The app supports four assets: USDT and USAT for digital dollars, XAUT for tokenized gold, and Bitcoin.
Tether News
Tether launched a self-custodial application on Tuesday called tether.wallet, giving users direct access to its payments infrastructure for the first time. The release marks a shift for the company, which has until now operated primarily as a back-end layer powering liquidity and settlement across crypto markets. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said the product is aimed at making digital asset transfers "as easily as sending a message."
The app supports four assets: USDT and USAT for digital dollars, XAUT for tokenized gold, and Bitcoin. Tether described the selection as deliberate, calling them "the only assets that truly matter for most of the people." The wallet runs across multiple networks, including Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, and Bitcoin's Lightning Network.
All transactions are signed locally on the user's device. Private keys remain fully under user control at all times. The design eliminates the role of intermediaries and means no exchange or third-party custodian holds keys on behalf of the account holder.
The app removes two friction points that have historically slowed crypto payment adoption. Firstly, users can pay transaction fees directly in the asset they are sending, removing the need to hold a separate gas token to operate on a given blockchain network. Secondly, wallet addresses are replaced with human-readable identifiers in the format "name@tether.me," simplifying the process of sending funds to another person.
Tether said its technology already reaches more than 570 million people globally, largely through exchanges and payment rails that use its infrastructure in the background. The new wallet brings those functions into a direct consumer interface for the first time. The company said it is targeting people who have been "left behind by the traditional financial system."
The product is built on Tether's open-source Wallet Development Kit. The same toolkit powers the Rumble wallet, which uses Tether's infrastructure to support creator payments and peer-to-peer transfers. Tether has also backed stablecoin payout systems through investments such as Whop, and has made the WDK available to third parties building self-custodial wallets for humans and AI systems alike.
Ardoino has argued publicly that AI agents will need native, self-custodial wallets and will rely on Bitcoin and stablecoins to handle machine-to-machine payments. The tether.wallet architecture is designed to support that use case from launch. The $185 billion USDT token remains the largest stablecoin in circulation by market capitalization.
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