Tether Will Keep Adding to $24 Billion Gold Stash Held in Former Nuclear Bunker, Says CEO

In brief

• Tether is purchasing around 1-2 tons of gold per week to add to its massive holdings, its CEO said.
• It now holds around 140 tons, or $24 billion worth of the precious metal, much of which is held for reserves and its gold-backed token.
• The firm’s holdings are maintained in a secure former nuclear bunker in Switzerland.

Crypto’s biggest stablecoin firm is becoming a behemoth in the gold market too.  Tether, which issues USDT—the largest stablecoin by market capitalization—has been adding around 1-2 tons of gold per week to its reserves, CEO Paolo Adroino told Bloomberg.  “We are soon becoming basically one of the biggest, let’s say, gold central banks in the world,” Adroino said in a recent interview. The firm’s frontman said Tether owns around 140 tons of gold, around $24 billion worth following the asset’s recent record surge, and it intends to keep buying at its current pace at least for the next few months.

 That haul is good enough to make it one of the largest holders of the precious metal in the world, much of which is held for its stablecoin reserves and to fulfill its gold-backed stablecoin, XAUT, which has seen a rapid expansion as gold demand surges. XAUT outpaced USDT’s growth last quarter, leaping inside the top 50 cryptocurrencies by market cap.  Buying and storing gold is not a simple process, and it’s something the firm is hoping to make more efficient over time, according to Ardoino. He told Bloomberg that the firm hauls its weekly gold acquisitions into a high-security vault that was once a Swiss nuclear bunker, hidden behind multiple layers of steel doors.  “It’s a James Bond kind of place,” Ardoino said. “It’s crazy.”

The firm’s bunker has only been getting more valuable of late, as gold soared to new all-time highs earlier this week, eclipsing a price of $5,000 per ounce for the first time. It’s now jumped even further, up nearly 4% on Wednesday and recently changing hands around $5,320. “Maybe we are going to reduce, we don’t know yet,” Ardoino told Bloomberg of the firm’s future plans to acquire the metal. “We are going to assess on a quarterly basis our demand for gold.” Its precious metal reserves, mainly gold bars, which act as partial backing for its USDT stablecoin, were worth around $12.9 billion—or about 7% of its stablecoin reserve—according to a September attestation from Italian bank BDO Italia.  In November, S&P Global downgraded the stability of its flagship product to “weak” on account of its use of risky assets, like Bitcoin, in its reserves. Users on Myriad—a prediction market operated by Decrypt’s parent company, Dastan—believe that gold will continue its recent surge, giving it an 85% chance of rising up to $5,400 rather than falling back to $4,700. Those odds have grown 28% in the last day alone.