Tether Investments, the investment arm of the leading stablecoin issuer, has made a strategic investment in LayerZero Labs, which develops an interoperability protocol called LayerZero.
The move is essentially a bet on the technology underpinning USDt0, a blockchain-agnostic version of Tether’s dollar-pegged token that has moved more than $70 billion across blockchains in less than a year, according to a press release shared by the company.
LayerZero’s infrastructure allows cryptocurrencies to flow across different blockchains without fragmentation or illiquidity. That allows developers creating financial tools to rely on stablecoins without their funds being locked into a single network.
That same architecture also supports more experimental use cases, such as AI agents managing their own wallets and sending payments autonomously, in what Tether called “agent finance.”
The Tether investment comes on the heels of Everdawn Labs’ implementation of USDt0 and is built using LayerZero’s Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT) standard. Along with its tokenized Tether gold token, XAUt0, the projects are considered real-world tests of the LayerZero interoperability framework.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed and Tether did not respond to a request for comment.
The stablecoin giant has been using the billions it generates backing USDT tokens in circulation to make a wide range of investments. These include a majority stake in Latin American agricultural company Adecoagro (AGRO), a privacy-focused health app, and a stake in video-sharing platform Rumble (RUM).
The company has been aggressively accumulating gold and earlier this month bought a $150 million stake in Gold.com to boost the distribution of tokenized gold.
LayerZero’s ZRO token gained up to 10% on the news, but quickly reversed and is now down 3% in the last 24 hours.
