Tether has launched a self-custody wallet, Tether Wallet (tether.wallet), that supports USDT, bitcoin and tokenised gold.

On April 14 local time, blockchain outlet The Block Crypto reported the product is being read as a move by Tether to expand from a backend infrastructure provider in the cryptocurrency market into a service with direct user touchpoints.

Tether said the new wallet targets billions of users excluded from the existing financial system. Tether’s infrastructure has mainly been used to supply liquidity and for payments and settlement in the cryptocurrency market. Its consumer products for direct use by ordinary users have been relatively limited. This time it focused on putting payment infrastructure directly in users’ hands.

Supported assets are limited. Only the digital dollar USDT and USAT, tokenised gold XAUT and bitcoin are supported. Tether described the lineup as a combination centred on assets that matter in practical terms to most people. Rather than broadening the number of assets, it focused on areas with strong demand for real payments and storage.

It also simplified how the wallet is used. Users can send funds through a human-readable identifier instead of a wallet address. Paolo Ardoino (파올로 아르도이노), Tether’s chief executive officer, said the goal is to make digital asset transfers as easy as sending a message, and stressed a structure that does not lose control of assets even without intermediaries.

It also changed the fee system. Users can pay fees with the asset being transferred without preparing a separate gas token. Users fully control their private keys, and all transaction signing takes place on the device. It put forward a structure that leaves control of assets with users, which is the core of a self-custody wallet.

The launch also ties into Tether’s recent expansion strategy. Over the past few months, Tether open-sourced a wallet development kit to support development of self-custody wallets for people and AI agents. It also supported cryptocurrency wallet integration for video platforms such as Rumble, and has backed stablecoin payout systems through investments such as Whop.

Against this backdrop, Tether Wallet is closer to a product that puts Tether’s payment network front and centre than a simple storage app. Tether said its network reaches more than 570,000,000 people worldwide, and said the new app also runs on that foundation.

Tether also reaffirmed its view that the main actors in financial activity will not remain limited to humans. Ardoino has previously argued that AI agents need native self-custody wallets and that bitcoin and stablecoins will be used for machine-to-machine payments. This app was also built on the same foundation.

Tether Wallet runs on Tether’s open-source wallet development kit and was designed to support transactions among humans, machines and AI systems. Supported networks include Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum and the Bitcoin Lightning Network. This puts Tether’s wallet business into an expansion phase of user touchpoints, spanning stablecoin payments and bitcoin transfers, beyond simple asset storage.