Rumble wallet rolls out with Tether’s USDT for creator payments

Canadian YouTube alternative Rumble announced the launch of its wallet with support for Tether’s USDT stablecoin.

In a March 26 X post, Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski said Rumble Wallet will be used for content creator monetization. He promised it would work better than most advertisers and that it would use Tether’s USDt (USDT). Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino showed his appreciation for the initiative, referring to it as “A wallet for the people” in an X post.

A flurry of investments

The announcement follows Tether investing $775 million in Rumble in late 2024. Ardoino wrote at the time that the company “deeply believes in the fundamental values of freedom of speech and financial freedom.”

It is one of several major investments recently made by the $143 billion stablecoin issuer. Reports from 2024 indicated that Tether was the seventh-largest holder of US Treasury securities globally, surpassing many nation-states.

In February, Tether acquired a majority stake in Juventus FC, a major Series A football club based in Turin, Italy. During the same month, the stablecoin operator sought to acquire a majority stake in South American agribusiness firm Adecoagro.

Rumble also recently began investing its capital, acquiring over $17 million worth of Bitcoin (BTC) earlier this month. The firm announced its new strategy in late November 2024, when it voiced its intention to spend up to $20 million adding Bitcoin to its balance sheet.

Rumble was founded in late 2013 as a YouTube alternative for small content creators. The platform saw a significant influx of users from 2020 onward, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Viewership increased from 1.6 million users in 2020 around the US election time to 31.9 million by the end of the first quarter of 2021.

Rumble’s foray into the US

Venture capitalists backed the platform, including current US Vice President J.D. Vance and former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel. At the end of 2021, US President Donald Trump-linked Trump Media and Technology Group announced a partnership with Rumble, which would “deliver video and streaming for TRUTH Social.” Trump wrote in the announcement:

“TMTG continues to align with service providers who do not discriminate against political ideology. Therefore, I have selected the Rumble Cloud to serve as a critical backbone for TMTG infrastructure.”

In 2022, Trump’s social media platform Truth Social also migrated to Rumble’s cloud platform. TMTG CEO Devin Nunes said at the time that “Truth Social and Rumble took a major stride toward rescuing the internet from the grip of the Big Tech tyrants.”

The partnership between the two companies grew stronger as time went on. Also in 2022, Truth Social joined Rumble’s ad platform as its first publisher. This year, TMTG joined Rumble in a lawsuit to halt alleged censorship in Brazil.

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