Tether has the gold. Now, CEO Paolo Ardoino is making a bold push into AI

Accounting is not a very physical job, but tell that to the KPMG gnomes who just spent weeks lugging around gold bars in a secret Swiss cavern.

This came after stablecoin giant Tether tapped the Big Four firm to carry out an audit of its reserves, which includes around 150 tons of bullion that back the company’s popular gold token.

“It was a heavy-lifting exercise,” CEO Paolo Ardoino tells me of the audit, which not only confirmed that, yes, the gold is all there , but that Tether’s overall reserves exceed its liabilities by $6.8 billion.

The KPMG audit should finally put to rest one of crypto’s longest-running conspiracies: That Tether’s $183 billion supply of USDT stablecoins is not properly backed, and that the company would one day pull the mother of all rug pulls.

So much for that.

While hyper-secretive Tether is unlikely to win a prize for corporate transparency any time soon, the KPMG seal of approval means the media can turn to more interesting questions—like what the company plans to do next.

For starters, it’s notable that, like many others in the blockchain world, Tether is trying to shake the “crypto” label.

“It’s been a while since we’ve considered ourselves crypto.

I think that we are both a digital dollar company and a digital gold company,” says Ardoino, adding that Tether now has over 650 million worldwide users.

The bulk of these are in regions like Africa and South America, where governments have repeatedly debased national currencies, and prompted their citizens to seek out sturdier assets like Tether’s dollar and gold offerings instead.

Now, Tether is accelerating plans to expand far beyond financial services, and transform itself into a platform capable of delivering technology and infrastructure.

In the last two years, it has invested heavily in fields like decentralized communication, farming, and a network of solar-powered kiosks that provide off-grid electricity for a few dollars a month.

Next up is basic AI services.

Ardoino points out that, even in the poorest countries, nearly everyone has a cell phone on which it’s possible to run a simple AI model.