Tether CEO casts the stablecoin giant as Asimov’s Foundation at Plan ₿ Forum

Paolo Ardoino pitched open-source infrastructure as a hedge against civilizational decline, backed by a reported $1.5 billion quarterly profit Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino walked onto the Plan ₿ Forum stage in Lugano and compared his company to the Foundation from Isaac Asimov’s science fiction. That is the outfit built to carry knowledge through a galactic dark age. His keynote was titled “Tether – A Psychohistory Implementation.” It borrowed Asimov’s idea of a predictive science of society. In Ardoino’s telling, decline cannot be stopped. The dark stretch that follows, however, can be shortened if open, unstoppable infrastructure is built in advance. The seed vault, funded by the Empire Ardoino framed Tether as a seed of light meant to survive whatever comes next. The concrete version of that pitch is an open-source technology plan aimed at widening financial inclusion and helping communities become more self-reliant. ZeroHedge, which covered the speech, pointed out the irony. The money funding this seed, it noted, comes from the Empire’s own debt, plus a growing pile of Swiss gold. Ardoino stressed that Tether wants to be more than a stablecoin issuer. He pointed to open-source prot...