Unrequested (long) late night USDT0 story: One of the first chains to hear the @USDT0_to pitch was a certain L1. Let’s call it X. My co-founders and I are DeFi-native, and at the time we were close to people operating the X Foundation. Our mentors were skeptical. We genuinely believed in the team. X had strong backing from early DeFi builders and had just gone through a rebrand + upgrade that felt significant in that cycle. In our minds, X was the ideal launch partner. We pulled every favor we could and even had people at Tether who saw the potential in what we were building advocate for us in the telegram chats with X management. Eventually, we got on a call with X’s leadership, a team that had been trying to get USDT on their chain for almost two years. We prepare for 2 days as if it was the most important thing ever. The call starts. I begin what is still, to this day, my go-to USDT0 pitch. Less than 90 seconds in, a person in their management team lies down on his sofa WITH HIS CAMERA ON and starts doing something else on his MacBook, clearly not listening to our value proposition. Two minutes later, he interrupts me, laughs, and dismisses us. He tells us they are one of the best L1s in the world, that they already work with other stablecoins, and that they have no interest in what we are building. He says our product will never get traction and that the status quo is perfectly fine. That’s what they are interested in. At the time, it was frustrating. In hindsight, it was clarifying. A few months later, we met the @inkonchain / @krakenfx team, and what we expected to be a difficult conversation turned into an obvious one. We launched USDT0 there, and traction started to build. Then came the @arbitrum upgrade. Tether entrusted us with ownership of the contract, 1.8B USDT. We went from about 100M TVL to over 2B, and suddenly the market understood what we were trying to do. From there, we kept shipping. Berachain, Sei, Hyperliquid, Flare, Polygon, Corn, and more. Daily volume moved into the 10 to 15M range, then kept growing. What mattered most was that partners started using USDT0 because it solved a real operational problem, not because of narratives, but because of utility. A few months later, I heard that X tried to work with a USDT0 copycat. That effort failed spectacularly. Meanwhile, USDT0 kept growing thanks to some new and exciting chains. Plasma, Mantle, Stable, Conflux, Morph, MegaETH, and more. Today, X isn’t where it once was. The DeFi Builders attention has moved elsewhere, and CT’s tone toward its leadership and communications has become more critical. The governance token is in a though spot, like most others in his market. Today, USDT0 moves about 300M USDT per day across 25 chains. It is the de facto expansion strategy for Tether assets and sits at 4.4B plus TVL. It is the fastest growing cross chain infrastructure in the world. Sometimes, getting laughed out of a room is the best thing that can happen to your project. If you are building something with real utility, something that improves the status quo and solves an actual problem, you cannot give up just because short-sighted people do not see it. Prove them wrong.