Tether's mainstream payment journey begins with digital asset "tips".

Tether seems to have never been satisfied with just being a “stablecoin company.” Recently, it announced with the video platform Rumble that it will launch a digital asset tipping feature for 51 million monthly active users this December—users can tip content creators through Rumble Wallet. At first glance, this is just a product feature, but in reality, it marks a key step for Tether in the direction of “mainstream payments.”

For a long time, the influence of digital assets mainly existed at the exchange and over-the-counter settlement level, rather than in the daily consumption of end users. Now, through a platform like Rumble, which has strong creator economy attributes, Tether has gained a unique “entry point” that allows tens of millions of ordinary users to directly access and use digital assets.

Rumble's user base is primarily from North America, and these individuals are not typical crypto players, but they have a strong interest in “independent speech” and “anti-censorship” content, which creates a natural resonance for cryptocurrency payments. For Rumble, this mechanism can motivate creators and allow the platform to break away from the traditional revenue structure of advertising and subscriptions; for Tether, this means it no longer relies on liquidity driven by trading demand, but begins to embed its stablecoin into the fundamental behaviors of the internet economy.

Paolo Ardoino pointed out in an interview that Tether hopes to bring the use of stablecoins and Bitcoin to mainstream users in the U.S. through Rumble's platform, ultimately making its compliant stablecoin USAT a digital payment tool for 100 million Americans. In fact, as early as 2024, Tether invested $775 million in Rumble, with part of the funds used for stock buybacks and part for content and cloud business expansion. This means that Tether is not simply purchasing a payment channel externally, but is shaping an ecological pivot - jointly promoting the “usability” of stablecoins through capital, technology, and content.

Unlike the attempts of early content platforms, this innovation is not about building a completely new internal points system, but rather allowing existing mainstream digital assets to directly participate in the content economy. In the past, projects like Steemit proposed the concept of “content as mining,” but due to the disconnection between their incentive assets and the real payment system, users found it difficult to use their income for actual consumption. The collaboration model between Rumble and Tether is much closer to the logic of the real economy: allowing creators to directly receive digital assets with broad circulation, truly realizing “creation equals income, income equals use.”

At the same time, traditional tech companies are also exploring similar paths. For example, Meta has been reported to be researching the integration of stablecoin payment functionality into the Facebook and WhatsApp ecosystems, hoping to support user-to-user transfers and creator payments through its own wallet. Although these attempts are still in the early stages, the direction is consistent—allowing digital assets to move away from exchange scenarios and into real value transfer between people. This is precisely the key significance of the collaboration between Tether and Rumble: to give stablecoin payments a social function, rather than just being a financial tool.

In contrast, Tether's integration at the technical and ecological levels is more thorough. It has not waited for external regulation or payment systems to drive its development but has actively “created its own scenarios.” Through the Rumble wallet, it controls both the payment channels and user relationships; through the Rumble content ecosystem, it has transformed USDT from a settlement asset into a “payment medium for the creator economy”; and through USAT, it has provided a potential compliant carrier for this model. For Tether, this is not just business expansion but a repositioning—transforming from “the shadow of the dollar” to “a bridge for digital payments.”

This strategy is important also because Tether has long been viewed as the “behind-the-scenes bank” of the global digital asset market, yet has always lacked user-facing “front-end products.” Now, the launch of the Rumble wallet will change this situation. If in the future users can complete small tips, content payments, or creator settlements daily through the Rumble wallet, Tether's position will shift from infrastructure to that of an application-layer payment brand—similar to the role of PayPal in the e-commerce ecosystem.

Regardless of whether Meta's payment experiment can be implemented, or whether exchanges like Binance and OKX are trying to attract users to use Web3 wallets through social or content modules, one thing has become consensus: the future of digital assets lies not in trading, but in payments. Tether's advantage lies in its robust capital reserves and asset structure. According to Tether's transparency report from September this year, over 85% of its reserves are in short-term U.S. Treasury bonds and cash equivalents, with total assets exceeding 117 billion USD. This scale is sufficient to support large-scale payment and settlement expansion, which also means it has liquidity and resilience far exceeding that of other competitors.

For Tether, the outcome of this game is no longer about competing for market share of stablecoins, but rather who can first grasp the “gateway to crypto payments.” In this new era of content and payment integration, Tether is trying to become that very gateway.