Is it too soon to say crypto winter? Perhaps. But it certainly is getting ugly out there: Asset prices are in freefall, key legislation hangs by a thread, and members of Crypto Twitter fret it’s their turn to learn what it’s like to “have fun staying poor.” One company, though, is sitting pretty amid all this. That would be Tether, which last week reported $10 billion in profits for 2025, and has amassed so much gold it’s now storing bars of the stuff in Swiss bunkers from World War II.
I recently sat down with Tether’s CEO Paolo Ardoino, whose view of crypto and the future is the subject of my latest Fortune magazine feature. The vision Ardoino shared is a dark one: He thinks Europe—and possibly the West more broadly—is on the cusp of a cultural and economic death spiral, and that new forms of decentralized technology offer the best hope for surviving this coming collapse.
