Tether, the issuer of the world’s largest stablecoin, said on Tuesday it had launched a self-custodial digital wallet designed to give users direct access to its stablecoins, gold-backed token, and bitcoin, as the company pushes further into consumer-facing crypto services.
The new product, called Tether.Wallet, marks a shift for Tether from serving mainly as underlying infrastructure for trading, settlement, and payments toward offering a wallet built for everyday users. The company said the application supports USDT, USAT, XAUT, and bitcoin across several blockchain networks at launch.
The new wallet targets users underserved by traditional finance, as Tether looks to onboard more people into an ecosystem already used by over 570 million people globally as of March 2026.
From Infrastructure Layer to User Product
Known largely for its back-end role in the digital asset market, where USDT is widely used across exchanges, payment networks, and trading venues, Tether is now trying to take that infrastructure straight to retail users through a wallet of its own.
The company said the wallet was built to simplify the use of digital assets by allowing transfers through human-readable identifiers such as “name@tether.me,” rather than long wallet addresses. It also said users would be able to pay transaction fees in the asset being transferred, removing the need to separately hold gas tokens.
Self-Custody at The Center
Tether said the application is fully self-custodial, with private keys and recovery phrases remaining under the user’s control and transactions signed locally on the device before being broadcast to blockchain networks.
The shift highlights the trade-off in self-custody, giving users direct control over their crypto holdings while placing the burden of safeguarding login details, private keys and recovery phrases squarely on them
In a statement, Chief Executive Paolo Ardoino said the launch aimed to make digital asset infrastructure easier to use without giving up user control.
The objective is to remove the complexity that has prevented broader adoption while preserving the properties that make the digital asset technology valuable. Users should be able to send value as easily as sending a message, without relying on intermediaries and without giving up control of their assets.
Multi-Network Support at Launch
Built on Tether’s open-source Wallet Development Kit, or WDK, the wallet will launch with support for USDT and XAUT on Ethereum, Polygon, Plasma, and Arbitrum, as well as USAT on Ethereum and Bitcoin on both the main blockchain and the Lightning Network, with additional integrations planned later.
