With $111 billion in assets and $6 billion in profits, shadowy stablecoin merchant Tether has emerged as crypto’s most profitable company. Now it's restructuring, moving into bitcoin mining, AI and education.hile much of the crypto world crashed and burned during the recent market downturn, reeling from the collapse of FTX and other giants, Tether has thrived.
Tether’s planned expansion isn’t just a matter of prudent diversification–it’s philosophical. “We feel like 90% of technologies, if not more, are built for the best case scenario but no one is building the tech for the worst case scenario,” says Ardoino, 40. “If there is a catastrophe, I’m not saying that there has to be a huge war, but anything can happen, and we are not prepared for that.”
Looking for opportunities outside of Italy, he moved to London around 2013 and soon after founded Fincluster, a startup that built cloud-based financial applications for advisors, fund managers and institutions throughout London, Milan, and Lugano. In October 2014, one of his customers introduced him to Giancarlo Devasini, the CFO of Tether and its sister crypto exchange Bitfinex. Devansini asked Ardoino to help scale Bitfinex’s platform, which was already gaining popularity.
Data, responsible for strategic investments in emerging technologies, including AI and peer-to-peer platforms;Edu, to support education and leadership initiatives. In terms of bitcoin mining, Ardoino’s goal is a 5% market share, which would rank it among the top miners globally. “If you think of bitcoin as the ultimate form of money, you know, built for the apocalypse, you don’t want the majority of bitcoin mining being concentrated in one country. So the way to do it is to invest in different regions,” he explains.
Rob Toews, partner at Radical Ventures, is doubtful about Tether’s so-called move into AI. “Getting hands on GPUs and renting them out to AI companies is a strategy that is easier to get into, but it’s really hard for me to imagine Tether becoming a credible competitor in the world of building multimodal AI models.”courses and masterclass programs encompassing blockchain tech as well as artificial intelligence, coding and design.