Tether, the company behind the world’s largest stablecoin, has been buying physical gold at a rate of up to two tons per week and has built one of the world’s largest gold inventories.
Tether intends to continue buying gold at this price for at least the next few months, CEO Paolo Ardoino told Bloomberg. At current prices, this equates to more than $1 billion in monthly purchases.
The purchases were shipped to a high-security former nuclear bunker in Switzerland, which Ardoino described as a “James Bond-type place.”
Tether currently holds approximately 140 tons of gold, worth an estimated $24 billion, making it one of the largest known holders of gold outside of governments, central banks, and major ETFs. Most of the gold represents the company’s own reserves, while some gold backs its gold-based stablecoin, The company currently has a market capitalization of $2.7 billion, according to CoinGecko.
The company said its gold purchases have outpaced those of countries such as Greece, Qatar and Australia. In the last quarter of 2025, its fund exposure increased by 27 tons of gold.
“With Tether Gold, the scale of our operations now places the Tether Gold Investment Fund on par with sovereign gold holders, which carries real responsibility,” Ardoino said in a press release. “XAU₮ exists to remove ambiguity at a time when confidence in the monetary system is waning.”
Björn Schmidtke, CEO of Tether gold finance company Aurelion (AURE), said part of the ambiguity has to do with investing in gold exchange-traded funds and stocks. To Schmidtke, these represent “paper gold” because investors don’t know which piece of physical gold they own through it.
Schmidtke estimated in an interview with CoinDesk that about 98% of gold investments are made through ETFs or other financial instruments that do not guarantee ownership of a specific gold bar.
He warned that in a market crisis, this “paper gold” structure could burst under pressure if massive redemptions were triggered. Tokenizing gold helps eliminate bottlenecks in gold delivery and provide proof of ownership, Schmidtke said.
Still, gold’s performance has led many to speculate that buyers are helping push prices higher. The precious metal has gained more than 90% in the past 12 months and is currently trading at $5,260 an ounce.
Jeffries estimated that Tether’s purchases helped push gold prices higher, as did central bank purchases. Poland, Kazakhstan, Brazil and Azerbaijan were the top buyers of the precious metal last year, according to the World Gold Council.
Ardoino believes some of the gold purchases may be ahead of a possible foreign launch of tokenized gold aimed at competing with the U.S. dollar.
In fact, several members of the intergovernmental organization BRICS have been among the largest net buyers of gold. One exception is Russia, which has been a net seller despite being involved in an ongoing armed conflict that threatens to deplete its reserves.
