Tether Investments, the investment arm of a 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 U.S. dollar-pegged token that has moved more than $70 billion on the blockchain in less than a year, according to a press release shared by the company.
LayerZero’s infrastructure enables cryptocurrencies to flow across different blockchains without fragmentation or illiquidity. This enables developers to build financial instruments that rely on stablecoins without having to lock funds into a single network.
The same architecture also supports more experimental use cases, such as artificial intelligence agents managing their own wallets and sending payments autonomously, what Tether calls “agent finance.”
Tether’s investment follows the deployment of USDt0 by Everdawn Labs and is built using LayerZero’s Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT) standard. In addition to the tokenized Tether gold token XAUt0, these projects are also seen as real-world tests for 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 making extensive investments using the billions of dollars generated by its support of the USDT token in circulation. These include a majority stake in Latin American agriculture company Adecoagro (AGRO), a privacy-focused health app, and a stake in video-sharing platform Rumble (RUM).
The company has been actively accumulating gold, and earlier this month it bought a $150 million stake in Gold.com to facilitate the distribution of tokenized gold.
After the news broke, LayerZero’s ZRO token briefly rose by 10%, but quickly reversed, falling by 3% in the past 24 hours.
