Tether leads an $8 million Series A round in Speed, a Lightning-based payments company, with Ego Death Capital also participating in the raise.
Speed says it has already processed more than $1.5 billion in annualized payment volume and has about 1.2 million users, positioning the funding as scale capital rather than a seed-stage experiment.
Speed’s pitch is straightforward: let merchants and platforms accept stablecoin payments that move at Lightning speed, without forcing users to touch card rails or wait on slower settlement. The company is leaning on Taproot Assets—an approach used to represent assets like USDT on Bitcoin while using Lightning for routing and instant transfers.
What Speed is building
Speed is focused on payments over the Bitcoin Lightning Network, aiming for near-instant checkout and low fees compared to traditional card acceptance.
They’ve marketed themselves as a simple merchant pricing model—free up to a threshold and then capped fees (0%–1% in its published examples) rather than the typical 2%–4% band merchants often see with card processing.
A key product theme is “USDT on Lightning,” which Speed has framed as a way to bring stablecoin usability (price stability) to a network optimized for small, fast transactions.
Why Tether is involved
Tether’s lead check effectively backs the idea that stablecoins shouldn’t be limited to Tron/Ethereum-style rails and can be pushed through Bitcoin-native infrastructure via Taproot Assets + Lightning
For Tether, the bet is that distribution matters as much as issuance: if USDT is spendable in more places, usage grows—even if the underlying rail is Bitcoin rather than a smart-contract chain.
What to watch next
The real test is merchant adoption at scale: whether Speed can convert “Lightning is cheap” into a repeatable sales motion across marketplaces, remittances, and creator payments.
It also puts pressure on the broader ecosystem to make Taproot Assets production-grade across wallets, liquidity providers, and compliance workflows—not just technically viable in demos.
