Stablecoin Tether promotes tech chief to CEO, taking over from mysterious crypto leader
A picture taken in London shows gold-plated souvenir cryptocurrency tether, bitcoin and ethereum coins arranged beside a screen displaying a trading chart, May 8, 2022.
Justin Tallis | Afp | Getty Images
Paolo Ardoino, the chief technology officer for Tether, has been promoted to CEO of the stablecoin company, in a surprise move. Ardoino will take the reins from Jean-Louis van der Velde, a secretive crypto executive and entrepreneur, who has for years been the company’s boss.
In a press release Friday, Tether said that Ardoino will lead Tether from December 2023, succeeding van der Velde. Van der Velde will take up a new advisory role at Tether while still holding the position of CEO at Bitfinex, a crypto exchange that is closely associated with Tether and operated by the same Hong Kong-based parent company, Ifinex.
Ardoino will still serve as Tether’s chief technology officer while taking on his additional duties as CEO, Tether said. He will also continue serving as the chief strategy officer of Holepunch, a peer-to-peer communications network launched by Tether, Bitfinex and infrastructure platform Hypercore.
Ardoino first became involved in crypto when he joined Bitfinex in 2014. He joined Tether as chief technology officer in 2017.
Tether is one of the largest stablecoin operations in the world. Its USDT token, which aims to maintain a one-to-one peg to the U.S. dollar, is the biggest stablecoin by market value with more than $80 billion worth of tokens currently in circulation. Stablecoins are a vital part of the crypto market that help traders move in and out of digital tokens, anywhere in the world, around the clock.
In a statement, Tether’s van der Velde said that Ardoino is “extremely well-suited to lead Tether,” adding: “I believe Tether is poised to continue its rapid growth, with a continued focus on emerging markets and transformative technology.”
The departure of van der Velde, an executive who has barely ever appeared in public, comes as Tether has faced scrutiny over transparency. Many market observers had pointed to the lack of the former CEO’s public facing attitude as a sign Tether is not transparent.
Ardoino has for years effectively been the face of Tether. He has held multiple interviews with the media and appeared on podcasts, often to defend his company and its associated USDT token from scrutiny.
In a CNBC interview at the Money 20/20 conference in Europe in Amsterdam earlier this year, Ardoino said the company would release a full audit “eventually.”
“We’re working on it,” he added.
Explaining why the company had not yet completed a full audit already, Ardoino said this is because none of the big four auditing firms were willing to work with an industry that lacks regulation. While regulations are coming into place around the world for crypto, there is still no all-encompassing framework for the industry in place.
That is soon set to change with the EU’s Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulation around the corner. This would require stablecoins to keep a certain level of assets including more quality assets in their reserves, as well as publicly disclose their reserves. However, MiCA won’t fully apply until December 2024.
Van der Velde, on the other hand, has largely operated in the shadows, helming Tether without appearing in public much or speaking to the press.
Tether ran into a major controversy last year following the collapse of a rival stablecoin called TerraUSD, or UST. UST’s price fell to zero after crypto investors flocked out of the coin en masse due to fears over its backing.
Not long after then, Tether’s USDT also began to deviate from its U.S. dollar peg, stoking concern over whether it was truly fully backed by dollars. That led to calls for Tether to increase transparency and run a full audit of the reserves behind USDT.
For its part, Tether said that its coin is always backed by dollars and dollar-equivalent assets including government bonds. Tether is also backed by other assets, including crypto tokens like bitcoin, and even gold.
Tether’s reserves rose to more than $86 billion in the three-month period from April to June. During that quarter, the company also says it booked a profit of more than $1 billion, up 30% quarter-over-quarter.
The company is sitting on a stockpile of U.S. Treasury bills, which are currently yielding about 4.6%. Tether makes money from various fees, and issuing loans to other institutions, and investments in digital tokens and precious metals.
In 2021, Tether settled with the New York Attorney General’s office for $18 million over claims that it and sister company, Bitfinex, had moved hundreds of millions of dollars to cover up the apparent loss of $850 million of commingled client and corporate funds.
As part of the settlement, Tether agreed to offer frequent quarterly reports detailing its reserves.
Tether continues to face sharp regulatory scrutiny. The U.S. Department of Justice is reportedly investigating Tether executives over allegations that they committed bank fraud in the early days of running the company, according to Bloomberg.
– CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report
WATCH: How a $60 billion crypto collapse got regulators worried
Technology
Spotify paid over $100 million to podcasts in the first quarter, including Joe Rogan, Alex Cooper and Theo Von
Palo Alto Networks signage displays on the screen at the Nasdaq Market in New York City, U.S., March 25, 2025.
Jeenah Moon | Reuters
Palo Alto Networks announced on Monday its intent to acquire Protect AI, a startup specializing in securing artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, for an undisclosed sum.
The deal is set to close by the first quarter of fiscal year 2026.
“By extending our AI security capabilities to include Protect AI’s innovative solutions for Securing for AI, businesses will be able to build AI applications with comprehensive security,” said Anand Oswal, senior vice president and general manager of network security at Palo Alto Networks, in a release.
Palo Alto has been steadily bolstering its artificial intelligence systems to confront increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. The use of rapidly built ecosystems of AI models by large enterprises and government organizations has created new vulnerabilities. The company said those risks require purpose-built defenses beyond conventional cybersecurity.
The acquisition would fold Protect AI’s solutions and team into Palo Alto’s newly announced Prisma AIRS platform. Palo Alto said Protect AI has established itself as a key player in what it called a “critical new area of security.”
Protect AI’s CEO Ian Swanson said joining Palo Alto would allow the company to “scale our mission of making the AI landscape more secure for users and organizations of all sizes.”
The company’s stock price is up 23% in the past year lifting its market cap close to $120 billion. Palo Alto reports third-quarter earnings on May 21.
Year-to-date stock chart for Palo Alto Networks
Technology
Cloud software vendors Atlassian, Snowflake and Workday are betting on security startup Veza
From left, Veza founders Rob Whitcher, Tarun Thakur and Maohua Lu.
Veza
Tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Nvidia have captured headlines in recent years for their massive investments in artificial intelligence startups like OpenAI and Anthropic.
But when it comes to corporate investing by tech companies, cloud software vendors are getting aggressive as well. And in some cases they’re banding together.
Veza, whose software helps companies manage the various internal technologies that employees can access, has just raised $108 million in a financing round that included participation from software vendors Atlassian, Snowflake and Workday.
New Enterprise Associates led the round, which values Veza at just over $800 million, including the fresh capital.
For two years, Snowflake’s managers have used Veza to check who has read and write access, Harsha Kapre, director of the data analytics software company’s venture group told CNBC. It sits alongside a host of other cloud solutions the company uses.
“We have Workday, we have Salesforce — we have all these things,” Kapre said. “What Veza really unlocks for us is understanding who has access and determining who should have access.”
Kapre said that “over-provisioning,” or allowing too many people access to too much stuff, “raises the odds of an attack, because there’s just a lot of stuff that no one is even paying attention to.”
With Veza, administrators can check which employees and automated accounts have authorization to see corporate data, while managing policies for new hires and departures. Managers can approve or reject existing permissions in the software.
Veza says it has built hooks into more than 250 technologies, including Snowflake.
The funding lands at a challenging time for traditional venture firms. Since inflation started soaring in late 2021 and was followed by rising interest rates, startup exits have cooled dramatically, meaning venture firms are struggling to generate returns.
Wall Street was banking on a revival in the initial public offering market with President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, but the president’s sweeping tariff proposals led several companies to delay their offerings.
That all means startup investors have to preserve their cash as well.
In the first quarter, venture firms made 7,551 deals, down from more than 11,000 in the same quarter a year ago, according to a report from researcher PitchBook.
Corporate venture operates differently as the capital comes from the parent company and many investments are strategic, not just about generating financial returns.
Atlassian’s standard agreement asks that portfolio companies disclose each quarter the percentage of a startup’s customers that integrate with Atlassian. Snowflake looks at how much extra product consumption of its own technology occurs as a result of its startup investments, Kapre said, adding that the company has increased its pace of deal-making in the past year.
‘Sleeping industry’
Within the tech startup world, Veza is also in a relatively advantageous spot, because the proliferation of cyberattacks has lifted the importance of next-generation security software.
On the public markets, the First Trust Nasdaq Cybersecurity ETF, which includes CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks, is up 3% so far this year, compared with a 10% drop in the Nasdaq.
Veza’s technology runs across a variety of security areas tied to identity and access. In access management, Microsoft is the leader, and Okta is the challenger. Veza isn’t directly competing there, and is instead focused on visibility, an area where other players in and around the space lack technology, said Brian Guthrie, an analyst at Gartner.
Tarun Thakur, Veza’s co-founder and CEO, said his company’s software has become a key part of the ecosystem as other security vendors have started seeing permissions and entitlements as a place to gain broad access to corporate networks.
“We have woken up a sleeping industry,” Thakur, who helped start the company in 2020, said in an interview.
Thakur’s home in Los Gatos, California, doubles as headquarters for the startup, which employs 200 people. It isn’t disclosing revenue figures but says sales more than doubled in the fiscal year that ended in January. Customers include AMD, CrowdStrike and Intuit.
Guthrie said enterprises started recognizing that they needed stronger visibility about two years ago.
“I think it’s because of the number of identities,” he said. Companies realized they had an audit problem or “an account that got compromised,” Guthrie said.
AI agents create a new challenge. Last week Microsoft published a report that advised organizations to figure out the proper ratio of agents to humans.
Veza is building enhancements to enable richer support for agent identities, Thakur said. The new funding will also help Veza expand in the U.S. government and internationally and build more integrations, he said.
Peter Lenke, head of Atlassian’s venture arm, said his company isn’t yet a paying Veza client.
“There’s always potential down the road,” he said. Lenke said he heard about Veza from another investor well before the new round and decided to pursue a stake when the opportunity arose.
Lenke said that startups benefit from Atlassian investments because the company “has a large footprint” inside of enterprises.
“I think there’s a great symbiotic match there,” he said.
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