Tether today announced a $200 million strategic investment in Whop, a crypto payments startup, valuing the digital market at $1.6 billion. The capital and direct integration of Tether’s Wallet Development Kit (WDK) aim to enable native stablecoin settlement on Whop and accelerate the rollout of dollar-linked payments for its global user base.
The investment will fund product integration and Whop’s international expansion, according to the companies’ announcement. The company currently serves approximately 18.4 million users in 144 countries and processes roughly $3 billion in annual payments. The platform’s gross transaction volume shows impressive month-over-month growth of approximately 25%, which caught the attention of the largest stablecoin issuer in the market.
What is the new partnership about?
According to the plan, Whop will integrate Tether’s WDK so buyers can pay in USD₮ and USA₮, and sellers can receive earnings in digital dollars via on-chain settlement. Tether presented the initiative as an effort to “support real economic activity by providing an efficient digital dollar and wallet infrastructure that can scale to billions of people across all continents,” stated Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether.
Steven Schwartz, CEO and co-founder of Whop, said on X:
“Our partnership with Tether marks a major step in building the world’s largest internet market. Tether is committed to enabling everyone in the world to participate in the new internet economy. The way humans work and create value is changing fast. The world needs both an open internet market giving people a platform to conduct business, as well as a transparent payments network.”
The companies stated that the funding will fuel expansion in Latin America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region, and will introduce self-custody wallet functionality and DeFi primitives such as loans and borrowing within Whop. The integration is positioned to shorten settlement times, reduce exposure to chargebacks, and lower cross-border transaction costs by bypassing some traditional banking procedures.
This is clear evidence that stablecoins are achieving mass adoption as a payment method. Increasingly, both traditional and online businesses are offering stablecoin payment options. For Tether, this integration provides an opportunity to further drive the adoption of USDT and USAT, this time on a platform that opens the door to the world of online commerce.
