Tether is rapidly expanding its physical gold footprint, with CEO Paolo Ardoino making the stablecoin issuer less of a fintech and more of a central bank. “We are soon becoming one of the largest gold central banks in the world,” Ardoino said in an interview with Bloomberg, as the company revealed that it has purchased and stored bullion on a scale rarely seen outside of banks and sovereigns.
Tether’s gold strategy
These remarks come as Bullion continues to rewrite the macro strategy playbook. Gold hit new record highs above $5,200 an ounce this week after President Donald Trump said he was not concerned about a weaker dollar, reinforcing the “depreciation trade” that has taken flows away from sovereign bonds and currencies into hard assets.
Tether’s push for gold is physical, not just accounting. According to the report, more than a tonne of bullion is transported to a high-security vault in Switzerland every week, with the hoard described as the largest known hoard outside of banks and nation states.
Ardoino presented accumulation as an ongoing policy decision rather than a one-time allocation. “Maybe we will taper, we don’t know yet. We will evaluate on a quarterly basis our demand for gold,” he said, suggesting that Tether intends to manage the position dynamically as the macroeconomic environment evolves.
The treasury engine is USDT. With approximately $186 billion in circulation, Tether receives dollars for its stablecoin issuance and invests reserves in assets including treasuries and gold, generating interest and trading profits that can be recycled into other purchases.
Ardoino’s comments also highlight a shift in posture from a bullion accumulator to an active participant in the market plumbing. He said the company needed “the best gold trading floor in the world” to continue buying at scale and exploit inefficiencies, adding that whatever strategies it adopted would be structured so that the company “stays in physical gold for a very long time.”
“Our goal is to have stable, stable, long-term access to gold,” Ardoino said, describing logistics that more closely resemble commodity trading than crypto cash management. “Because one to two tonnes per week is a very large quantity,” he added, as Tether seeks to make the acquisition process more efficient, buying directly from Swiss refiners and also sourcing from major financial institutions, with large orders sometimes taking months to arrive.
This expansion is already reflected in the workforce. Tether has hired two senior gold traders from HSBC, and Ardoino said the company is evaluating opportunities to trade around dislocations between futures and physical prices.
Ardoino’s broader argument is explicitly monetary. “Gold is ‘logically a safer asset than any national currency,’” he said in a previous interview with Bloomberg. “Every central bank in the BRICS countries buys gold.” This week, he linked that demand to the user base that has made USDT a dominant proxy for the offshore dollar: “Exactly the people who love gold and who use gold to protect themselves from their own government that has been devaluing their currency for a long time,” he said. “We think the world is heading toward darkness. We think there’s a lot of unrest.”
This thesis directly powers Tether Gold (XAUT), the company’s token exchangeable for bullion. Tether issued XAUT equivalent to about 16 tons of gold, or about $2.7 billion, and Ardoino said there was a “good chance” it would end the year with $5 billion to $10 billion in circulation. “The way I see it is that there are foreign countries that are buying a lot of gold, and we believe that these countries will soon launch a tokenized version of gold as a competitive currency against the U.S. dollar,” he said.
For now, the message from Tether is that it already works on a state scale. “We are operating at a scale that now places the Tether Gold Investment Fund alongside sovereign gold holders, and with that comes real responsibility,” Ardoino said.
At press time, XAUT was trading at $5,283.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
Editorial process as Bitcoinist focuses on providing thoroughly researched, accurate and unbiased content. We follow strict sourcing standards and every page undergoes careful review by our team of top technology experts and seasoned editors. This process ensures the integrity, relevance and value of our content to our readers.
