How to Survive a Financial Apocalypse | @paoloardoino 00:00 Tether Is Becoming More Than a Stablecoin 03:00 KPMG Audit Answers 12 Years of Tether Criticism 05:22 Will Tether Be Audited Every Year? 09:51 Why Tether Hedges the Dollar With Bitcoin 12:10 Why Tether Owns Bitcoin, Gold and Farmland 13:45 Why Gold Still Matters More Than Bitcoin Globally 15:45 Why Bitcoin Is Still Too Early for the World 18:58 Tether Could Become a Top 5 Buyer of U.S. Treasuries 20:34 How Stablecoins Decentralize U.S. Debt Ownership 23:44 Will AI Eventually Do Everything for Us? 26:18 Why the Global AI Race Is Moving So Fast 28:28 Tether’s Plan to Become a “Stable Company”

EXCLUSIVE: Inside Tether’s KPMG Audit: Gold Bars, Bitcoin, and $6B in Excess Equity Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino joins The Starting Block to unpack details of their KPMG US audit. Ardoino explains how Tether finally cleared the biggest hurdle in the room with a Big Four audit from KPMG US, why the timing mattered, and what the new yearly audit plus quarterly attestations mean for the company and the industry. Timestamps 00:00 - Paolo Ardoino joins to discuss Tether’s Big Four audit announcement 01:16 - Why the audit took years and what made it possible now 03:31 - Why Tether chose KPMG US after earlier controversy around attestations 04:58 - Yearly audits and quarterly attestations as a transparency standard 05:15 - Responding to critics who still question Tether’s transparency 06:36 - The 7 billion redemption stress test in 2022 07:57 - Why auditors counted gold bars in Tether’s reserves 08:40 - Tether’s gold and Bitcoin reserve holdings 09:23 - The private fundraising narrative and why Tether says it does not need capital 12:31 - Tether’s AI effort, Qvac, and the mission to serve the unbanked 14:59 - Supporting Bitcoin security work after the Coldcard exploit 16:52 - Confirming annual audits and quarterly attestations going forward

Feels like a lifetime ago when I made @tether t-shirts and countered constant FUD, explaining in interviews and podcasts that no stablecoin issuer had an audit (all had attestations). Now the doubters have nothing more to say. With @paoloardoino announcing they’ve completed the largest inaugural financial audit in history with KPMG, this definitively shows reserves exceed liabilities by a staggering $6.8B. He even had KPMG count every single gold bar in their vaults. 😂 Many congrats to Paolo and the Tether team. This sets a new bar for the stablecoin industry and shows why Tether is indeed the King of the Stablecoins by every measure. 👑