With the crypto market roiled by fear on Thursday, Tether quietly made a move that could reshape how gold fits into digital finance.
Hours after unveiling a $100mn investment in custody firm Anchorage Digital, Tether disclosed a second deal: a $150mn purchase of a 12% stake in bullion marketplace Gold.com.
The company known primarily for its USDT stablecoin hasn't positioned the venture as a shiny side project. The move underscores Tether’s growing push to anchor its business to real-world assets and tokenization. Gold.com is a NYSE-listed precious-metals platform with decades of experience in sourcing, physical delivery and custody.
Win-win situationGold.com said it will invest $20mn of the proceeds into XAUT, Tether’s gold-backed stablecoin, and plans to integrate a suite of Tether products – including USDT, USAT and XAUT – across its marketplace.
Tether has been hording gold in a strategy that's at odds with Bitcoin maximalists and crypto enthusiasts who believe digital assets will supersede the world's favourite physical safe haven. The company had about 140 tons of the precious metal, worth close to $24bn, at the start of February.
While both gold and Bitcoin function as hedges against systemic instability, they behave very differently in the current crisis. Bitcoin remains highly sensitive to shifts in risk appetite and liquidity, often trading more like a tech stock than a defensive anchor. Gold has demonstrated a resilience across monetary regimes that digital tokens cannot yet match.
Tether's XAUT token already commands a dominant share of the gold-backed stablecoin market, which has expanded rapidly over the past few years. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino has said that gold "is a hedge and a long-term allocation to protect our user base and ourselves in a world that is becoming increasingly unstable." Tether's physical stash is used to back XAUT on a one-to-one basis.
Tokenization and beyondDespite recent turmoil across crypto markets, one trend is becoming harder to ignore: stablecoins and tokenization are emerging as the sector’s most durable use cases. Tether is positioning itself squarely at that intersection.
Juan Sartori, Head of Special Projects at Tether, has pointed to that future, noting that financial markets are going in a direction “where trusted real-world assets and blockchain-based infrastructure increasingly converge.”
Giving users of one of the world’s largest bullion platform the ability to buy and sell real-world gold using on-chain tokens and stablecoins highlights how far these products have come, and how deeply crypto infrastructure is being embedded within traditional financial markets.
