you is, but we have bitcoin, why would we need gold? And I'm like, sake, no, like you don't get it. Gold and bitcoin are not in competition between each other. Gold is in competition with the US dollar when it comes to actually replacing the US dollar in the wider, uh, world economy at best. Because think about it, right, like you can be living in, in, in Zimbabwe, right? And of course Zimbabwe, fiat fiat currencies went down the drain in terms of purchasing power since the 1980s I think, if I remember correctly, and it lost like 99% of its value. And people are playing in the streets with notes and banknotes, but at the end of the day, them going into the US dollar to hedge against this, uh, it's just moving into a different kind of fiat currency. The US dollar is also inflating by quite a lot in the last 10 years. And it's just a different version of a fiat currency. When all of those people will understand that there is a currency which is gold that doesn't inflate unless in certain cases and that it's been used by humanity since the dawn of time. All those people in my opinion will move away also from the US dollar and they will jump into the gold market and the gold denominated stablecoin space. So all of this to say that I'm extremely biased and it's taking time to grow the product, but we're seeing a lot of users here as well on the payment side of things. Tether gold is not yet used quite a lot. People save in tether gold. Rather than spend tether gold, our volumes are also way, way lower. We move, I uh, think 10 ounces of gold between blockchains, uh, every day, which is not a lot. But our goal is to basically lay down the groundwork and wait for this big wave adoption to come. And our job is to make sure we're ready when this big wave of adoption actually ends up coming.

Speaker B: Makes sense. Yeah. And I think, I mean, we've seen a lot of huge increase in price of gold over the last year or so. Right. It's crazy. So I guess I'm very happy. Exactly. Yeah, I bet. I bet. Um, I'm curious, maybe if you can explain a bit for the average user, like, how does a tether go product actually work, like under the hood, the technical side of it? Because obviously, like, you know, the people who may not be familiar with blockchain and Web3 technology. Yeah. And how they work.

Speaker A: There's also two parts here. There is tether gold, which is a stablecoin itself, which I'll walk you through it, how it works. Obviously, uh, tether people are better suited to explain it, but I'll do my best. And then there is what we do, which is the interoperability side. Tether gold is a pretty cool idea. Like, the idea is in the same way as you give me $1 and I give you one USDT, you give me one ounce of gold, I give you one Xaut, which is tether gold sticker, and now me as tether, we take those bars of gold and we put them into a vault in Switzerland. So there is a vault in Switzerland that holds all of the gold that tether owns, both the one that it's on their balance sheet as well as the one that is backing tether gold. And then the product itself works in the exact same way as any other stablecoin. If the price of tether gold rises above the price of gold, people buy tether gold on the market and they redeem it back for physical gold or fiat currencies. With tether, if the price of gold is too low, uh, if tether gold price depegs, uh, from the price of gold itself, they're buying tether gold on the market cheaply. They're redeeming it with tether, and they are then selling the gold to basically cash in on this arbitrage. It works in the exact same way as usdt. And in my opinion, it can grow way faster and way larger than what USDT will ever be able to be. Because when you are basically acquiring and taking on yourself all of the costs of storing gold and all the risks of storing gold. You're basically making another killer product that hundreds, uh, of millions of people could potentially use. So this is the Stablecoin itself. What we do is in the same way as we do for USD 0, we take that Stablecoin and we bring it to every single other chain on the planet that needs a version of Terragold onto their network. Uh, the cool thing about Tether Gold is that Tether Gold has been issued only in Ethereum mainnet. So there is no more fragmentation of liquidity anywhere. Because any chain that has a version of Tether Gold on it, it's powered by us. And because it's powered by us, you're now basically creating this unified liquidity layer that puts into connection all of this siloed ecosystem and that allows to have improvements in both user experience, capital efficiency and so on, so forth. So yeah, that's basically how the, the, the, the whole system works. I hope it's clear because I know it's technical and so on and so forth, but it should be pretty understandable.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it's clear to me. I'm hoping it'll be clear for the viewers, obviously. Yeah, obviously. Yeah, for sure. No, I think it's very helpful. I'm kind of curious. So one thing I'm wondering is like this um, vault in Switzerland, right? Probably very. Firstly like the most heavily guarded place on earth. Right. Obviously security for that is like top notch. You have to. Because otherwise.

Speaker A: Yes, it's insane.

Speaker B: We'll go. It's like.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's really crazy. Like I've, I've seen pictures of it. I think I heard Paolo talking about it a uh, couple of times and feels like a James Bond movie. It's like built inside of a mountain and to get into this thing and there's like 10 armored doors to get to the vaults and wow. So on and so forth. I don't know if you've ever been to the, to the Freeport in Singapore. So it kind of looks like that. It's really. I, yeah, I went to the Freeport in Singapore. Uh, last token, 2049 there was an event made by Ave and was amazing and they showed us around the Freeport, they showed us all of the gold that they store into the Freeport. They showed us a couple of paintings. They showed us a triceratop, you know, like a dinosaur skull. Oh yeah, skeleton.

Speaker B: That's crazy.

Speaker A: I geek out on dinosaurs so I always wanted to buy one they're just too expensive. But it's kind of the same thing. It's a very secure place where m, basically all of the large companies and all of the large entities that need to store something physically in Europe go to. And it's uh, pretty cool because it's owned by the, the vault itself is owned by tether, which basically means that it's not a bank's vault or anything of the sort. It's their own vault and they have control over their own vault, which makes it extremely more resilient than any other, uh, gold backed stablecoin solution on the planet. Because, you know, not your keys, not your coins, not your vault, not your gold.

Speaker B: So makes sense.

Speaker A: It's pretty straightforward.

Speaker B: Okay, cool. Yeah, that makes sense. Cool. And hopefully we'll probably grow more and more in the future. Well, going back to USDT0, you said a lot of ecosystem and a lot of different blockchains and users have actually adopted it. Can you share maybe one case of which, uh, ecosystem or heavy user, big user could be. Will whatever surprise you the most in terms of adoption for USDT0 and why?

Speaker A: Well, I usually bring forward plasma, uh, as a chain, as an example because full disclosure, we are very biased. We seeded plasma together with Bitfinex. So I love the team, we think they're great. And we also are pretty involved into the discussion. Basically the plasma team came to us and pitched us this idea of, hey, we're going to build the blockchain only for usdt. We don't care about anything else. We just want this thing to be as aligned with whatever you guys are building as possible. Can you help? And we worked together on it. And the cool thing about plasma is that USDT0 is the way USDT lives on plasma. And because of that it allowed to create very complex strategies like the plasma pre deposit vaults that I'm sure, uh, you saw because there was a moment in Defi that everybody was talking about, uh, these predepositivolks that grew to like 4 or 5 billion dollars in TVL before the chain even launched. So all of this TVL was sitting on Ethereum mainnet, earning yield, waiting for the chain to launch. As soon as the chain launched and we opened up the pathway between Ethereum, uh, and plasma, all of this money immediately m flowed into this brand new chain, uh, and grew really significantly. Uh, plasma is to this day the fastest growing USDT chain in history. It went from zero to $8 billion initial TVL or $6 billion initial TVL in like five days. Then it decreased a little bit because centralized exchanges rebalanced, users migrate away. But it still retained like a billion, a billion and a half in issued usdt, which is extremely successful. Only three chains have more USDT issued on than plasma, and those are Ethereum, Tron and, uh, Solana. Uh, which are obviously extremely large ecosystems that have been around for a long time. Um, so, yeah, I always bring up plasma as an example because it allows. It basically shows exactly how you should build usdt, how you should build with USDT zero now with their new product, Plasma one, which I don't know if you ever tried, but it's a pretty cool neobank infrastructure. And I can show you, I always use my plasma card, uh, every time I can here, uh, on my phone and so on and so forth. You can basically deposit USDC or USDT into your plasma account and it gets immediately transferred. If it's usdc, it gets sold into USDT and it gets immediately sent over to plasma. And by doing so this way, you're basically creating a black hole sync of TDL into the chain that actually ends up being really used by the users every day. It's a normal neobank. Uh, so, yeah, that was a very, very, very good example. And Paul and the rest of the plasma team have really been amazing in supporting us and in building us. And for the longest time, plasma has been the largest UST0 ecosystem for, uh, this reason specifically.

Speaker B: That's cool. Yeah, I think that makes sense. Yeah. Now I have like one chain where the USDT0 you said is like where it lives on the chain. Right? It's like the canonical version, I suppose.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Ah.

Speaker A: All of the chains we launch on, they treat USDT0 as the canonical version of USDT.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: It's funny because a lot of old chains came to me and they were like, hey, can we get USDT0? And I'm like, well, you don't really need USDT0 because you have USDT already. So we can try to work on solutions to connect your already existing USDT to our ecosystem. But it makes no sense for me to launch USDT0 on a chain where USDT already exists, because on those networks there's just going to be fragmented liquidity and a pretty bad, uh, user experience.

Speaker B: That makes sense. And I think we both know that fragmentation liquidity is not really good for users protocols in general.

Speaker A: It's terrible.

Speaker B: That makes sense. Yeah. Cool. Talk a bit more about the competitors. Uh, who do you consider like, competitors for usdts?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good question. Okay, so on one side there's the competitors. On the stablecoin side of things, we do think that Circle is a competitor. We do think that the other large stablecoins are competitors. But we also think that competition is very good. Competition, uh, is what drives an industry forward. And very honestly, if Circle didn't pioneer, uh, the cross chain model tied to a stablecoin, we would have not been not forced, but incentivized to create our own version of it, to basically give our own users the ability to do the same thing. So on one side there is the competition. On the stablecoin side of things, we don't focus on that too much because that's tethered job. Our job is just to move those stable plans around. On the other side there is the interoperability space. So basically competition between bridges. Again, we do not really like to consider ourselves a bridge. We are the largest bridge on the planet. USDT0 alone moves more money than every other interoperability solution combined times two on average. Uh, obviously other than layer zero, because we're built on top of layer zero. So every time we move a dollar, layer zero also moves a dollar. But everyone else, you can take them all, add them together, multiply by two, and it's still less on average than what we move, uh, on a good day. So what we're really looking at and what we are comparing ourselves against are now larger, um, traditional financial institutions, the Western Union of this world, the monograms of this world, these large remittance platforms, the Swift of this world. Because obviously we're still early and it's going to take us some time to get to the, to the next level. But when you start moving hundreds of billions of dollars every year, you're no longer comparing yourself against the little niche m that crypto is, but you're now comparing yourselves against, uh, the wider financial infrastructure. So it's basically this, uh, and then other than that we don't really have much competition because we're not in the market to make money. So nobody wants to compete with us because we're making no money. We're just making the system a little bit better. And we are working directly with chains to pay up to pay for a cost. But it's not a business that many people want to get into. You know, when everybody wants to make something big until you tell them that it takes five years and you're spending money for those five years and you're not making a cent.

Speaker B: So interesting on the last part there, maybe if you can, uh, expound on that. So I mean, yeah, that was actually one of the questions I was going to ask next. Like what is a business model? You say like you're not making money, is it? I think you're referring to USDT0, right? Not making money.

Speaker A: Yeah, of course, of course. Tether makes a money, lot of, of money. We all know tether makes a lot of money.

Speaker B: I can agree with that. Yeah. Okay.

Speaker A: Our business model is pretty straightforward. So we, we charge chains that we deploy on. So when we deploy on a chain to, to make sure that our deployments are secure, we have to spend a lot of money in audit cost, personality costs, the security reviews and so on, so forth. When we built USDT zero, we never built it with the idea of turning it into a profit machine, like it's a startup. Startups are not meant to be profit machines. They're meant to be solutions that can grow, grow and grow and then potentially find a monetization layer after. But we were pretty lucky on the fact that every chain in the world needs a stablecoin. So they are very happy to pay to get the best stablecoin on the planet to get on their chain. So we charge chains, we uh, are a pretty expensive product to get on uh, a network because we have those very high costs. And with those chains, what we charge chains to actually deploy, we're able to grow our team. We've been growing from six people to 20 over the first year. Uh, and we're able to keep paying for services with the uh, best companies on the planet. Right. Like we have recurring contracts with chainalysis on the compliance side, with Certora, with OpenZeppelin, with all of those large players without which we wouldn't be able to do our job. Because interoperability and cross chain transfers, what we usually say is that it's like open heart surgery every time and if you fuck something up, you get hacked and people steal all the money of your users. And this is, I mean if you're a small bridge that is securing only $40 million, maybe PPRK doesn't look at you. But when you're securing three and a half billion dollars, you're constantly under scrutiny by all of those nefarious players that are trying to hack you, you. So the only thing that we never save money on M is security and engineering costs. And uh, we think it's the right choice.

Speaker B: Okay, yeah, that makes sense. So right now I'm trying to send correctly just one main revenue source. Like when new chain, you know, come on and they want to stablecoin USDT0 then. Yeah, that's where you guys, uh, generate the fees.

Speaker A: Okay, yeah, they pay us, we take the money, we pay all of our providers, uh, we save some to make sure that if something was to go wrong, we have enough.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Resources to go over the winter. And I mean, listen, I'm not complaining, it's been very successful. But at the same time it's not what we, what we built USD0 for. We built USD0 because we thought that the benefits that it could bring to the tether ecosystem was so much larger than whatever amount of money we would have ever be able to change to charge chains. And it's actually happening. So we are very, very excited to be able to see it and we are very, very happy to be able to contribute, even though if it's in a little part to making sure the tether remains the uh, leading stable code on the planet.

Speaker B: Makes sense. Okay, very interesting strategy there. So regarding, like layer zero, so you said when someone move $1 USDT zero and basically layer zero also move one, will they get any fees for that transaction or.

Speaker A: No, um, not currently. Because layer zero is a protocol, currently has no fee turned on other than the fees that you pay to execute the transfer on the chain, on the receivable chain. But this is just technicalities. We're not talking about a real fee.

Speaker B: Got it.

Speaker A: And so yeah, there's no fee involved other than the gas fee itself, which is why everybody is using the platform. We have no interest in actually charging users profits. We have no interest in charging users a fee onto these transfers to make a profit. We might, uh, in the future slightly increase the gas fees a little bit more. We're talking about 10 cents, 15 cents more to uh, be able to add additional security checks or additional DVMs, which are. DVM is basically, you can think about it as the node that verifies transaction between chains. Right. Because if, uh, I'm sending from Ethereum to Polygon, I need something that checks the transaction happened on Ethereum and executes it on, on Polygon. Uh, we have three of those ddns right now that are running in fully independent ways with fully independent code between the three, but we would like to have more of them. Uh, our goal is to be able to increase our DDN set to a five out of five, six out of six, seven out of seven during 2026, hopefully. And the more DDN you add, the more expensive it becomes to actually send a transaction. But again, what we're seeing is that as long as A transaction costs less than $1 in terms of gas fees. Users will still be able to execute it. Maybe agents and agentic payments will be a little bit challenging to do it. But we are, we are a whales network. Basically. We have people moving hundreds of millions of dollars and I'm sure that they will be willing to pay a dollar more to uh, enjoy better security.

Speaker B: I'm sure they will. For the whales. For them. Yeah, they used to pay like, I don't know, M1 people, whatever. Right. Several beeps so they get for this.

Speaker A: Which by the way, a few times over the last year we kind of sat down on a table and we were like, okay, so we did 90 billion dollar in volume. If you had to charge 10bps on those $90 billion of volume, we would be pretty okay, you know. But at the same time it's also important to. This is something that we learned pretty early on. Uh, being greedy is not the way to do good business in an industry like crypto. Yeah. So it's something that we have learned pretty early on and we kind of keep building with these ETOs in mind every day. We don't think people should be charged for their normal action of moving tokens between address A and address B. So why would they be charged to move it from chain A to chain B?

Speaker B: Yeah, makes sense.

Speaker A: Cool.

Speaker B: Cool. Um, well, I mean it sounds like everything is going really well, but could you share a bit about like some of the challenges like facing your team, your city, zero anything?

Speaker A: Things are going pretty well, I have to say. So it's been hard to identify challenges and usually when we do identify, identify them, uh, we hyper focus on them to try to solve them. I think there's more. There's mainly three aspects. Right. One aspect is the security aspect that I mentioned before. We know that every day there is at least 30 people in North Korea trying to keep to hack us. Constantly. Constantly. Uh, that's what they do. That's what Lazarus and other DPRK hacking groups do. And we know we have a target on our back. So this is some, this is one of the things we are very paranoid. We, we hold ourselves to the highest security standard in the industry and even though we do that, sometimes that's not enough. So we constantly try to improve our own security standard and sometimes we do things that only we do. Uh, a lot of times we have to evaluate the chain to decide how long it takes to leave that chain, for example, and we realize that there is no one in this industry that can help us on that because nobody has the problem that we do. Because if you deploy, I don't know, AAVE on a blockchain, yeah, maybe there is a chance that DPRK could hack a blockchain just to hit aave, but it wouldn't really make any sense because the economics would no longer work on our side. With $3.5 billion that could be stolen, it starts to become feasible. So we ended up figuring out that we had to build our own risk analysis team. And it's something that it's taken us a lot of time, a lot of resources, just because we cannot do things halfway through. Right. They need to be done to the best possible standard. So security has definitely been one. Explaining the product has been another challenge because, you know, people are like, oh, but I don't care about USDT0, I just want USDT. And I'm like, well, no, hold on. It's the same thing. The only difference is that we offer you something more. So how about you hear my pitch and then you tell me if you care about it? And then usually they say yes. And then after they hear the pitch, we're like, oh, USDT0 is exactly what we been looking for. I'm like, you don't say, I told you so. This is the other thing. And then the third thing is actually trying to understand what we can do better. So what kind of tools, what kind of additional inefficiencies are existing, uh, in the Tether ecosystem that we are not seeing and that we should be seeing to make a better product. And yeah, this is what we've been doing for the last six, uh, months, least. Average of Labs, which is the company behind USD0. It's, uh, USD0 is not our only product, it's our most successful one. But we are constantly looking at other areas in which we could contribute to make sure that Tether can be more used and more users can have less of a pain to actually interact with Tether. So, uh, we're going to be working on a bunch of other stuff in the next few years. It's just that it takes time to actually scale up the team properly.

Speaker B: Yeah, makes sense. Yeah. I mean, you guys do very early, I would say, right? Like 16 months in. And then.

Speaker A: Yes. I'm also very lucky to have two co founders that really know their shit, if you will. And they, I mean, my. Both of them are extremely knowledgeable in their areas of expertise and I'm very, very lucky to be able to work with, alongside with them because, you know, sometimes, uh, on a. When you do things like we do, there are moments of despairs. You know, there are moments that when after the third time somebody tells you we don't want your product, like, maybe I'm wrong, maybe nobody really cares about this product. Thankfully, my co founders were helping each other to kind of be next to each other in those moments where I, uh, maybe next one will. And then thankfully at one point somebody did want the product and then it just went snowboarding from there.

Speaker B: Makes sense. Yeah. So you have to have a really strong conviction, right? I mean, of the, uh, value proposition of your product and then launch it and then keep persisting and. Yeah.

Speaker A: And hopefully you're right because if you have a lot of conviction and you're wrong, then you just look like an idiot sometimes.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, I think you can change like pivot. It's not, it's not end of the world. Right.

Speaker A: But you need to understand, like, this has always been my biggest challenge. Like USB0 was not the first idea that I had or my co founders had. Right. It's always tricky when you have an idea on your own to actually see the weak, the weak point of this idea, if you will. Uh, and, uh, it's something that we are trying to do every day to try to be better as entrepreneurs or just straight up as people that are trying to build something cool.

Speaker B: Makes sense. Just a few more questions for sure. Go for the show. Yeah. In general, I guess in the future here, do you see a future where it's one dominant stablecoin everywhere, or is there going to be many local stable coins connected together? What's the future look like of stablecoin?

Speaker A: I think. And, uh, again, I'm biased, But I think 80% of the market will still be cornered by one single solution. So there's going to be multiple other stablecoins all over the planet, but 80% of the users will be on one stablecoin only. Uh, that's just because of the power law. That's normal power law.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Like in economics, things happen like that. I think that the solution will be usdt, because Tether. And I can say it because it was not my idea. It was obviously Paolo and Giancarlo and the rest of the Tether team idea. Tether is the only stablecoin that really understood where the product market fit really, really lies. Stablecoins are not made for people like me that live in Switzerland and can open a bank account in two hours. Stablecoins are made for the people in Africa, in Latin America and in Asia that cannot open a bank account because the system failed them and the system doesn't want to service them because they cannot generate enough money for the bank fees. So I have not yet seen, uh, any other stablecoin provider to actually understand this simple narrative. And I do not think there is any other stablecoin provider that has the amount of expertise and that has survived so many crises as Tether does. So I think there's going to be multiple Stable coins. There's going to be basically any large product with a user base will try to make its own stablecoin and then they're going to all converge towards what the users actually want to use, which is usdt.

Speaker B: Okay, yeah, like that makes sense. Yeah. Uh, interesting. But do you also foresee like a rise of maybe, I don't know, local currency stable coins, for example, you know, like in, I don't know, Europe. Right. EU tether. I'm not sure is that even actually

Speaker A: Euro tether used to exist. Tether was the first one to push out the euro denominated product, but then they switched it off because the regulatory landscape in Europe is just oh, that's crazy. It's insane in my opinion and personal opinion, not representing anyone's MHM position on it, but I think MICA is the worst piece of regulation I've ever seen, uh, ever in the history of regulation. Probably. I think yes, there will be locally denominated stablecoins, but the problem is that why are people using usdt? Because they don't want to be exposed to the Turkish lira. They don't want to be exposed to the naira or other or other highly inflated currency. So stablecoin doesn't fix inflation. A stablecoin just gives ability for people that could never open a bank account in US dollar to tap into the US dollar market. But that's why the usage exists. The usage exists because the US dollar is still the reserve currency of the world and people want to have access to it. No other denomination of stablecoin has ever been successful other than a little bit the Euro ones. But again, I think that the market cap of all euro denominated stablecoin is less than 5 billion if I had to make a guess. But maybe I'm wrong. But it's only your C and from circle that actually has any kind of of adoption and anything else is basically non existent. Like yesterday Tether introduced the Stable, a new stablecoin for Georgia, uh, to basically use the initial currency of Georgia and bring it onto the blockchain. But those markets are way, way smaller. So yeah, I hope that we're all going to be living in a world with fiat dominated stablecoins in the future, but I'm. I'm not so sure that's going to be the case. I. I do believe that most of it will converge to dollar and gold and kind of stop like that.

Speaker B: Nice. Yeah. M. It makes sense. Yeah. Hopefully we'll see more. And I, I also agree with your point that I mean USD is like the, I guess like the number one reserve currency right now still in the world. Right. And then a lot of people still want access to USD but they unable to do it in their local market. So that's why make it like the perfect entry for what you guys are building for.

Speaker A: Great.

Speaker B: Nice. What, uh, could you share like maybe what's the most non obvious use case for USDT0 beyond trading that you've seen?

Speaker A: Huh? Yeah, well, there are some people in New York that are allowing you to buy uh, luxury watches and um, private jets with USDT zero. That's pretty cool. I guess I've obviously not been able to try them because I cannot.

Speaker B: That's pretty cool. Yeah.

Speaker A: We have seen a couple of transactions actually going through from this team that was actually basically the way it was working is that users wanted to pay with USDT on Tron and then they needed to cash out. The merchant itself needed to cash out with USDT0 on Polygon. So they're accepting these very large payments as a merchant and then they are immediately sending them over to Polygon or Arbitrum to basically off board them, uh, into the centralized exchanges. And I always like to see those kind of products being born in the wild without us knowing. Because I met this guy in New York City and he was like, well, you know, we move around $20 million between your chains every single day. That's you. That's amazing. Tell me more about it. And it's actually very cool. And other than that, we don't have any other crazy use cases. But uh, I mean anyone can build whatever they want on usdt. So I'm sure that there are some people that are building some pretty crazy stuff, but nothing pops into my mind other than those large payments.

Speaker B: Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah. No, I think that's a very clever use case right there. Yeah, for sure. Um, and right now we're living in the age of artificial intelligence. Everywhere he goes, go to AI. I'm curious, what's your take on how was the agentic AI Agentic payment? The whole space affects stable coins. Is that a good Thing, bad thing, net positive, good thing.

Speaker A: We're focusing a lot on it. All of the USD zero products are built so that agents can integrate them and that agents can actually execute everything they need fully on their own. Right. Like if I'm sending 10,000 USD between Polygon and Arbitrum, I cannot wait for somebody to process a withdrawal on a centralized exchange. If I'm an agent, I need something that programmatically executes it and programmatically brings it forward. Uh, mhm. I think the big challenge for when agentic payments will really start working and be integrated in our society will not really be a stablecoin challenge, it will be a network challenge. The amount of transaction per second that an agentic economy will require is absolutely insane. We're talking no longer about tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of tpss transaction per second. We're probably talking about single digit millions of TPSs needed. Because if every single human being on the planet was to use a financial network with, we wouldn't still, we would still rarely get 1 million TPSs. But we've now hundreds of millions of agents that are talking to each other, paying things between each other and executing stuff on their own. It becomes fundamental to have networks that are highly performant and highly secure. We're working very very closely with the LayerZero team on zero chain, the blockchain that are gonna be launching in uh, October this year. And we think it's one of the the best designs on how you could actually reaches though reach those single digit millions of TPSs. And on our side obviously our network has never been clogged once. So we can process hundreds of thousands of TPSs between our chains. But we do expect cross chain interactions to be less, the numbers will be lower compared to same chain interactions between agents. So ah, we're still working very hard on it. We're working on, on a whole suite of toolkit products to help agents to actually build on top of USDT0. But yeah, it's one of the things that we're focusing the most on right now. So we're very very excited about it.

Speaker B: Well yeah, that sounds very exciting for sure. And like you said in future, I mean obviously agent they move it like speed up very uh, fast right? It's like faster than second, faster than human can react. So we definitely only 100,000 or even 100,000 tps or even more in the

Speaker A: future as yeah probably 100,000 hps would be easy to achieve. The problem is when you get to the Three millions. I think it's pretty challenging.

Speaker B: It's true. And I think even if we do some simple math, like if one person, I mean that's assumption that one person, one agent. Right, but what if like one person, like multiple agent working for same person and then multiply. Yeah, Exactly.

Speaker A: I have 10 agents. So how about we start running on billions of agents and they need to transfer between each other.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: Infinitely scalable blockchains, basically. Which is something basically impossible to achieve, by the way.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's very tough. Tough one to do than blockchain. Yeah, interesting. But yeah, it was an interesting problem. Uh, I'm kind of curious to see how people were so in the future. All right, cool. Um, well, since you've been building in web3 for like so many years and also running this USC0, can you have any advice if you want to build their own web 3 company? Company or like startup in general? Any advice?

Speaker A: Don't go. Go sell flowers. It's a much more relaxing life. No jokes aside, it's a very challenging industry to build in. Probably the hardest, single hardest industry to build in when it comes to stress levels and threats and so on and so forth. Uh, but in my opinion, it's also one of the most deserving, if you will, industry to actually bet on. Because, you know, maybe, maybe it's just me being a little bit of a dreamer, but I like to think when I, when I don't sleep and when I cannot go out with my girlfriend on a Saturday night because we are fixing a problem or anything of the sort. Yeah, I do like to think that we're really trying to change the world. Obviously not on our own. We're doing a little, we're putting a little brick into the wall that could potentially change the world. But, uh, I think financial freedom is the most important thing that anyone could do. And it's also the only thing that makes me want to wake up at night and work 20 hours a day because. Yeah, making money, school. And if you worked at Jane street or blackrock, you could make a lot of more, probably a lot more money than what I'm making and, um, probably work way less, but it doesn't, doesn't tickle me. You know, it's not something that makes me happy and it's not something that makes me want sometimes ruin my life just to be able to get to a certain goal in a certain future. So, yeah, I guess advices would be. I don't even know if I have an advice, to be honest. It would mostly be if you're getting into this thing, know what you're getting into and only get into it if you, if you want to go all in, you know, don't, don't go halfway through because if you go halfway through, you're just gonna end up being stressed, unhappy and probably waste your life. So if you want to do this thing, do it the right way. And if you want to do it the right way, it's going to be harder, but it's also going to be probably the most, uh, deserving, if you will, or, or self fulfilling thing that I've personally experienced in my life.

Speaker B: Makes sense. Yeah. And I totally agree. I mean web3 is not an industry where you can just like come in, wave, wave your hand around and it's like, yeah, it's like you have to be fully committed. Right. 247 like tired people actually left the

Speaker A: industry because of that reason and now they're into AI. And I'm like, yeah, I guess your life is much more chill than mine is right now.

Speaker B: Yeah, interesting perspective. Cool. Yeah. And the final question, where can people follow you and all the USDT0 feel free to share any public handles from US company.

Speaker A: Yes. So you can, you can follow our twitter profiles@usdt0. Underscore to my personal profile is at zero lore. So Z E R O L O R E. Yeah. And, and Our website is USDT0TO. Obviously our documentation is there, it's fully there and you can learn, learn about it and see what can happen.

Speaker B: Awesome. Cool. Yeah, I'll make sure to put all the links in the show notes here so that you know, the followers and the listener can actually follow and check on your company, uh, progress. Yeah. Awesome. Once again, Lorenzo, it's been a real pleasure having you on today talking about, you know, USDT0 theta, you know, why the meteoric rise, you know, how you guys achieved so much in the last 16 months. Yeah. I wish you and the uh, co founder the best of luck moving forward.

Speaker A: Appreciate it.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: Thank you so much. Have a good day.

Speaker B: Cheers. Thank you. And we back to our studio. What do you think about Lorenzo and the successful launch of USDT0? Uh, I think his story of digging deep into the trench of crypto in his USD days, uh, and to leading one of the biggest stable coins in this space is really impressive. The biggest takeaway for me is that stablecoins are not just trading tools, they are becoming global financial infrastructure, especially for people in uh, Africa, Asia, Latin America and other markets who need access to USD with our US bank account. What was your favorite idea or moment from the episode? Please leave a comment down below. For the next episode, we'll be talking to Matthew Schneider. He's the President and CEO of Building.inc where he works on the data infrastructure behind real estate finance. His background combines real estate, technology and capital markets with a focus on how AI and blockchain can make property information more trusted, usable, and finance ready. He's also a public speaker, guest lecturer, and host of uh, Code and Concrete, a podcast on real estate, technology and the built environment. If you enjoyed this episode, please give a like and subscribe. It means a lot to us. Thank you for watching and see you next time.