Tether's path to mainstream payments begins with digital asset "tipping".

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

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

Rumble's user base is primarily in North America. While these users aren't typical crypto enthusiasts, they have a strong interest in "independent speech" and "anti-censorship" content, creating a natural resonance for crypto payments. For Rumble, this mechanism incentivizes creators, allowing the platform to move beyond traditional advertising and subscription revenue structures. For Tether, it means it's no longer reliant on transaction-driven liquidity but is beginning to embed its stablecoin into the fundamental activities of the internet economy. Paolo Ardoino stated in an interview that Tether hopes to use the Rumble platform to bring stablecoins and Bitcoin to mainstream American users, 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 some funds used for stock buybacks and others for content and cloud business expansion. This means that Tether is not simply buying an external payment channel, but rather building an ecosystem fulcrum—using capital, technology, and content to jointly promote the "usability" of stablecoins. Unlike earlier attempts by content platforms, this innovation does not involve building a completely new internal points system, but rather allows 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 because their incentive assets were disconnected from the real-world payment system, users found it difficult to use their earnings for actual consumption. The partnership between Rumble and Tether is closer to real-world economic logic: allowing creators to directly receive widely circulated digital assets, truly realizing "creation equals income, income equals usability." Meanwhile, traditional tech companies are also exploring similar paths. For example, Meta was reportedly researching embedding 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 their early stages, the direction is consistent—to move digital assets away from exchange scenarios and into real-world value transfers between people. This is precisely the key significance of the Tether and Rumble partnership: giving stablecoin payments a social function, rather than just being a financial tool. Unlike other payment systems, Tether's integration at the technology and ecosystem levels is more thorough. It didn't wait for external regulation or payment system support; instead, it proactively created its own scenarios. Through the Rumble wallet, it controls both payment channels and user relationships; through the Rumble content ecosystem, it transforms USDT from a settlement asset into a "creator economy payment medium"; and through USAT, it provides a potential compliant vehicle for this model. For Tether, this is not just business expansion, but a reshaping of its position—it aims to grow from a "shadow of the dollar" into a "bridge for digital payments." This strategy is crucial because Tether has long been considered the "behind-the-scenes bank" of the global digital asset market, yet has consistently lacked a user-facing "front-end product." The launch of Rumble wallet will change this. If users can use Rumble wallet daily for small donations, content payments, or creator settlements, Tether's position will shift from infrastructure to an application-layer payment brand—similar to PayPal's role in the e-commerce ecosystem. Regardless of whether Meta's payment experiment succeeds, or whether exchanges like Binance and OKX attempt to attract users to Web3 wallets with social or content modules, one thing is certain: the future of digital assets lies not in trading, but in payments. Tether's advantage lies in its robust financial reserves and asset structure. According to Tether's transparency report in September of this year, over 85% of its reserves are short-term US Treasury bonds and cash equivalents, with total assets exceeding $117 billion. This size is sufficient to support large-scale expansion of payments and settlements, meaning it possesses liquidity and resilience far exceeding its competitors. For Tether, the outcome of this game is no longer about competing for stablecoin market share, but rather who can be the first to control the "gateway to crypto payments." In this new era of content and payment convergence, Tether is attempting to become that gateway itself.