Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin issuer, is coming to Bitcoin.
USDT, the company’s dollar-backed stablecoin, will soon be fully functional across both Bitcoin’s base layer and the Lightning Network, a Bitcoin scaling network, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino announced onstage Thursday at a Bitcoin conference in El Salvador.
The integration marks a significant milestone for both Tether and Bitcoin, two dominant forces in crypto that had yet to combine forces. At a market capitalization of over $139 billion, USDT is handily the world’s top stablecoin, used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide as a secure form of payment linking traditional finance to the crypto economy.
Bitcoin, meanwhile, is by orders of magnitude the world’s largest and most influential cryptocurrency. But the Bitcoin network itself has been slow to attract on-chain users, given that it was not initially designed to support decentralized applications.
Scaling networks like the Lightning Network have filled in the gaps, making layer-2 transactions on Bitcoin cheap and speedy, and enabling the integration of assets like USDT into the Bitcoin ecosystem.
“Today marks a new era for stablecoins,” Elizabeth Stark, CEO of Lightning Labs, the leading developer of infrastructure on the Lightning Network, said Thursday in a statement. Lightning Labs developed the protocol that will allow USDT to integrate with the Bitcoin network.
“Millions of people will now be able to use the most open, secure blockchain to send dollars globally,” Stark continued. “It all comes back to Bitcoin.”
USDT is currently available on 17 other blockchain networks, including Ethereum and Solana.
As crypto becomes increasingly intertwined with mainstream finance, stablecoins have never been more critical to connecting both worlds. Tether is by far the most popular stablecoin, allowing users to easily park crypto funds in a non-volatile asset pegged to the U.S. dollar.
Stablecoins generally—and Tether specifically—have come under increased scrutiny as their influence over the global economy has grown. On Wednesday, lawmakers questioned Howard Lutnick, President Donald Trump’s nominee for Commerce Secretary, over his intimate ties to Tether—a popular form of payment not just among retail users, but also criminal organizations.
Lutnick’s Wall Street firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, currently custodies billions of dollars worth of collateral assets for Tether, which in theory prevent the stablecoin from losing its dollar peg. No independent agency has yet verified, however, whether Cantor and Tether are accurately reporting the size of that collateral reserve.
During Wednesday’s hearing, Lutnick agreed that the United States should adopt a robust auditing process for stablecoins issuers like Tether, given the increasing significance of keeping such assets steady.
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