Home The Cointelegraph Top 100 2023 Paolo Ardoino

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Paolo Ardoino

Chief technology officer of Bitfinex and Tether

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“We see cryptocurrencies increasing as a means of payment and a store of value.”

Biography:

With his experience spanning close to 10 years in Web3 alone, Paolo Ardoino is a veteran in creating technology solutions for the decentralized world. Ardoino joined Bitfinex as a senior software developer in 2014 but was soon made the chief technology officer in 2015 and has continued in the role ever since. He has also served as the chief technology officer of Tether, which issues the USDT stablecoin, since 2017.

Since the early years of his career, Ardoino has worked on multiple research projects involving cybersecurity and cryptography for military applications. He started his professional career as a developer after completing a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Genoa. 

Ardoino’s 2022:

For anyone in the Web3 sphere, 2022 was demanding and relentless. The two most affected areas of the industry during the crypto bear market were centralized exchanges and algorithmic stablecoins. While USDT is not an algorithmic stablecoin, it had to survive several market risks during the year. The USDT stablecoin is pegged to the United States dollar but depegged to $0.95 in May during the Terra episode and again to $0.97 during the FTX collapse in November. 

Tether had to address a lot of FUD about the assets backing its stablecoin. It responded with an announcement that it had refined its asset base and reduced its exposure to commercial paper. In September, Tether was hit by a court order to provide evidence that the stablecoin was backed by U.S. dollars. Tether claimed it was a routine discovery process that it had to work with to provide details of the assets backing its stablecoin.

Overall, in 2022, Tether was launched on Polygon, Tezos and Polkadot. Tether also deployed a stablecoin pegged to the British pound called Tether GBP (GBPT) and extended its stablecoin portfolio to the euro (EURT), Mexican peso (MXNT) and Chinese yuan (CNHT). Meanwhile, Ardoino and his team achieved several milestones at Bitfinex, as it became the first exchange to enable transactions with offshore Chinese yuan. The exchange also launched a low-cost scaling solution highly optimized for speed called Harmony One and became popular in Portugal and Turkey. Furthermore, the year marked the launch of Holepunch, a platform for building peer-to-peer (P2P) applications, put together via a collaboration across Bitfinex, Hypercore and Tether. They also launched Keet, a P2P video calling application on Holepunch. Ardoino was appointed the chief strategy officer of the initiative.

Ardoino’s 2023:

Ardoino will hope for a positive 2023, and just as the year opened, Tether announced the launch of Tether Gold (XAUT). Tether’s market cap recovered from a cycle low of $65 billion and has steadily crept up to $67 billion as of the start of 2023. Bitfinex will look to continue surviving the contagion brought about by the fall of Terra and the shake-up in confidence in centralized exchanges.

It can be expected that both of the platforms will become more widely used, creating more peer-to-peer applications by leveraging the Holepunch platform. The Keet mobile app launched at the end of January as a peer-to-peer messaging platform that relies on no central entity. Ardoino will also likely focus on building the ecosystem around his projects through events. He is actively participating in events like the Plan B Forum and promoting his projects.