‘Time to ditch the cloud’: Tether CEO teases open-source local password manager after massive online data leak

Stablecoin issuer Tether's CEO, Paolo Ardoino, stated in his latest social media post that it is time to move beyond storing passwords in the cloud, as he announced an upcoming locally run password manager, PearPass. 

"The cloud has failed us. Again," Ardoino wrote in his X post on Thursday, referring to the massive password leak from major IT platforms yesterday. "16 billion passwords just leaked. It's time to ditch the cloud."

On Thursday, it was revealed that 16 billion passwords to Apple, Facebook, Google, government services and other social media platforms were leaked in what is believed to be the largest data breach ever, according to a Forbes report .

Online security experts described the leak as a "blueprint for mass exploitation," enabling illicit actors to utilize the stolen information to launch hacks or phishing attacks, Cybernews reported .

The Tether CEO stated that such vulnerabilities in cloud-based security are why the company has been developing PearPass, described as a "fully local, open-source" password manager. This means that all data, including passwords and encryption keys, will be stored exclusively on the user's device(s) without any reliance on cloud storage.

"No cloud. No servers. No leaks. Ever," Ardoino wrote, adding that PearPass will be released shortly.

Tether, the issuer of the world's largest stablecoin, USDT, previously launched Pear Credit, a peer-to-peer lending platform, in collaboration with Holepunch and Synonym in 2022. It is yet unknown whether PearPass will be linked to the P2P platform in any way.

Last month, Ardoino also announced that Tether is working on Tether AI , an open-source AI runtime that aims to operate on any hardware or device and integrate with crypto payments via Tether’s Wallet Development Kit (WDK).

The Tether CEO  stated in a recent podcast interview with Anthony Pompliano that his vision is to develop technologies that can function in the worst-case scenario, such as a World War III.

"If we are living in a disaster scenario, we need to be able to have technology that works locally first," Ardoino said. "My mission is to prove that you can build great technology that is human-first … that's what we're building with Holepunch, with our AI platform, with everything else."