Paolo Ardoino, chief executive of Tether, says the global financial system is structurally unprepared for the volume of transactions that an AI-powered economy will require.
Speaking at the Bitcoin 2026 Conference, Ardoino says the future will see a mind-boggling number of transactions with the rise of AI agents and machines.
“We believe in a future where billions of people, billions of machines and trillions of AI agents will need a self-custody wallet. People need to be in charge of their own wealth. People need to be able to transact with whomever they want.”
According to Ardoino, the current financial system is not designed for what is coming.
“When AI agents will be everywhere, there will be the need of trillions of payments per day. And the current financial transport layers are not going to be able to cope with that.”
His solution is Bitcoin’s Lightning Network — a peer-to-peer transaction layer built on top of Bitcoin that enables fast, low-cost payments without routing through traditional financial intermediaries.
“Things like Lightning Network are the right way because Lightning Network is a peer-to-peer transaction layer for Bitcoin.”
Tether is the issuer of USDT, the world’s largest stablecoin by market capitalization. The firm has been expanding its presence in the Bitcoin ecosystem and has positioned itself as a key infrastructure provider for the emerging AI agent payment economy.
Earlier this month, Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of the venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), said the traditional payment rails are not designed to handle the incoming scale of AI agent transactions, highlighting that AI is crypto’s killer app.
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