Tether CEO Warns AI Bubble Could Jolt Bitcoin by 2026

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino warned that a potential “AI bubble” burst in 2026 could trigger a stock market sell-off that drags Bitcoin down due to its correlation with traditional capital markets.
Ardoino anticipates a shift away from Bitcoin’s historical 80% drawdowns, citing increased stability from institutional adoption by pension funds and governments.
While optimistic about the growth of real-world asset tokenisation, Ardoino criticised European innovation and the MiCA regulatory framework.

Paolo Ardoino, Tether’s CEO, said he sees one main risk for Bitcoin by 2026: a possible “AI bubble” in US markets that could spill over into crypto.

Speaking on the Bitcoin Capital podcast, Ardoino said Bitcoin is still closely tied to broader capital markets. So if investor sentiment around AI flips in 2026 (after heavy spending by AI firms on data centres, power capacity, and GPUs), he expects stock market stress could drag Bitcoin down too.

That is the so-called AI bubble, this concern about the fact that AI companies are spending too much money in AI infrastructure and data centers and trying to build a gazillion gigawatts of power and installing GPUs.

Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether.

Outside of that scenario, he said he sees fewer major threats to Bitcoin’s performance in 2026. He pointed to growing adoption from pension funds and governments, and suggested the market may be less likely to see the same kind of deep crashes seen in past cycles. He said 80% drawdowns like 2022 or early 2018 may be less common going forward.

Something similar was said by Grayscale, who stated that the four-year cycle thesis, which links major BTC peaks and crashes to its usual halving schedule, might need to be reevaluated and that the market is not entering a prolonged downturn like in those years.

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The Tokenisation Boom

Moreover, Ardoino also said he expects real-world asset tokenisation to grow sharply, especially tokenised securities and commodities. At the same time, he warned against Bitcoin becoming dominated by institutions, arguing it should not end up with most supply effectively controlled through institutional structures.

His views on Europe are not that great. The CEO said the region is falling behind on innovation and is trying to regulate crypto before fully understanding it, and pointed to the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) as part of the broader debate over how crypto should be overseen.

Europe will always remain the last wheel of the cart whenever we talk about innovation. Europe is trying to regulate something that it doesn’t understand yet. That is very sad.

Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether.

Read more: Tether Invests in Humanoid “Physical AI” Robots Aimed at Dangerous Industrial Jobs

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