- Tether Investments has acquired a strategic stake in LayerZero Labs to advance cross-chain infrastructure and support its omnichain stablecoin, USDt0.
- Built on the OFT standard, USDt0 allows USDT to move across multiple blockchains like Kraken’s Ink and Berachain without fragmented liquidity or traditional bridge risks.
- Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino views the partnership as essential “plumbing” for a future agentic AI economy, facilitating rapid, low-cost micro-payments managed by software agents.
Tether has taken a strategic stake in LayerZero Labs, as the USDT issuer believes that AI and blockchain infrastructure will play a huge role in Tether’s push for agentic AI.
The investment backs USDt0, Tether’s omnichain version of USDT, built on LayerZero’s Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT) standard. The setup locks USDT on Ethereum and issues an equivalent token on other networks, aiming to avoid the usual mix of wrapped assets and fragmented liquidity.
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Plumbing For Agentic AI
Paolo Ardoino, Tether’s CEO, pitched the deal as plumbing for an “agentic AI” economy where software agents move stablecoins constantly and cheaply. LayerZero CEO Bryan Pellegrino framed Tether’s backing as validation after USDt0’s early traction.
LayerZero Labs has built interoperability technology that allows digital assets to be transferred in real-time across any transport layer and distributed ledger, enabling a fundamental utility within the financial industry. This enables digital assets to serve the infinite agentic AI economy that will require such primitives to orchestrate micro-payments at an unprecedented scale.
Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether Tether positioned the investment as part of a broader portfolio push spanning AI, biotech, energy, and remittances, with stablecoins as settlement rails.
LayerZero sells itself as cross-chain messaging with decentralised oracles and relayers that pass messages between blockchains so assets can move without traditional bridges.
USDt0 first appeared on Kraken’s Ink L2 and is slated to expand to chains including Berachain and MegaETH.
Tether said USDt0 has already handled more than US$70 billion (AU$107 billion) in cross-chain transfers in under 12 months since an early 2025 rollout tied to Everdawn Labs’ implementation. The same stack has also been used for an omnichain version of Tether’s gold token, XAUt0.
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