A Canadian alternative to YouTube, Rumble, has announced the launch of its new wallet, which will support Tether’s USDT stablecoin.
On March 26, the CEO of Rumble, Chris Pavlovski, shared on X that the Rumble Wallet will facilitate monetization for content creators. He asserted that it would outperform many traditional advertisers and specifically utilize Tether’s USDT. Tether’s CEO, Paolo Ardoino, expressed his support for the initiative, describing it as “A wallet for the people” in a post on X.
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A wave of investments
This announcement follows Tether’s investment of $775 million in Rumble late last year. At that time, Ardoino stated that the company “deeply believes in the fundamental values of freedom of speech and financial freedom.”
Source: Paolo Ardoino
This is among several significant investments made recently by the $143 billion stablecoin issuer, which was reported as the seventh-largest holder of U.S. Treasury securities globally, surpassing numerous nation-states.
In February, Tether acquired a majority stake in Juventus FC, a prominent Serie A football club located in Turin, Italy. The stablecoin operator also sought to take a significant stake in the South American agribusiness firm Adecoagro during that month.
Additionally, Rumble has recently begun to invest its own capital, acquiring over $17 million in Bitcoin (BTC) earlier this month. The company announced this new strategy in late November, expressing its intention to allocate up to $20 million towards increasing its Bitcoin holdings.
Founded in late 2013 as a YouTube alternative for smaller content creators, Rumble experienced substantial user growth starting in 2020, coinciding with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Viewership rose dramatically from 1.6 million users around the time of the U.S. elections in 2020 to 31.9 million by the end of the first quarter of 2021.
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Rumble’s move into the U.S. market
The platform has received backing from venture capitalists, including current U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel. At the close of 2021, the Trump Media and Technology Group, which is linked to former President Donald Trump, announced a partnership with Rumble to “deliver video and streaming for TRUTH Social.” Trump stated in that announcement:
“TMTG continues to align with service providers who do not discriminate against political ideology. Therefore, I have selected the Rumble Cloud as a critical backbone for TMTG infrastructure.”
In 2022, Truth Social also transitioned to Rumble’s cloud platform. TMTG CEO Devin Nunes remarked 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 relationship between the two entities has strengthened over time. Also in 2022, Truth Social became the first publisher on Rumble’s ad platform. This year, TMTG joined forces with Rumble in a lawsuit aiming to challenge alleged censorship in Brazil.
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