Think about 2020, imagine a room full of people and the people in this room are all the greatest names of our industry and you can imagine in that room all the people you know were looking at each other and then looking at us and you whispering oh yeah yeah those guys are the black sheet those guys they are going

down and then you fast forward four years in that room you don't hear whispering

because basically there is only us. Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance.

This is how to get started, how to get better, how to front run the opportunity.

This is Ryan Sean Adams.

This is a solo episode today. David's on a flight, so I guess I'm here to help you become more

bankless. We have Apollo Ardonio, the CEO of Tether, the hundred billion dollar

stable coin company on the podcast today.

All right, so I think before we get in this episode, I want to give you a little bit of context.

For as long as I've been in crypto, I've heard people say, and I'm sure many of you have heard people say,

tether, the stable coin, is going to go bust. People have said it's a scam, people have said it's a fraud,

and that maybe someday it would go bust and take down all of

crypto with it. It's been about 10 years of people saying that and I've seen a lot of

crypto projects rise and fall during that time.

And here's the thing, tether is still here,

and it's still pretty much working as advertised.

Of course, we can't take that to mean

that we should trust it. If you choose to use a

crypto dollar, something that is centralized in the way that tether is, you're

getting a product that does not have trustless guarantees. It is not crypto native to the nth degree.

And so like all centralized stable coins, tether is a dollar IOU. It's based on the full faith and credit of the Tether bank. You have to trust

Tether's auditors. It's not bankless in the way that Bitcoin and Ethereum are bankless and

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