Share this article
Most Influential 2021: Paolo Ardoino
Tether’s unofficial hype man is willing to argue online with critics of the stablecoin.
By CoinDesk
Updated May 11, 2023, 6:26 p.m. Published Dec 8, 2021, 5:29 p.m.
U.S. lawmakers signaled this year that stablecoins may be a threat to financial stability and could prove to be systemically important beyond crypto. Often unnamed in official reports, tether is never far from mind. The largest stablecoin, by far, USDT has ballooned this year along with the crypto market (it’s worth $76 billion at the time of writing). Paolo Ardoino is the company’s chief technology officer, tasked with coding the stablecoin project that lives on multiple blockchains. He’s also the project’s unofficial hype man, willing to argue online with critics of the stablecoin, who raise concerns about the stablecoin’s backing.
The Complete List: CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2021
More For You
What to know:
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
More For You
Solana’s Drift Launches v3, With 10x Faster Trades
With v3, the team says that about 85% of market orders will fill in under half a second, and liquidity will deepen enough to bring slippage on larger trades down to around 0.02%.
What to know:
- Drift, one of the largest perpetuals trading platforms on Solana, has launched Drift v3, a major upgrade meant to make on-chain trading feel as fast and smooth as using a centralized exchange.
- The new version will deliver 10-times faster trade execution thanks to a rebuilt backend, marking the largest performance jump the project has made so far.
Top Stories
