Tether CEO says firm is becoming a “gold central bank” as bullion pile grows

Every week, trucks haul more than a ton of gold into a high-security vault in Switzerland. It’s not a central bank receiving the delivery. It’s Tether.

The company behind USDT has been quietly turning stablecoin profits into physical bullion, riding a gold rally that has been fueled by geopolitics, investor hedging and steady central bank demand. Ardoino told Bloomberg that Tether is now operating at a scale that “carries real responsibility,” and he isn’t shy about the ambition. In his words, the firm is “soon becoming” one of the world’s biggest “gold central banks.”

That framing is partly about volume and partly about positioning. Ardoino said Tether holds around 140 tons of gold worth roughly $23 billion, making it one of the largest known private hoards outside banks, ETFs and nation states. He also said purchases have been running at about one to two tons per week and that the company intends to keep buying for the next few months, reassessing quarterly.

The physical setup is unusual, too. Ardoino described the storage site as a former nuclear bunker with multiple thick steel doors. “It’s a James Bond kind of place,” he said.

Tether’s gold shows up in two places. A portion backs its tokenized gold product, XAUT, which is marketed as ownership of real bars stored in Switzerland. Separately, Tether holds gold as part of the broader reserves that support USDT, which it invests largely in U.S. Treasuries but has increasingly diversified into other assets.

Ardoino also hinted at a more aggressive next step: competing with banks in trading gold. If more countries and investors want alternatives to dollar exposure, a gold-linked instrument that moves like crypto could be an easy on-ramp.

The harder part is trust. The bigger the hoard gets, the more pressure Tether faces to explain how the metal is audited, who has claims on it and how redemption works when markets get stressed.