Tether Investments, the investment arm of the leading stablecoin issuer, has made a strategic investment in LayerZero Labs, which is developing an interoperability protocol called LayerZero.
The move is essentially a bet on the technology behind 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 between different blockchains without fragmentation or illiquidity. This allows developers creating financial tools to build on stablecoins without their funds being locked into a single network.
This same architecture also supports more experimental use cases, like AI agents managing their own wallets and sending payments autonomously, in what Tether calls “agent finance.”
Tether’s investment follows Everdawn Labs’ deployment of USDt0 and is built using LayerZero’s Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT) standard. Alongside their tokenized Tether gold token, XAUt0, the projects are considered real-world tests of LayerZero’s interoperability framework.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed and Tether did not respond to a request for comment.
The stablecoin giant uses the billions it generates from backing circulating USDT tokens 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 accumulating gold aggressively, and earlier this month it purchased a $150 million stake in Gold.com to boost distribution of tokenized gold.
LayerZero’s ZRO token gained as much as 10% on the news, but quickly reversed itself, now down 3% in the last 24 hours.
