Tether joins forces with Opera’s MiniPay to broaden USDT and Tether Gold reach in emerging markets
Tether has deepened its push into mobile-first economies by expanding support for its flagship stablecoin USDt and its tokenized gold product XAU₮ through Opera’s MiniPay wallet. The move is designed to give users in more than 60 countries easier access to dollar-pegged savings and inflation-resistant gold exposure directly from their smartphones.
The market reacted quickly. Opera’s shares surged by almost 18% intraday after the tie-up was revealed, ultimately closing with gains of just over 13.5% on February 2, followed by an additional 3.55% rise in after-hours trading. Investors appear to be betting that embedding Tether’s assets deeper into Opera’s mobile ecosystem could turn the browser company into a major on-ramp for everyday crypto payments and savings.
According to the February 2 announcement, MiniPay users can now send, receive, and store USDt, while also converting part of their balances into XAU₮. This tokenized gold exposure is pitched as a hedge against local currency depreciation and macroeconomic instability, particularly in regions where inflation and FX volatility regularly erode purchasing power.
MiniPay itself is a self-custodial wallet built into Opera’s mobile browser and powered by the Celo blockchain. It targets regions where most people access the internet primarily via mobile phones—Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia—and has become one of Opera’s fastest-growing products. The company reported a 50% growth rate for MiniPay in just the fourth quarter of 2025.
Available on both Android and iOS, MiniPay claims a presence in roughly 60 countries and reports 12.6 million activated wallets. This broad geographic spread, combined with its integration into a popular browser, effectively turns Opera into both a web gateway and a financial access point for millions of users who may not have reliable access to traditional banking.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino framed the partnership as part of the company’s long-term mission to bring stable and accessible digital value to people outside mature financial systems. By embedding USDt and XAU₮ into MiniPay, he argued, users gain not just speculative assets but practical tools: they can send remittances, hold their savings in dollars, or shift part of their wealth into gold without leaving a mobile app.
Support for USDt inside MiniPay is not entirely new. The wallet first integrated the stablecoin in July 2024 with the rollout of MiniPay V2. That upgrade introduced Pockets, a drag-and-drop stablecoin swap feature powered by the Mento protocol. Through Pockets, users can easily move between cUSD, USDT, and USDC, smoothing the user experience for people unfamiliar with traditional crypto trading interfaces.
Since that integration, demand for USDt within the MiniPay ecosystem has been robust. By December 2025, more than 7 million phone-verified USDt wallets had been created inside the app. Over that same month, MiniPay users reportedly executed over 96 million USDt transfers and 3.5 million peer‑to‑peer payments, underscoring that the stablecoin is increasingly used for everyday transactions, not just speculative holdings.
Jørgen Arnesen, EVP Mobile at Opera, emphasized that many of these users are interacting with digital dollars for the very first time. For them, MiniPay represents a straightforward, app-based gateway into on-chain money, with stablecoins functioning more like a familiar digital balance than an abstract crypto asset. The result, he suggested, is a bridge between traditional cash economies and programmable digital finance.
The latest addition—Tether’s tokenized gold, XAU₮—builds on that foundation. By allowing users to park part of their holdings in gold-backed tokens, MiniPay offers what it describes as an inflation-resistant savings option. For people in countries where local currencies can lose double-digit percentages of value in a single year, the ability to switch between digital dollars and tokenized gold can be a powerful risk-management tool.
Opera has been steadily positioning itself as a Web3-enabled browser, layering crypto-focused capabilities on top of its core browsing experience. Over the past few years, the company has introduced integrated stablecoin wallets, direct access to decentralized applications, and various savings and yield tools, transforming what used to be a simple browser into a multipurpose gateway for web and finance.
Why this partnership matters for emerging markets
In many of the regions MiniPay targets, formal banking penetration remains low, while smartphone adoption continues to climb. Traditional bank accounts can be difficult to open, remittance fees are often high, and local currencies are vulnerable to both inflation and political shocks. A mobile-first, self-custodial wallet that supports stablecoins and tokenized gold offers an alternative financial rail that only requires an internet connection and a basic smartphone.
USDt provides a familiar unit of account—dollars—without the need for a dollar bank account. Users can receive payments from abroad, preserve value in a currency that tends to be more stable than their local one, and make day-to-day transfers without dealing with the overhead of legacy banking. For gig workers, freelancers, and small merchants, this can translate into faster settlements and fewer intermediaries.
XAU₮, meanwhile, mirrors a behavior already common in many inflation-prone countries: using gold as a long-term store of value. Instead of buying physical gold, which involves security and liquidity challenges, users can convert part of their digital balance into tokenized gold with a few taps. This pattern—holding a mix of local currency, digital dollars, and gold—may become a new baseline for personal finance in unstable economies.
User experience and accessibility
A core selling point of MiniPay is that it attempts to hide crypto’s complexity behind a mobile-native user interface. Features like drag‑and‑drop stablecoin swaps through Pockets are designed for people who have never used an exchange or written down a seed phrase. MiniPay’s self-custodial model gives users full control over their assets, while Opera’s UX decisions aim to make that power feel as simple as using a conventional fintech app.
Phone verification for wallets, although not a strict identity system, helps reduce spam and fraud within the ecosystem and makes it easier for users to identify and transact with people they know. This is crucial for peer‑to‑peer payments and social money use cases, which dominate in emerging markets where formal invoicing and card networks are less prevalent.
Opera’s strategic shift: from browser to financial gateway
For Opera, the Tether partnership is more than a feature upgrade; it is a strategic step in repositioning the brand. The company is leveraging its existing distribution—hundreds of millions of browser installs—to layer financial services into the everyday browsing experience. If MiniPay continues to expand and retain users, Opera could emerge as a significant player in the consumer-facing crypto and digital payments space.
The sharp rally in Opera’s share price after the announcement suggests that investors recognize this pivot. Integrating widely used assets like USDt and XAU₮ into a wallet that already has millions of active users strengthens Opera’s narrative as a growth-focused, Web3-ready tech company rather than a legacy browser maker.
Implications for Tether and the stablecoin landscape
For Tether, deeper integration into MiniPay is part of a broader strategy to cement USDt’s role as the default transactional currency of the crypto economy, particularly outside the United States and Western Europe. Every new wallet that offers frictionless USDt access increases network effects: more merchants can consider accepting it, more platforms can integrate it, and more users can view it as a de facto digital cash.
The inclusion of XAU₮ also showcases Tether’s ambition to expand beyond simple dollar-pegged tokens. Tokenized real-world assets, especially commodities like gold, are gaining traction as investors look for on-chain instruments that combine crypto’s portability with traditional assets’ stability. MiniPay’s reach gives XAU₮ an immediate audience in markets where gold has longstanding cultural and financial significance.
Potential challenges and risks
Despite the upside, the partnership operates in a landscape filled with challenges. Regulatory scrutiny of stablecoins is intensifying worldwide, with questions around reserves, transparency, and systemic risk. As more people treat USDt holdings like bank deposits, calls may grow for stricter oversight, consumer protection rules, and clear legal frameworks in each jurisdiction where MiniPay operates.
There are also UX and security considerations. While self-custody offers control, it also places the burden of responsibility on users. Lost devices, forgotten recovery phrases, and phishing attacks can all lead to irreversible loss of funds. MiniPay and Opera must continue refining their onboarding flows, security education, and backup mechanisms to balance empowerment with protection.
Network performance and transaction fees are another factor. MiniPay runs on Celo, a blockchain optimized for mobile use, but congestion or changing fee markets could still impact the reliability and cost of everyday transfers. Ensuring transfers remain fast and cheap is critical if MiniPay wants to compete with existing mobile money solutions and card networks.
What this could mean for everyday users
If the integration fulfills its promise, a typical user in, say, Lagos, Nairobi, São Paulo, or Jakarta could use MiniPay to receive international payments in USDt, swap a portion into XAU₮ to preserve long-term value, and convert small amounts to local currency when needed using on‑ and off‑ramp partners. That same user could pay friends, family, or local merchants directly from their browser wallet in seconds.
For small businesses, accepting USDt via MiniPay can reduce chargeback risk and dependence on local banking rails, while giving them an easier path to holding part of their treasury in dollars or gold. Over time, a critical mass of such users could create parallel payment networks that sit alongside traditional banking, but operate with different rules and economics.
Outlook
The Tether–Opera MiniPay partnership illustrates how large-scale consumer apps are increasingly using crypto infrastructure not as a speculative add-on, but as a core financial layer. By combining USDt’s liquidity, XAU₮’s inflation hedge, and MiniPay’s mobile-first design, the collaboration aims to turn stablecoins and tokenized gold into mundane, everyday tools rather than niche instruments.
Whether this experiment ultimately reshapes financial access in emerging markets will depend on regulation, user trust, technical reliability, and the broader macroeconomic environment. For now, the rapid uptake of USDt within MiniPay and the strong stock market reaction to the announcement suggest that both users and investors see significant potential in bringing stable, programmable money directly into the browser.