Tether’s new launch aligns with the CEO’s long-term vision that AI agents will need self-custodial wallets in the future.
- Tether launched tether.wallet on Tuesday, which allows users to directly hold and transfer digital assets without relying on intermediaries.
- The app supports Bitcoin, tokenized gold, and Tether’s stablecoin USDT, with transactions designed to work across multiple blockchain networks.
- The launch reflects Tether’s broader push into consumer-facing products, building on its open-source wallet infrastructure and expanding role in digital payments.
Tether (USDT), the issuer of the world’s largest stablecoin, announced the launch of a self-custodial crypto wallet on Tuesday, aimed at giving users direct control over digital assets.
According to the company’s statement, tether.wallet is designed to make Tether’s payments infrastructure directly accessible to users, rather than operating primarily as a backend layer for crypto markets. The company said its technology was already used by more than 570 million people globally.
CEO Paolo Ardoino also posted that Tether had built one of the “widest financial inclusion” networks globally, adding that the new wallet aimed to bring that infrastructure directly into the hands of users.
Tether.wallet will allow users to hold their own private keys, meaning funds will remain under user control without reliance on intermediaries. It supports assets including Bitcoin (BTC), Tether’s USDT and USAT stablecoins, and tokenized gold (XAUT), and will function across multiple blockchain networks.
The company also said that the wallet was built to simplify transactions by removing common friction points in crypto usage. Users can send funds using human-readable identifiers instead of long wallet addresses, while transactions can be completed without separately managing gas tokens, with fees integrated into the transfer process.
Tether’s price was trading at $1 over the past 24 hours. On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment around USDT moved to ‘neutral’ from ‘bearish’ zone, while chatter around it fell to ‘low’ from ‘normal’ over the past day.
Tether Expands Into Consumer-Facing Products
The launch of the ‘people’s wallet’ came as part of a broader push by Tether to expand beyond its role as a stablecoin issuer and infrastructure provider into user-facing applications.
In October last year, Tether open-sourced its Wallet Development Kit (WDK), which supported crypto wallet integrations across platforms, and backed stablecoin-based payout systems through investments.
This aligned with Ardoino’s view that financial activity could extend beyond human users. Previously, he had argued on The Big Brain Podcast by The Block, “I believe that in the future, every single AI agent will have a wallet, and it should be a self-custodial wallet,” and that they would rely on stablecoins for machine-to-machine payments.
Tether.wallet is built on the very same foundation. It runs on Tether’s open-source Wallet Development Kit and supports transactions across networks, including Ethereum (ETH), Polygon (POL), Arbitrum (ARB), and Bitcoin’s Lightning Network.
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