TL;DR:
- Tether launched tether.wallet, a self-custody wallet that allows users to send USDT, USAT, XAUT and bitcoin across multiple blockchains.
- The app lets users pay transaction fees with the asset being sent and use human-readable names like “[email protected]” instead of long addresses.
- Paolo Ardoino introduced the wallet as “the People’s Wallet”, designed for humans, machines and AI agents.
Tether launched a self-custody wallet that allows users to send and receive USDT, USAT, the gold-backed token XAUT and bitcoin directly, without intermediaries and across multiple blockchains. The initiative marks a crucial strategic shift: for the first time, the company moves beyond operating primarily as infrastructure for exchanges and payment networks to offering a product directly facing the end user.
The application removes two of the main barriers holding back the adoption of crypto payments. On one hand, it allows transaction fees to be paid with the same asset being sent, eliminating the need to hold additional gas tokens. On the other, it replaces the long character strings of wallet addresses with human-readable identifiers like “[email protected]”, which greatly simplifies the experience.
Tether Sets Its Sights on the End User
Tether reported that more than 570 million people already interact with its technology, although in most cases they do so indirectly, through exchanges or payment rails. The new wallet aims to bring those functions to a direct interface in which users control their own private keys and sign transactions from their own devices.
The wallet was built with the Wallet Development Kit (WDK), an open-source toolkit the company had already developed for third-party projects. One of the most notable examples is the Rumble wallet, which uses Tether’s infrastructure to offer payments to content creators and peer-to-peer transfers.
CEO Paolo Ardoino described his new product as “the People’s Wallet” and presented it as the natural evolution of the company’s role: moving from building the foundations of the digital asset economy to making them directly accessible to anyone. Ardoino explicitly mentioned a horizon in which tens of billions of humans, machines and trillions of artificial intelligence agents will transact seamlessly and at the speed of light.
