Born 1984, Cisano sul Neva, Italy. Writing code at age 8. Computer Science at the University of Genova, then military research on self-recovering, high-availability networks and cryptography — literal defense-grade distributed systems, before anyone said the word "blockchain."
Still a student, Paolo and his university friends founded Involutive and shipped WarWide — a browser-based, real-time strategy game of global conquest played on a map of the real world. You chose any real city as your headquarters, then marched soldiers and tanks overland or sent fleets to sea to sack the others. Ships moved at their actual speed — about 100 km/h — so a campaign of conquest took days of real time. PHP, MySQL, plain HTML, and thousands of players fighting over the planet.
2013: founds Fincluster, cloud financial software for fund managers in London, Milan, Lugano. 2014: a chance meeting in London with Giancarlo Devasini → senior dev at Bitfinex. 2015: CTO of Bitfinex. The tutorial was over.
2017: CTO of Tether. 2023: CEO of Tether — the entity that actually dominates global liquidity. The kid who built a war game about conquering the world's resources now commands the largest stablecoin on Earth.
Built IGE, the empire that farmed and sold virtual gold in World of Warcraft. Learned that in-game currency is real currency the moment enough people believe it. Then co-founded Tether.
Built WarWide, a real-time global conquest game. Learned that whoever controls the resource flow controls the map. Then became CEO of the world's dominant stablecoin.