Every week, more than a ton of gold is hauled into the high-security vault owned by crypto giant Tether Holdings SA, which is now the world’s largest known bullion hoard outside banks and nation-states. Over the past year, Tether has quietly become one of the biggest players in the global gold market — the embodiment of a meeting of the crypto and gold worlds whose shared distrust of government debt is a major factor behind the surge in prices to never-before-seen highs above $5,100 an ounce. And yet relatively little is known about its inner workings, or its gold strategy.
When two of the most senior gold traders quit leading bullion bank HSBC Holdings Plc last year, the industry was abuzz with gossip about where they would head next; few guessed that the answer was Tether. In an interview with Bloomberg, chief executive Paolo Ardoino described the company’s role in the gold market as similar to that of a central bank, and predicted that Washington’s geopolitical rivals would launch a gold-backed alternative to the dollar. He revealed that it plans to keep ploughing its enormous profits into gold, while also beginning to compete with banks in trading the metal. “We are soon becoming basically one of the biggest, let’s say, gold central banks in the world,” he said.
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