Utexo has raised $7.5 million in a seed round co-led by Tether, Big Brain Holdings, and Portal Ventures, with participation from Franklin Templeton, Maven11 Capital, Fulgur Ventures, and others. The funding will support the development of Bitcoin-native stablecoin settlement infrastructure, enabling USDT transactions directly on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network.
Historically, Lightning Network and RGB have offered powerful capabilities on Bitcoin but remained complex to deploy in production. Utexo’s API layer abstracts this complexity, allowing payment operators to route USDT settlement over Bitcoin-native rails without managing underlying technical trade-offs. “We built Utexo so that USDT could move on Bitcoin the way money is supposed to move: instantly, privately, with no surprises on costs,” said Chris Hutchinson, Co-founder of Utexo.
The infrastructure enables the first-ever availability of USDT over the Lightning Network, with fees that are fixed and known in advance, regardless of network conditions. Settlement costs are paid in USDT and do not fluctuate with congestion. Transactions settle atomically and privately, anchored to Bitcoin’s security model and completed in under one second. Unlike public transaction graphs on other networks, Utexo prioritizes private execution with encrypted transactions written on-chain, preventing disclosure of counterparties’ payment flows and wallet addresses.
Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, stated, “Bitcoin has always been central to Tether’s long-term vision for USDT. What has been missing is production-ready infrastructure that makes Bitcoin-native stablecoin settlement viable at scale. Utexo provides that layer.”
Utexo’s go-to-market strategy focuses on routing existing USDT flows onto Bitcoin, targeting payment service providers, exchanges, wallets, and high-frequency trading firms. The company emphasizes that this infrastructure allows partners to move stablecoin volume without exposure to fee volatility, congestion risk, or weaker trust assumptions associated with bridges and wrapped assets. “For the first time, wallets will be able to offer their users free USDT transactions,” said Viktor Ihnatiuk, Co-founder of Utexo.
With stablecoins increasingly replacing legacy payment rails worldwide, Utexo’s solution makes Bitcoin a viable settlement layer for dollar-denominated payments, fulfilling Tether’s long-standing vision for native USDT on Bitcoin. For more information, visit https://utexo.com/ and follow on X at https://x.com/utexocom.
