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

[UmerIdrees]

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.

Is this the official wallet from Tether?  I need proof for that. And if it is a non-custodial wallet, then it's not worth using it. I would be better off keeping my USDT in an Unstoppable Wallet instead and feel more secure. By the way, it has XAU₮, maybe that's another reason why people using this wallet as they want to keep digital gold in personal wallets and not on exchanges.

That's Tether's official wallet. If you go to their website, wallet.tether.io, you'll see that it's their wallet. And yes, the main purpose of this wallet is to be able to manage USD₮, USA₮, XAU₮, and Bitcoin, but with so many odd things about this wallet, I recommend avoiding this wallet.

Why would a company as big as tether need to do a giveaway to promote their wallet? Instead, they should have introduced their wallet, and everyone would have started using it, and it would have gained a lot of hype, but this didn't happen. It is due to the factors mentioned above that it is not the wallet with the best features, and people aren't comfortable using it.

[internetional]

Why would a company as big as tether need to do a giveaway to promote their wallet? Instead, they should have introduced their wallet, and everyone would have started using it, and it would have gained a lot of hype, but this didn't happen. It is due to the factors mentioned above that it is not the wallet with the best features, and people aren't comfortable using it.

Tether is not very popular in the Bitcoin community. Neither is their token, nor the company itself. I would even say they have a negative image here. And since this is a Bitcoin wallet, not just a wallet for Tether tokens, relying on the Tether name alone to promote it wasn't an option. That's why they had to run a giveaway.

[Synchronice]

Why would a company as big as tether need to do a giveaway to promote their wallet? Instead, they should have introduced their wallet, and everyone would have started using it, and it would have gained a lot of hype, but this didn't happen. It is due to the factors mentioned above that it is not the wallet with the best features, and people aren't comfortable using it.

Brand recognition doesn't automatically translate to product adoption. I might be using USDT when I trade on different platforms but that doesn't mean I'll download their wallet on my smartphone. The competition is also quite big in the crypto community and the thing is, users are already comfortable with wallets that they use currently, so it's not easy to make them move from their current wallet to a new wallet software.
Also, don't forget, big names run marketing campaigns all the time. For example, Coca-Cola. Everyone knows it but they spend a lot of money in marketing.

By the way, truth be told, I liked the user interface of this wallet very much. I wish Electrum had a similar polished user interface for smartphone users, that would be amazing.

[sergiorus]

Why would a company as big as tether need to do a giveaway to promote their wallet? Instead, they should have introduced their wallet, and everyone would have started using it, and it would have gained a lot of hype, but this didn't happen. It is due to the factors mentioned above that it is not the wallet with the best features, and people aren't comfortable using it.

Tether is not very popular in the Bitcoin community. Neither is their token, nor the company itself. I would even say they have a negative image here. And since this is a Bitcoin wallet, not just a wallet for Tether tokens, relying on the Tether name alone to promote it wasn't an option. That's why they had to run a giveaway.

I remember back in the days of "Bitfinex'ed" Twitter's Bitcoin maxis would come at him defending Tether and Bitfinex with everything they had. "WhalePanda" among the most vocal ones as well as Blockstack devs.

What has changed?

[ABCbits]

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.

[internetional]

I remember back in the days of "Bitfinex'ed" Twitter's Bitcoin maxis would come at him defending Tether and Bitfinex with everything they had. "WhalePanda" among the most vocal ones as well as Blockstack devs.

What has changed?

By "Bitcoin community," I don't mean influencers or those who actively voice their views, but the actual users. Perhaps "community" wasn't the best choice of words.

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.

[Dogedegen]

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.

[ABCbits]

--snip--
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.

Fair point, their X post on https://x.com/tetherwallet/status/2049385502172676347 says the goal to educate users. But since some people don't want to handle so many wallet, IMO it makes sense some people consider moving coin they receive to wallet that they usually use. I agree $0.1 is enough to test/play with LN, but it's assuming there's routing path to the receiver. I have no idea how well connected is LN channel set by this tether wallet.

[Wind_FURY]

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.

But it will be very laughable if a large spam-farm will make 1,000 wallets per person and get as much $0.10 in Bitcoin as they can. Haha.

 

Spam-farms like to do easy internet labor for cents if they could exploit the system.

[internetional]

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?

Oh, for God's sake! No matter how I phrase it, it still comes out sounding a bit clumsy.

First, I wrote "Bitcoin community" to make it clear I was talking about the general market sentiment rather than specific Bitcoiners. I was misunderstood.
Then I replaced "community" with "people who use Bitcoin," and someone who uses Bitcoin immediately chimed in saying it didn't apply to them.

I honestly don't know how else to word this to make it clearer.

Let me put it this way:
Tether tokens just don't catch on in the Bitcoin ecosystem, so the wallet wouldn't have become popular on its own without extra marketing efforts.And just to clarify: this doesn't mean no one would download it at all. Of course, there are people who use both Tether tokens and Bitcoin. But that audience alone wouldn't be enough to make the wallet a mainstream success.

There, I think I've finally made my point as clear as possible.

[Wind_FURY]

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?

Oh, for God's sake! No matter how I phrase it, it still comes out sounding a bit clumsy.

First, I wrote "Bitcoin community" to make it clear I was talking about the general market sentiment rather than specific Bitcoiners. I was misunderstood.
Then I replaced "community" with "people who use Bitcoin," and someone who uses Bitcoin immediately chimed in saying it didn't apply to them.

I honestly don't know how else to word this to make it clearer.

Let me put it this way:
Tether tokens just don't catch on in the Bitcoin ecosystem, so the wallet wouldn't have become popular on its own without extra marketing efforts.And just to clarify: this doesn't mean no one would download it at all. Of course, there are people who use both Tether tokens and Bitcoin. But that audience alone wouldn't be enough to make the wallet a mainstream success.

There, I think I've finally made my point as clear as possible.

 



I browsed through the topic. It's laughable to see that the Bitcoin community HATES Tether that much, that they would tell people to be careful to use their wallet software.

There are pros and cons like other wallets, but to tell people to absolutely NOT to trust and/or NOT use the wallet is a little biased, no?

[ABCbits]

--snip--
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.

But it will be very laughable if a large spam-farm will make 1,000 wallets per person and get as much $0.10 in Bitcoin as they can. Haha.

 

Spam-farms like to do easy internet labor for cents if they could exploit the system.

Such people or group can try abuse it, but it's not easy to abuse since 1 $0.10 claim require 1 X account and 1 tether.me account. They probably already have lots of X account, but who knows what Tether do to prevent mass creation of tether.me account.

[Wind_FURY]

--snip--
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.

But it will be very laughable if a large spam-farm will make 1,000 wallets per person and get as much $0.10 in Bitcoin as they can. Haha.

 

Spam-farms like to do easy internet labor for cents if they could exploit the system.

Such people or group can try abuse it, but it's not easy to abuse since 1 $0.10 claim require 1 X account and 1 tether.me account. They probably already have lots of X account, but who knows what Tether do to prevent mass creation of tether.me account.

They DO. They have all sorts of accounts from FaceBook, to X, to Reddit, and probably some of them are here in BitcoinTalk or would be here if it was easy to rank up. Although, I wouldn't absolutely be surprised if there is a farm that's giving merits to each of their members accounts.

  👀

[Dogedegen]

Let me put it this way:
Tether tokens just don't catch on in the Bitcoin ecosystem, so the wallet wouldn't have become popular on its own without extra marketing efforts.And just to clarify: this doesn't mean no one would download it at all. Of course, there are people who use both Tether tokens and Bitcoin. But that audience alone wouldn't be enough to make the wallet a mainstream success.

There, I think I've finally made my point as clear as possible.

That is quite a different way to put it and it means something else completely compared to the original statement! I agree, people will use Tether and other stablecoins when the situation requires them to. I do not believe that this wallet will create any extra popularity in it. It may be used by some Bitcoin people and by some Tether users, but just having both doesn't mean that someone will install this wallet. Actually using separate wallets is much better for privacy reasons even if we completely ignore the company here and issues regarding custody that are not yet resolved. I could put this differently, they wanted to launch a Bitcoin wallet or a Lightning wallet and they included Tether because it is their product. It would maybe be strange to not include it since it is their main user base?

The wallet leaves much to be desired but let's see how it evolves in the future. Many of the current wallets were not that good in their earliest days either or they had very limited features.

Such people or group can try abuse it, but it's not easy to abuse since 1 $0.10 claim require 1 X account and 1 tether.me account. They probably already have lots of X account, but who knows what Tether do to prevent mass creation of tether.me account.

They DO. They have all sorts of accounts from FaceBook, to X, to Reddit, and probably some of them are here in BitcoinTalk or would be here if it was easy to rank up. Although, I wouldn't absolutely be surprised if there is a farm that's giving merits to each of their members accounts.
  👀

That is the reason why this is limited to such a tiny amount. Tether is a very rich company and it seems many users underestimate how rich it is. They could easily onboard 1 million or even 10 million users or more with $1 or even $10 each without even really noticing it, but the problem is that most of those users would not be real users and would instead be farmers. So I think the decision here to keep it at $0.1 with the intent of providing an educational experience of the Lightning Network was the correct decision.

I really don't like those farmers though, they have ruined legitimate giveaways that is why we don't have them anymore like in the old days.

[UmerIdrees]

Why would a company as big as tether need to do a giveaway to promote their wallet? Instead, they should have introduced their wallet, and everyone would have started using it, and it would have gained a lot of hype, but this didn't happen. It is due to the factors mentioned above that it is not the wallet with the best features, and people aren't comfortable using it.

Tether is not very popular in the Bitcoin community. Neither is their token, nor the company itself. I would even say they have a negative image here. And since this is a Bitcoin wallet, not just a wallet for Tether tokens, relying on the Tether name alone to promote it wasn't an option. That's why they had to run a giveaway.

Well, you cannot say that tether isn't popular here, in fact, the stablecoins have their important roles in cryptocurrencies and 90% of the traders are done in stablecoin pairs and not in bitcoin pairs (as it used to be in the early days). Considering this and the market cap of USDT, the tether official wallet is still unable to gain hype and is a big failure. As far as I know, it could have been a much better option if they had only launched a wallet that supports tether only and not other crypto like BTC, etc.

[philipma1957]

Why would a company as big as tether need to do a giveaway to promote their wallet? Instead, they should have introduced their wallet, and everyone would have started using it, and it would have gained a lot of hype, but this didn't happen. It is due to the factors mentioned above that it is not the wallet with the best features, and people aren't comfortable using it.

Tether is not very popular in the Bitcoin community. Neither is their token, nor the company itself. I would even say they have a negative image here. And since this is a Bitcoin wallet, not just a wallet for Tether tokens, relying on the Tether name alone to promote it wasn't an option. That's why they had to run a giveaway.

Well, you cannot say that tether isn't popular here, in fact, the stablecoins have their important roles in cryptocurrencies and 90% of the traders are done in stablecoin pairs and not in bitcoin pairs (as it used to be in the early days). Considering this and the market cap of USDT, the tether official wallet is still unable to gain hype and is a big failure. As far as I know, it could have been a much better option if they had only launched a wallet that supports tether only and not other crypto like BTC, etc.

The problem is the wallet does not support a ton of coins.

Why have a wallet that does 4 to 7 coins when there are wallets that do 100 plus coins.

Also tether can be frozen in any wallet so if you use tether a lot this wallet does not protect from freezing your coins and does not allow 100 or so other coins thus not much To work with.

[Pmalek]

The problem is the wallet does not support a ton of coins.

Why have a wallet that does 4 to 7 coins when there are wallets that do 100 plus coins.

Also tether can be frozen in any wallet so if you use tether a lot this wallet does not protect from freezing your coins and does not allow 100 or so other coins thus not much To work with.

Even if it did supported all those tokens that older multi-coin wallets support, what's so special about it to make people want to abandon their current setups and switch to the Tether Wallet? Let's say I was an altcoiner and shitcoiner with hundreds of different tokens and NFTs in my Trust Wallet, Guarda, Exodos, Coinbase, Cake Wallet, YouNameIt... Why would I abandon ShitWallet A I am familiar with for ShitWallet B? To get a Tether username that will work as a universal address for all my coins and tokens and maybe an airdrop worth a few cents? Not so appealing.

[FinneysTrueVision]

The problem is the wallet does not support a ton of coins.

Why have a wallet that does 4 to 7 coins when there are wallets that do 100 plus coins.

Also tether can be frozen in any wallet so if you use tether a lot this wallet does not protect from freezing your coins and does not allow 100 or so other coins thus not much To work with.

The wallet is too limited in coin availability and also functionality. The only thing the wallet allows you to do is send and receive USDT on a handful of different blockchains. If you only have USDT on Ethereum, but need it on a different network, then you are out of luck because the wallet doesn’t allow you to bridge to another blockchain. They do not allow swapping on DEXs either. To do those things, you have to transfer USDT to another wallet, which defeats the point of this wallet existing.

We also can’t pretend like USDT is the only stablecoin. It’s like they created a wallet for Tether maximalists, when in the real world people are also using USDC and a variety of other dollar pegged tokens and volatile cryptocurrencies.

[PrivacyG]

Well, you cannot say that tether isn't popular here, in fact, the stablecoins have their important roles in cryptocurrencies and 90% of the traders are done in stablecoin pairs and not in bitcoin pairs (as it used to be in the early days). Considering this and the market cap of USDT, the tether official wallet is still unable to gain hype and is a big failure. As far as I know, it could have been a much better option if they had only launched a wallet that supports tether only and not other crypto like BTC, etc.

I do not know of anyone who trades in direct Bitcoin pair, they rather trade in Tether all the time.  But at the same time.  All the people I can think of never end up holding on to Tether unless they were waiting for a few hours or days for the next order which meant their Tether would be gone again.

I imagined this is how it works for most people.  They never actually hold Tether but they use it as the 'middle Currency' because it is easier when Fiat value shows up.  This was also for me the reason Tether had such a high trading volume.  Holding Tether in my own Wallet would feel very wrong.  What is the point.

-----

We also can’t pretend like USDT is the only stablecoin. It’s like they created a wallet for Tether maximalists, when in the real world people are also using USDC and a variety of other dollar pegged tokens and volatile cryptocurrencies.

I am actually starting to consider your scenario.  Although I do get why Tether would not include other competing Stable Coins.  The reason is obvious.

Is there such a thing as 'Tether maximalists'?  Do they exist?  If they do.  You are right, this does look like a wallet created for them.