Keynote: Tether A Psychohistory Implementation | Bitcoin 2026

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:01]Year 10,231.

[00:00:04]Humanity had conquered distance, bent matter to its will, built a civilization across a thousand worlds.

[00:00:12]And the empire wasn't just powerful, it was permanent. Or at least, that's what everyone believed. [music] Everyone except one man.

[00:00:22]Mathematician Hari Seldon had spent his life on psychohistory, predicting the fate of civilizations through [music] math.

[00:00:30]And it told him something no one wanted to hear.

[00:00:39]He calculated the imminent collapse of the empire.

[00:00:42]It never happens all at once. First the unrest, then the blame, then the violence.

[00:00:50]Three factions, each convinced they alone could save what was already breaking apart.

[00:00:57]And then, silence.

[00:01:00]A world that once blazed with the light of [music] a billion lives, gone dark.

[00:01:05]Not destroyed, just forgotten.

[00:01:11]The empire will fall. Not today, not suddenly. He stood before the empire and told them what was coming. [music] >> Everything we built will collapse.

[00:01:19]Society will descend into darkness, 10,000 years of it.

[00:01:24]Unless we act now. They called it treason.

[00:01:28]But Hari had seen this, too. Even in the deepest darkness, his equations showed a second term.

[00:01:35]Small points of light. Not empires or armies, just people refusing [music] to let go. Knowledge becoming a bridge, a bridge becoming a network, a network becoming a foundation.

[00:01:48]So he proposed something radical. A foundation at the galaxy's [music] edge, a seed planted in the dark, meant to grow into light.

[00:02:00]everyone.

[00:02:04]Good to be here again this year.

[00:02:08]Um Why this video? I I wanted to try to explain in the best way possible how we think about Tether.

[00:02:26]So, Tether is very well known as a stablecoin company.

[00:02:32]Um issues USDT.

[00:02:35]Is a buyer of Bitcoin. We have more than 130,000, 140,000 Bitcoin. Uh we keep buying.

[00:02:45]Uh Just today, we released a Bitcoin faucet. If you go on Twitter, Tether owns the @BTC account. You can do @BTC and your tether.me email address that you get when you download the Tether wallet, and you will get 10 cents in in Bitcoin directly for free to your wallet, right? So, we do all these things.

[00:03:10]But um I tried to explain to you why be why Tether goes much beyond that.

[00:03:21]And the best way I could think about was taking inspiration from Isaac Asimov is my preferred author in history.

[00:03:32]And if you have read the cycle of the Foundation uh from Isaac Asimov, there is this um person, this mathematician called Hari Seldon, that create this theory called um psychohistory.

[00:03:47]And the psychohistory is a theory is is a combination between mathematics, statistics, physics, um sociology, politics, all together is a complete science to understand how humanity and society will ship will shift, shape, and change over the course of hundreds of years, thousands of years, and millions of years.

[00:04:19]And so, you know, this is an excerpt from from from the books.

[00:04:24]And we use that to express as he as Asimov was very well expressing in the books, that you can use science to predict to analyze what is going on in the universe and to predict the outcome.

[00:04:46]And try while you predict the outcome, try to think how you can use the very same science to adjust it, to move things in a different direction, to change the course of of maybe the decay of society, change the course of um potential darkness that could um arrive um among all of us. Like, you know, in in the books, Asimov was describing this this Hari Seldon predicting that after 10,000 years of the empire, the strongest empire of the galaxy, something would happen. A turmoil will happen, and 10,000 years of darkness will follow.

[00:05:37]And was also predicting that through the usage of psychohistory, that darkness could be reduced to just hundreds of years.

[00:05:46]And so, why I'm telling you this, am I crazy? Uh why why I'm saying this at a Bitcoin conference? I'm why bringing up this doom and gloom gloom discussion? But I think that here, the way I think about Bitcoin is the incipient of a technology and a new social construct that is creating a new sparkle that will survive and resist to any darkness because is made to be peer-to-peer, is made by people, is made by people using it, is made by people accepting it in every single part of the world. And so, if we believe that this is actually the case and, you know, if Bitcoin is truly the first element of a potential fight against an upcoming darkness, what we can learn from that. And first, so when when we I thought about what Asimov was trying to communicate with with his psychohistory um science, then I thought, is it just science fiction? Is it just happening in the books?

[00:07:08]And then I thought, well, that darkness described in books of Asimov is simply something that could be boiled down also on and brought back to Earth.

[00:07:23]Because darkness, as was described in those books, is nothing more than chaos in society.

[00:07:33]Is is instability in society. And you might have heard me last year explaining that Tether is for us that we work in the company, we call it the stable company. It's a company that aims to bring stability in society.

[00:07:53]And while Hari Seldon in the Asimov books was was doing that, was trying to solve and reduce darkness from 10,000 years to few hundred years through the usage of psychohistory, of this science, we believe at Tether that the darkness, quote unquote darkness, that we are seeing upcoming in society, because it's out there, right? So, we see uh wars, we see um uh inflation, we see national currencies being destroyed, we see instability, we see all the possible signals that what we call darkness is coming, is there. Like, and the world is not necessarily going towards a better place.

[00:08:40]There are more and more chaos, there is more and more um instability. And so, I wanted to use this video to explain how starting from the universe and sci-fi, actually we can boil this down to what is happening on Earth. So, let me move on to the next part.

[00:09:03]>> This is a story that doesn't just predict the future, it recognizes the present.

[00:09:08]Right now, 700 million people live with intermittent power.

[00:09:13]They are already in the dark.

[00:09:15]Families who have fed communities for generations discarded overnight because the system decided they were no longer economically viable.

[00:09:24]And in one of the oldest democracies on Earth, people arrested not for [music] violence, but for words, for a meme.

[00:09:32]The lesson from some governments has been clear. They don't need to silence us, they just need to make sure we can't pay our rent.

[00:09:40]And in the most powerful nations, corporations are building machines not to serve people, but to exploit [music] them.

[00:09:53]The darkness doesn't arrive with an explosion.

[00:09:56]It arrives with a slow dimming.

[00:10:03]So, again, starting from the universe, sci-fi, to the Earth.

[00:10:09]So, what was described as a period of thousands of years of of darkness in the universe and boiled down to Earth is simply society becomes more unstable, um unpredictable. You have hundreds of millions of people and actually billions of people that don't have access to basic financial services.

[00:10:30]They don't have access to um electricity. They don't have access to stable telecommunications. And more importantly, they don't have access to and will not have access to basic intelligence services.

[00:10:45]So, think about 4 billion people in the world that don't have access to basic financial services.

[00:10:53]They are left behind by the traditional financial system.

[00:10:58]How we can think that half of the population the world being left out will bring more stability to society.

[00:11:09]That will That is the analogy that we are trying to make with the psychohistory revelation.

[00:11:18]Some If we do don't do anything about it, if we don't do something, if we don't try to use science or technology and our abilities to build something different, something that outlasts darkness, that can reduce the the darkness, creating stability, creating spots of light across countries, across cities, people.

[00:11:43]Something that will connect people independently from where they are and make them resilient to the change in the world. That is going to be our darkness on Earth.

[00:11:57]But how, you know, this Sure, many words. What does mean? What Tether pertains to do about that?

[00:12:05]So, let's move on and see.

[00:12:11]Hari Seldon understood something most people miss.

[00:12:15]You don't fight the darkness by winning a single battle.

[00:12:19]You fight it by building systems that outlast it.

[00:12:23]That's what we're doing.

[00:12:25]A foundation, real infrastructure, and we call it the resilience stack.

[00:12:32]So, this is our answer.

[00:12:35]A resilience stack is an open-source technological stack that, as in the psychohistory case, is a scientific approach that analyzes the different issues that we see in all the countries we operate. Remember, Tether operates in hundreds of countries. In 160 different countries, we have boots on the ground, we talk to people. We have a network of 573 million users of USDT and Tether Gold and all of the other services that we provide. And it's growing Our network is growing by 34 million new wallets per quarter. So, this is unprecedented. This is a scale that proves that the technology that we are building is growing at the pace of a social network.

[00:13:23]It's not anymore a fintech company, it's not a stablecoin, but actually is becoming a movement, is becoming a technology stack that is becoming part a part of the fabric of that world. A part of the world where fathers and mothers of of of families are left behind by the traditional financial system. They're left behind by the ability to communicate safely with their children.

[00:13:51]They might not have even electricity at home.

[00:13:54]And think about a world where you have half of the population of the world that not does not have access to basic financial services and will not participate to the 100x improvement in intelligence capabilities because of AI.

[00:14:13]So, if the gap between the two sides of society was already that big because of financial inclusion, imagine what happens when AI will become truly part of everyone's life. You are going to have that gap that that is now splitting the two parts of exactly the two halves of the population of the world, that gap will become 100 times wider because of AI.

[00:14:40]And so, the resilience stack is our res- response to that. What are the practical things? What is the practical technology that it has, in the case of of psychohistory, we could use and build and apply to reduce the period of darkness from hundreds of years or decades to just few years and create the sparkle the sparkles of light across society so that whatever happens, whatever dystopian future, whatever catastrophe, whatever pandemic, whatever will happen, we can still connect together, we can transact together with Bitcoin, we can use the AI services that work for us and not for big few big corporations. So, all these is convergence in a single story, in a single stack. You should look at Tether GitHub open-source repositories. We have I think crossed 1,000 open-source projects on GitHub. That is very unique.

[00:15:43]That shows how really deeply we do care about building something that will outlast even us as a company because software technology needs to be resilient even to its own creator. That's also what I like about Bitcoin. It's everlasting even his own creator. Will last forever. Of course, we are going to always remember Satoshi Nakamoto. We are all Satoshi, but that's the beauty of a technology. That means when a technology is well done, is no matter who created it, everyone can use it. Everyone is actually the father of that technology. And so, let's see the first part.

[00:16:28]At the base, a peer-to-peer protocol that needs no servers, >> [music] >> no center to hold.

[00:16:50]Tether built Holepunch. That is completely peer-to-peer telecommunication protocol that can scale to billions of users, billions of machines, and trillions of AI agents.

[00:17:03]It's, for the more techy of you guys, it's the BitTorrent protocol that was built almost 30 years ago, rewritten from scratch, improved, added added the cryptographic layer, made it extremely scalable and adaptable not just for file sharing, but for any real-time data stream, for video calls, messaging, mapping, and you name it. So, this is fully open source. Everyone should take a look at it because for the first time, the Holepunch protocol allows any developer to build application that can scale to billions of people and and hundreds of thousands of companies without any single central server.

[00:17:49]On top of that, we have demonstrated, we are going to see in a little bit, but we we we are ourselves capable to offer services that truly scale to the entire humanity without any point of failure.

[00:18:04]And you can build any application on top of it. Again, you can build a peer-to-peer Uber, you can build a peer-to-peer mapping system, you can build anything you want. It's out there, it's for free, it's one of the most sophisticated, but at the same time easy to use software and networking stacks that could be empowering anything you are building for your company or for yourself, for your families, for your friends in an incredible way. This is, to me, what Bitcoin is to to to finance, Holepunch to me is to networking and telecommunications.

[00:18:48]Above that, communication [music] that can't be silenced or switched off.

[00:19:03]On top of the Holepunch protocol and stack, we built Keet.

[00:19:07]I'm not sure if many of you guys have used Keet. Um is the first example of a messaging app that in this moment has more than 5 million users across desktop and mobile.

[00:19:20]And there probably much more. It's hard to count because there are no central servers. There are millions and millions of users and chat rooms with tens of thousands of users that are sharing tens of millions of messages with videos, photos, and and everything without any central server. Keet is the first messaging application that can scale to 8 billion people and eventually to machines that does not have any cost because does not have any data center. It cannot be stopped. It works in any place even when you have the hardest type of and strictest type of control of the internet. We build this for the people.

[00:20:05]We build this for fathers that wants to have a reliable and secure way to talk to their children, but also for people that work in and live in areas where you know, they they they there might be a distortion or authoritarian regime.

[00:20:22]And this is the true first unstoppable communication app. And I want to say something. One of the main critics to Key as an application has always been why is not a open source. I can guarantee you have my commitment to make it open source.

[00:20:39]We are working on all the documentation.

[00:20:42]We are working on the modules so that everyone can take it once it's open source and improve it, build on top of it, change it, and recreate it in just a simple a simple steps. So, this is an example. This is enormous amount of work that Tether's team did and will be open sourced.

[00:21:02]And again, is we do it with our joy in our hearts because we believe if people cannot talk to each other, if people that they cannot message each other, and if we stop the ability to have peer-to-peer communication. So, as we had in society. Society was born with peer-to-peer communications. We were meeting the streets. We were meeting in the squares of the cities. We were talking to one another without any intermediaries. Intermediaries have taken over both the financial world and the communication world in the last 50 years. That's why society is having a hit's darkest moment because you got we we should have been using technology to create societies that were more open.

[00:21:52]Instead, we hijacked technology to make society much controlled by few few companies. So, Key is and the open source of Key for us will be one of the biggest moments. It will be one of the biggest testaments of our um dedication to this mission.

[00:22:20]Then, financial tools powered by WDK for humans, [music] machines, and the agents between them to integrate unstoppable Bitcoin payments.

[00:22:34]So, WDK is one of our uh more most successful products. It's out there. It's an open source library that allows any developer, any person, any computer, any AI agent to have a self-custodial wallet.

[00:22:53]So, we believe in a future where billions of people, billions of machines, and trillions of AI agents will need a self-custodial wallet.

[00:23:04]People need to be in charge of their own wealth. People need to be able to transact with whenever they want. And so, we wanted to create something that everyone could use, that would support any asset, but most importantly would support Bitcoin. Um there is even from the pure physics point of view, I mean, technology is physics.

[00:23:27]From the pure technological physics point of view, we know that the best way to scale the future need of payments when AI agents will be everywhere, there will be the need of trillions of payments per day.

[00:23:45]And the current financial transport layers are not going to be able to cope with that.

[00:23:52]Things like Lightning Network are the right way because Lightning Network is peer-to-peer uh transaction layer for Bitcoin.

[00:24:01]And I'm very happy to see the WDK is supporting that from the get-go. And we want to make sure that your smart fridge, your smart car, your your your smartphone will be able to transact in um in Bitcoin, but also protecting your Bitcoin and making sure that it will always remain your yours.

[00:24:33]And at the top, decentralized [music] AI.

[00:24:42]Because if it's not your AI, it's not your intelligence.

[00:24:54]Well, and the last part is Key Vault.

[00:24:56]So, we just released Key Vault SDK that is an open source software development kit that allows any person to build AI tools that run locally on your smartphone on your device, that run on your laptop so that your privacy is guaranteed. Um it support all the best open source large language models. It can scale from the tiniest GPU that you have to your laptop again, your your your smartphone to to mainframes. It can It has embedded the hole punch protocol. It has embedded WDK. It has embedded everything that we have seen before. Because, you know, we took inspiration from the um not your keys, not your coins, you know, that we were all all well know about when it comes to Bitcoin. We replicated the same concept and we understood that is not your intelligence if it's not your AI.

[00:25:58]So, we are driven and we are all talking about AI in this in these days in these these weeks and years. We know that is one of the most fundamentally changing technology for the future of society, humanity. But again, if we don't build AI tools that cover the needs of the people that are belonging to to that segment of the population, that half of the humanity that does not have access to basic financial services.

[00:26:24]If we pretend that the same people that don't have access to basic financial services, that they are the same people that don't have access to they will not be able to afford an open AI or Anthropic subscription. These people cannot be left behind. They need tools that can work on their small the smartphones, that work in in the the the the smallest and uh you know, farthest villages in in Africa or in Central South America or in Southeast Asia. We wanted at Tether to build a cohesive story that moves from telecommunication to to messaging to to wallets and self-custodial wallets and to artificial intelligence and create an entire unique stack fully open source that would empower people, not the companies, not the corporations, but just people.

[00:27:15]Because that is at the end of going back to the sci-fi story, people will rebuild the universe. People are going to rebuild the society or going to save the society here on Earth.

[00:27:29]They are going to People are the ones that are going to make society more stable here on Earth without looking at light years um outside of our um um solar system. And so, I suggest and recommend everyone of you guys to look at what we are building.

[00:27:46]Contribute. This again is fully open source. On the Tether website, we are going to publish soon um grants for everyone to contribute to this technology, to build upon it. We are going to do hackathons. We are going to do everything we can so to to help people to take ownership of what we build. Take pride of of contributing to it and making sure that this technology will be resilient to even the wrath of God. So, thank you very much. I will conclude with this last part of the video.

[00:28:41]Dad, how may entropy be reversed?

[00:28:55]Thank you. Have a good conference.

[00:29:03]>> [music] >> Every year, this community comes together to celebrate, [music] to debate, to build what comes next.

[00:29:15]>> [music] >> And every year, the stage gets bigger.

[00:29:22]>> [music] >> Sound money center stage. So, where do you go [music] to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history?

[00:29:33]You come home.

[00:29:36]>> [music] >> Nashville, July 2027.