Clearly plans for some kind of neo-bank/crypto-bank.
The absense of any coins other than BTC and Tether products plus no gas fees hints they target the audience that is unbanked or wants to be unbanked but can't really be bothered with all that convoluted crypto stuff.
Which would not be a bad thing, Bitcoin related banking has been foretold even in the earliest days of Bitcoin I think. It would be good if more people could have access to tools that allow them to get some fiat without having to sell Bitcoin. There are some services that allow you to take such loans these days, but the terms are still terrible because of lacking competition. Clearly self-custody is best, but we must not dismiss options and limit the freedom of others because of utopian ideals.
What I meant is that people who use Bitcoin do not use Tether tokens and do not consider Tether Ltd as an authoruty. This is evident from the history of USDT on Omni, which had to be shut down, the scale of USDT usage on Liquid, and the fact that the issuance of USDT on Taproot Assets, RGB, and Spark platforms was officially announced a long time ago, yet to this day, not a single user has given dollars to Tether and asked for tokens on any of these platforms in return. This is exactly why, for Bitcoiners, Tether tokens are just some weird, useless crap.
What are you even talking about? I guess I don't exist then and many people who I know also don't exist? Tether is widely used, more than any shitcoin that tries to be Bitcoin. In some cases you will not even be allowed to pay a service with anything other than a stablecoin like Tether, so please don't invent things that are not based on data. You use what you have to use or what you want to use, those cases are sometimes not compatible. I can't somehow force someone to accept Bitcoin who wants only USDT for whatever reason they want to do this. Data on stablecoin payments shows that there are many users and a lot of volume, even if a lot of it is fake. You can't honestly believe that none of them are Bitcoin users? You can use Bitcoin and Tether without believing in any kind of authority, why you bring up this argument I don't even know.
So by now it has almost 10K downloads.
Seeing that they are doing a giveaway on X by just downloading their wallet, it is likely that most of those who download it are just to get free sats.
I've read the giveaway details on
https://wallet.tether.io/giveaway-2026-rules/, but $0.10 worth of Bitcoin (on Lightning Network) hardly can be called giveaway. IMO the amount is simply too small to even to make people download their wallet and setup it, especially if you consider possible cost to move it to their own Bitcoin wallet.
Maybe a promotion or learning campaign is the right wording instead? Why would someone want to move this to their own wallet? The idea behind it is to learn how to use LN with this wallet and see it in action. Even these days I find sometimes forum members writing all kinds of lies on LN, when in fact it almost always works flawlessly. I have paid so many times in person with it and still sometimes it stuns me how fast the transactions are completed. $0.1 is a sufficient amount of being able to play with LN and it makes cheating and farming of the campaign much harder and less rewarding.
