The tech director’s promotion comes as the company plans to become a “technology-driven organization changing the future of finance,” rather than just a stablecoin issuer
USDT steiblcoin issuer Tether will appoint its longtime CTO Paolo Ardoino as CEO, The Block writes. He will take up the new position in December, while the company’s current CEO Jean-Louis Van der Velde will move into an advisory role.
Van der Velde will remain head of crypto exchange Bitfinex. At the same time, Ardoino will remain CTO of Bitfinex and Chief Strategy Officer of Holepunch, a platform for building decentralized applications backed by Bitfinex, Tether and Hypercore.
Ardoino joined Bitfinex in 2014 and Tether in 2017. According to a statement from the company, his appointment as CEO is because Tether plans to become a “technology-driven organization changing the future of finance,” rather than just an issuer of stablecoins.
“Paolo will begin his new position by focusing on technology advancements, supporting peer-to-peer (decentralized) projects and participating in bitcoin mining initiatives,” the publication quoted a Tether spokesperson as saying.
The company noted that the new technology strategy may also include working with regulators to establish clearer guidelines and promote greater compliance in the cryptocurrency space.
While USDT will remain Tether’s core product, the company is expanding its horizons, Ardoino told reporters. He added that the firm will soon announce a new platform that “leverages Tether’s expertise in building financial technology by focusing on real assets.”
At the end of May, it became known that the USDT issuer decided to engage in bitcoin mining and announced that it was investing in the production of green electricity and the launch of bitcoin mining in Uruguay. In June, Tether also took part in raising $1 billion to build the largest crypto farm in the world in El Salvador.
In late July, Forbes named the owners of Tether dollar billionaires. The journalists calculated that Van der Velde and Ardoino each have stakes in the company of $1.8 billion.