Tether launches "Tether.wallet" (Bitcoin/Lightning/USDT)

[BitMaxz]

Not me saying it will be encrypted lol..

I just downloaded and verified myself, the wallet doesn’t allow usage of password as if you’re creating an account, instead it only uses verification code  everytime you try to sign in.

This only means one thing, nothing was encrypted and even if they did there’s no way to really proof how they did it or there isn’t any extra log somewhere.

The seed can be imported but so far they are doing all those extra background magics.. it only means one thing which is controlling of users account just like exchanges.

The only way I think it is better than C-exchange is just that users are not forced to give up their full KYC details, email can be private. But,all about it screams centralization

That's the problem about closed source wallet you don't know if maybe the app itself have a backdoor or something that logs anything from your device.
I also read the terms and notice this one:

"We may suspend, withdraw, or restrict the availability of all or any part of the Tether Wallet for business and operational reasons. We will try to give reasonable notice of any suspension or withdrawal of the Tether Wallet by notice on this page."

It seems they have control over our wallet, as they can suspend, withdraw, and restrict access to it. It is most likely an exchange wallet.
I also discovered that they collect device data, but you can request to remove or delete your data by contacting them at privacy@tether.to.
However, I believe they will inquire further about your identity once you request the deletion of your data from the tether server.

It's actually interesting wallet but I do not think it's safe to use based on what see from their terms and privacy policies.

[goldkingcoiner]

One wallet for the digital tokens people actually trust: USD₮, USA₮, XAU₮, and Bitcoin

Assuming I trust USDT, why so few options? What about XMR and LTC? Or are we pretending that Tether is somehow closer to Bitcoin than the n + 1 other cryptocurrencies?

The developer kit seems interesting though (even though I am not convinced of this wallet) and it might be interesting to look into the tools a bit deeper.

[FinneysTrueVision]

So, speaking about Polygon and Arbitrum, what does Tether consider as USDT in their new wallet? USDT0 or something else?

Tether is officially partnered with LayerZero, the issuer of USDT0. This is the version that is supported in their wallet.

I don’t really know much about that, but the main question is how will users recover their assets when they need to since it won’t show up on EVM wallets.

Tether Wallet implements Safe Wallet standards, so your wallet will be recoverable inside Safe Wallet. To do so, first you need to import your Tether Wallet seed phrase into an extension wallet like Metamask. Then you go to Safe.Global where you connect Metamask and then you will have the option to import your existing accounts. Something to note is that your account doesn’t exist until you have transacted on chain, so you can only import your address on networks where it has been used before.

[Dogedegen]

Okay, school me "altcoins wizard".

There is no need to be rude or condescending, I am merely stating what is true. This kind of concept or feature is not novel and has been widely adopted by shitcoins in recent years.

Is this an altcoin? Huh!

It does not have to be, concepts cross over between chains all the time. Sometimes there are good things, but at other times they will incorporate features that are terrible for many things that are important about things like Bitcoin.

Tether controls billions of dollars stable coins, that's a market cap bigger than 50% of altcoins market cap. They have stable coin across popular chains you can think of, this same company has more enough staff than any company would ever think, they built a wallet only to be accessible by an email, in 2026? You and the company need help bro, even if they are creating something that's human readable, easy and accessible, email alone shouldn't be the only criteria, if your email is hacked all your asset is gone for good.

I was merely sharing information with you, and instead you try to make it out as if this was a thing that I want. It is not, I have stated that I do not have needs for such a thing. We can all think of various ideal scenarios where everyone does self custody in the most secure possible ways, yet the reality of the market will completely ignore it. If this thing does end up having users that means that there is a demand that is being fulfilled. Who are the people that want to have an email only wallet? I don't know, but my personal views do not have any impact on the market of demand of anything.

So what's the point of them saying this if all your assets can ultimately be accessed via email? Or is this just a marketing ploy to create the illusion that this is a self-custody wallet when it's not?

That is a good question! And I do not know, that is something that should be scrutinized and questioned. It is not unusual for wallet providers to make all sorts of errors in recent years.

This strengthens the reasons to avoid this wallet..

Yeah our opinions here have a limited effect on the few users that are here. It is quite possible or at times we could even say quite likely that it have enough users. Have you not explored how many users some wallets from scam chains have like Tron? There are many multi chain or shitcoin wallets on the phones that have all kinds of issues, but they have many users. Simply a big portion of the users do not care about these things, and there is not much that we can do about that. We try educating, and the information is freely available anyway but simply many won't listen. If this email based wallet thing was not being used in the shitcoin space then why would anyone spend time and money to add that feature?

[alani123]

Why did stablecoin developers wake up just now to make their own apps and bridges?


Tether used to have tether.to open to BTC to USDT conversions and withdrawals but eventually suspended all retail use and minting.
It's a little crazy to me.

Then all the stablecoins that came made it ridiculously hard for any retailer to make redemptions. This gave stablecoins an incredibly bad reputation because it was becoming obvious they only wanted to give exchanges the ability to make redemptions which was an obviously abusable feature. It's only now with high interest rates that stablecoins became profitable and are doing attestations.

Anyway this is a good move from Tether but it's too little too late. Once interest rates are down again, which could even be within 2026, it's questionable how stablecoins will survive. Having loads of cash that needs to be available becomes a responsibility and a burden in times of low interest. People are gonna want to have their cash and Tether and Circle will have it locked in bonds and low interest investment which could lead to a bank run and eventual collapse.

Stablecoins could have stayed with the retailer customer base, instead they wanted to be the banks of crypto. They're still an institutional risk for the whole industry.

[Pmalek]

No thanks. I don't see how I could benefit if I wanted to use Tether Wallet instead of one of the other alternatives. It's not self-custodial if I need to run to my email address to copy a code if I want to access and "log in" to my own wallet.

Besides, if you have a wallet that supports LN and on-chain BTC, why would you use stablecoin at all?

Why do you make that connection? LN and BTC are still bitcoin on different layers. If you want something tied to the value of USD, you need a stablecoin that you can swap to.

[internetional]

Why did stablecoin developers wake up just now to make their own apps and bridges?


Tether used to have tether.to open to BTC to USDT conversions and withdrawals but eventually suspended all retail use and minting.
It's a little crazy to me.

And that's actually true! I personally used the tether.to wallet back in 2016 to receive and send bitcoins. Today I logged into that same wallet again and noticed that bitcoins are no longer available there - only tokens issued by Tether remain.

I even suspect there might have been a few satoshis left in my wallet, so I decided to check the transaction history. But the wallet shows that there were no transactions at all - the entire history is gone. It seems they completely discontinued Bitcoin support in the old wallet and moved it to a new one.

[alani123]

Why did stablecoin developers wake up just now to make their own apps and bridges?


Tether used to have tether.to open to BTC to USDT conversions and withdrawals but eventually suspended all retail use and minting.
It's a little crazy to me.

And that's actually true! I personally used the tether.to wallet back in 2016 to receive and send bitcoins. Today I logged into that same wallet again and noticed that bitcoins are no longer available there - only tokens issued by Tether remain.

I even suspect there might have been a few satoshis left in my wallet, so I decided to check the transaction history. But the wallet shows that there were no transactions at all - the entire history is gone. It seems they completely discontinued Bitcoin support in the old wallet and moved it to a new one.

When I checked in 2020 they still had my trade history. Surely they have the records somewhere.

I'm pretty sure that subject to EU law financial transaction records have to be delivered upon request and can't be deleted without user acknowledgement. So if you had any BTC or not in there, they should be providing the tx history and trade history so you can find out. Dust from 10 or more years ago maybe a salary now with the course BTC has had.

[NotATether]

The worst part.
I log out and tried to "login to an existing wallet", my email was requested, I inserted the email and OTP was sent, input it and wallet login. I gained access to the wallet without recovery phrase.

If your email is compromised, your asset is gone.

This is not self custody, don't use.

I was going to ask if this wallet was open-source, now I have my answer.

It's incredibly sad how stupid some of these design decisions turn out to cost the users. Like it should be common knowledge that you should not use an online login and password to access crypto, but they just go and make it the authentication method anyway.

But then again, this is Tether we are talking about, so I don't expect anything less from them.

[Dogedegen]

Why did stablecoin developers wake up just now to make their own apps and bridges?

The whole space over there is much more fragmented than the one with Bitcoin. Users, liquidity, features all sorts of things are split. I mean one can argue fairly that we do not need more wallets, there are enough. We need the quality of all existing wallets to improve rather than diluting more the space with extra products.

Tether used to have tether.to open to BTC to USDT conversions and withdrawals but eventually suspended all retail use and minting.
It's a little crazy to me.

Maybe it was possible for some time and then they had to stop because of regulations? I can see different kinds of abuses to which such a thing would be susceptible, they would have to run heavy AML on the incoming BTC and maybe that is what the issue was? Since they can't do much after the fact. Imagine a criminal converts BTC to USDT this way and then it is found some weeks later. They can't just freeze that USDT if it has moved at all, it could be in the hands of someone completely innocent.

Then all the stablecoins that came made it ridiculously hard for any retailer to make redemptions.

I guess maybe because that is not their target business operations, to be easy off ramps? Off ramp is probably the most scrutinized part of the whole process where the companies could get hurt easily for allowing all kinds of money to enter the traditional system. I am not sure, I am just wondering whether it could be that.

It's incredibly sad how stupid some of these design decisions turn out to cost the users. Like it should be common knowledge that you should not use an online login and password to access crypto, but they just go and make it the authentication method anyway.

But then again, this is Tether we are talking about, so I don't expect anything less from them.

Like I already said this is a common thing found in the shitcoin world, so it does not surprise me that much. After all Tether is more leaning towards shitcoins than fundamentals of Bitcoin even if in this case they show support for stuff like Lightning. I don't think we will convince many entities about this since this cat is out of the bag, but it does not matter that much? I mean many companies in every industry do all sorts of bad things and make errors in their decisions. The important thing is that the key wallet makers that preserve Bitcoin's ideals never sacrifice themselves into this direction like Bitcoin Core or Electrum.

[nc50lc]

This is not self custody, don't use.

This looks just like Blockchain.com wallet which is a very good example of a wallet that I can not recommend anyone to use. They will say it is noncustodial but you will be able to have access to the wallet using email and password. So how come that is possible? Do they mean it is a brain wallet? Which I can not also recommend.

In Blockchain(dot)com's case, they explained it like this:
They have an encrypted copy of your wallet file in their server which they claim that they have no access to because the password isn't saved.
When the user tries to "login" via email, it fetches that encrypted wallet from the server to the client and decrypts it client-side.

Tether.wallet hints the same web wallet setup by showing some information about "encrypted backup stored on our servers" in the FAQs in their website.

In a way, it's not really proper to call it "self-custodial" since they're keeping the wallet file in their server.
And their claim that they can't access it isn't verifiable since there's no open-source server-side source code to audit.

[Pmalek]

Maybe it was possible for some time and then they had to stop because of regulations? I can see different kinds of abuses to which such a thing would be susceptible, they would have to run heavy AML on the incoming BTC and maybe that is what the issue was? Since they can't do much after the fact. Imagine a criminal converts BTC to USDT this way and then it is found some weeks later. They can't just freeze that USDT if it has moved at all, it could be in the hands of someone completely innocent.

That's exactly what Tether can do and does from time to time. It takes time to investigate such things, and they can get "results" weeks or months after an incident happened. When they do, they will just freeze all connected coins in their addresses. In the meantime, an innocent person could have bought those coins somewhere and now their money is confiscated and they have to prove why they have it, how they got it, and who sent it to them...

But it's not just them, centralized exchanges confiscate crypto all the time because it's a great way to increase their wealth, pretending that they are protecting people from crime and scams. And all that time, it's them who are the criminals, but they are in compliance and licensed to do what they do.

[satscraper]

Maybe it was possible for some time and then they had to stop because of regulations? I can see different kinds of abuses to which such a thing would be susceptible, they would have to run heavy AML on the incoming BTC and maybe that is what the issue was? Since they can't do much after the fact. Imagine a criminal converts BTC to USDT this way and then it is found some weeks later. They can't just freeze that USDT if it has moved at all, it could be in the hands of someone completely innocent.

That's exactly what Tether can do and does from time to time.

So they launched their own wallet to make that freezing process easier for themselves? It makes sense for them ^{but not for us if that’s the case}. As for USDT, I refuse to use it and rely on USDC when it comes to stablecoins. It seems more reliable to me. Luckily all crypto cards I have support topping up with USDC transferred through various chains, so you can always choose which chain to use based on the fees.

[Pmalek]

So they launched their own wallet to make that freezing process easier for themselves?

As the issuer, Tether already has absolute control over USDT and the freezing can happen anytime and anywhere. If they start doing it for other assets inside the Tether Wallet they will just prove to everyone that the software isn't non-custodial.

As for USDT, I refuse to use it and rely on USDC when it comes to stablecoins. It seems more reliable to me.

Circle's USDC is also centralized and the issuer can again freeze its own tokens. However, they don't do it as often as Tether does and it's also not as popular. Despite everything, USDT is and remains the #1 stablecoin in the world.

[Dogedegen]

They have an encrypted copy of your wallet file in their server which they claim that they have no access to because the password isn't saved.

Tether.wallet hints the same web wallet setup by showing some information about "encrypted backup stored on our servers" in the FAQs in their website.

In a way, it's not really proper to call it "self-custodial" since they're keeping the wallet file in their server.

That is not exactly true, because you have to make a difference here. Are they keeping the original file on their server or is it a copy like you have claimed? If it is only a copy it could be self-custodial, why not? If a user on their own backs up their self-custodial wallet to a cloud service in an encrypted format, the wallet is no longer considered self-custodial?

And their claim that they can't access it isn't verifiable since there's no open-source server-side source code to audit.

This I agree with fully, overall it is not good to use wallets that are not open source and it is even worse when they involve the servers of the issuer of the wallet in some direct way like this. It is basically like having to have blind faith in the whole process. It is not necessary, and this aspect bothers me much more than the email thing all together which as I said is quite common in shitcoins already.

Maybe it was possible for some time and then they had to stop because of regulations? I can see different kinds of abuses to which such a thing would be susceptible, they would have to run heavy AML on the incoming BTC and maybe that is what the issue was? Since they can't do much after the fact. Imagine a criminal converts BTC to USDT this way and then it is found some weeks later. They can't just freeze that USDT if it has moved at all, it could be in the hands of someone completely innocent.

That's exactly what Tether can do and does from time to time. It takes time to investigate such things, and they can get "results" weeks or months after an incident happened. When they do, they will just freeze all connected coins in their addresses. In the meantime, an innocent person could have bought those coins somewhere and now their money is confiscated and they have to prove why they have it, how they got it, and who sent it to them...

But it's not just them, centralized exchanges confiscate crypto all the time because it's a great way to increase their wealth, pretending that they are protecting people from crime and scams. And all that time, it's them who are the criminals, but they are in compliance and licensed to do what they do.

Yeah but who is at fault for this? Do we blame Tether or do we blame those that wrote the regulations that Tether is following? Somehow I get the feeling here that people selectively hate some businesses for some reason, when in most cases they do not have a choice for what they are doing. I can understand when a particular business is malicious like selectively trying to scam people as we have seen with some Swap services in the past, but Tether is extremely rich and they do not have the need to selectively scam anyone even in the millions range of value. So why blame those that have no choice for following these regulations instead of those that wrote them?

Besides blaming the regulators, people should simply be educated on the differences between stuff like tokens that can be frozen in many cases and Bitcoin. If they are aware of the risks, it is their responsibility if they decide to do this. In most cases nothing is going to happen to you especially if the coins come from established platforms with large pools, but the risk is much higher in P2P transactions. But this is not much different than doing Bitcoin P2P in a way, because if you sell it via P2P for a bank transfer for example there could be a chargeback or malicious dispute later down the road or the money could have come from a stolen bank account and things like that. Do you blame the bank because you received money from a stolen account? Of course you do not, they have no choice but to freeze it as soon as they find out.

So they launched their own wallet to make that freezing process easier for themselves? It makes sense for them ^{but not for us if that’s the case}. As for USDT, I refuse to use it and rely on USDC when it comes to stablecoins. It seems more reliable to me. Luckily all crypto cards I have support topping up with USDC transferred through various chains, so you can always choose which chain to use based on the fees.

No, that is false. They do not need any wallet to make freezing any easier. It seems to me that you have never owned a token not even on testnet. Freezing someone as an owner of the token is a simple as making a single transaction, and some wallets or private wallets even have an GUI for it. All the information they need is the address of where the coins are currently located and with that they just issue a simple transaction to the blockchain and it is frozen.

[Cookdata]

They have an encrypted copy of your wallet file in their server which they claim that they have no access to because the password isn't saved.

Tether.wallet hints the same web wallet setup by showing some information about "encrypted backup stored on our servers" in the FAQs in their website.

In a way, it's not really proper to call it "self-custodial" since they're keeping the wallet file in their server.

That is not exactly true, because you have to make a difference here. Are they keeping the original file on their server or is it a copy like you have claimed? If it is only a copy it could be self-custodial, why not? If a user on their own backs up their self-custodial wallet to a cloud service in an encrypted format, the wallet is no longer considered self-custodial?

I'm trying to look into exactly what you said not true. To begin with, any storage that include cloud storage as self custody isn't safe. Have you thought for once why you could have access to the entire wallet if you login with an email? You think that response came from heaven and not from the server side?

If you login with your email, one time password is sent to verify if it's real you trying to have access to the wallet, if true, you will have access to your wallet without any additional security features. With this method, do you see these processes like self custody?

Without the private keys or seed phrase from the server, you can't gain access to your wallet, and who knows exactly how the keys are stored. This part is not explained on any of their doc, there is no place on their website that says anything about this process, probably they don't want to say the truth. I still don't like anything related to this wallet but just for the innocent users, aside from OTP from the server side, maybe an additional 2fa should be introduce on the user side and then change the english to tether custody. If they come clean, there are other people that will still use their service with their fake billions on different chains.

[Dogedegen]

They have an encrypted copy of your wallet file in their server which they claim that they have no access to because the password isn't saved.

Tether.wallet hints the same web wallet setup by showing some information about "encrypted backup stored on our servers" in the FAQs in their website.

In a way, it's not really proper to call it "self-custodial" since they're keeping the wallet file in their server.

That is not exactly true, because you have to make a difference here. Are they keeping the original file on their server or is it a copy like you have claimed? If it is only a copy it could be self-custodial, why not? If a user on their own backs up their self-custodial wallet to a cloud service in an encrypted format, the wallet is no longer considered self-custodial?

I'm trying to look into exactly what you said not true. To begin with, any storage that include cloud storage as self custody isn't safe. Have you thought for once why you could have access to the entire wallet if you login with an email? You think that response came from heaven and not from the server side?

If you login with your email, one time password is sent to verify if it's real you trying to have access to the wallet, if true, you will have access to your wallet without any additional security features. With this method, do you see these processes like self custody?

We are not talking about whether something is safe or not, nowhere has that been mentioned in the conversation that you are responding to. We are talking about whether one thing can be considered self-custodial or not under the example models. I was merely trying to establish a difference in the details in regards to what can be considered self-custodial or not. Both examples are of low security, but you guys need to stop with the utopian talk. Both of these are pretty good compared to what many people do all the time. Just because keeping an encrypted copy of your wallet in the cloud is fairly bad in terms of security it does not mean it is terrible or worse what is found in real world conditions. People keep their seed phrases as a note on their desktop, unencrypted in cloud storage where their account does not even have 2FA enabled and all sorts of things so please..

Without the private keys or seed phrase from the server, you can't gain access to your wallet, and who knows exactly how the keys are stored. This part is not explained on any of their doc, there is no place on their website that says anything about this process, probably they don't want to say the truth. I still don't like anything related to this wallet but just for the innocent users, aside from OTP from the server side, maybe an additional 2fa should be introduce on the user side and then change the english to tether custody. If they come clean, there are other people that will still use their service with their fake billions on different chains.

Let's wait for a clarification and more information before attributing malicious behavior and judging them this way. Many documentations are incomplete in many projects relating to software even after years of being live. Contact them, ask them if you are interested in doing something. If not just patiently wait and let's see which is the case from the ones you have written about. Anyway in general you can not say that self-custody is always safer than custodial solutions, it depends. For many kinds of people the exact opposite is true. Bitcoin is safer when given to a custodian than when self-custodied by people who would input their seed phrase in a website that looks official whatever that means..

[nc50lc]

They have an encrypted copy of your wallet file in their server which they claim that they have no access to because the password isn't saved.

That is not exactly true, because you have to make a difference here. Are they keeping the original file on their server or is it a copy like you have claimed? If it is only a copy it could be self-custodial, why not? If a user on their own backs up their self-custodial wallet to a cloud service in an encrypted format, the wallet is no longer considered self-custodial?

There's a reason why Blockchain(dot)com wallet-related topics aren't placed in this board but in the "Web Wallets" of Services board.
Since the actual wallet isn't stored in your own device but in their server, it's considered more of a "Web Wallet" than a self-custodial one.
Encrypted or not, they have a copy of your wallet in an online environment, aka "web".
Plus it's not entirely verifiable that they cannot access it due to it being closed-source. (so, there's trust involved on its claims)

As for the "copy" part, it's more of an "original copy".
As tested by Cookdata, after logging out, you can just immediately access the wallet by logging in your email, not the seed phrase.
That indicates that even if you uninstalled the app, they still have that copy in their servers.

Anyways, by saying "Web Wallet" it doesn't necessarily means "custodial",
but it can't be categorized as "self-custodial" unless you can verify that you are the only one who's in custody of your wallet.

[satscraper]

It seems to me that you have never owned a token not even on testnet. Freezing someone as an owner of the token is a simple as making a single transaction, and some wallets or private wallets even have an GUI for it.

Learn more about addBlackList and isBlackListed functions in the actual Tether smart contract before posting shit like this.

Tether.wallet simply gives company more visibility into users' tokens, which facilitates freezing actions. The underlying power of relevant smart contract functions remains exactly the same.

As for “you’ve never owned a token, not even on testnet,” I hate to disappoint you, but millions of them have passed through my wallets.

[Pmalek]

That is not exactly true, because you have to make a difference here. Are they keeping the original file on their server or is it a copy like you have claimed?

Where is the difference between an original or a copy of a digital file? For instance, would you be comfortable sending me a copy of the seed phrases you use, passwords, or any other secrets? Remember, it's just a copy. You will get to keep the original. Does it matter if I have the original or a digital copy of your private information and data?

Yeah but who is at fault for this? Do we blame Tether or do we blame those that wrote the regulations that Tether is following? Somehow I get the feeling here that people selectively hate some businesses for some reason, when in most cases they do not have a choice for what they are doing.

There is always a choice. Decentralized stablecoins like DAI could also have added freezing functions within their code. They chose not to.