- Tether is closing its gold-backed lending platform Alloy, with users given until September 17 to withdraw assets.
- The company now holds over 146 metric tons of physical gold, making it one of the largest private bullion holders globally.
- Tether has increased its stake in Metalla Royalty & Streaming to about 14%, deepening its push into gold royalties.
- Despite the Alloy shutdown, Tether reaffirms gold as a core focus, with XAUT trading volumes surging on exchanges.
Tether, the company behind the world’s largest stablecoin and one of the most significant private holders of physical gold, is quietly winding down its gold-backed lending platform Alloy. The move, while small in financial terms, offers a fascinating glimpse into the company’s balance sheet and its outsized position in the global gold market. Users of Alloy have until September 17 to withdraw their assets, a deadline that is now just over a month away.
The story is more interesting for what it reveals about Tether’s balance sheet than for any market impact from the shutdown itself. Alloy was always a rounding error against Tether’s broader gold holdings, with only a few hundred thousand dollars of Tether Gold locked in the platform against a company-wide stash worth close to 19 billion dollars. That stash is the more consequential detail for anyone tracking physical gold demand: at 146 metric tons and rising, Tether now sits ahead of many national reserves as a private holder of bullion, a scale that gives the company real, if largely unremarked, weight in physical gold markets alongside central banks and sovereign funds.
Alloy’s Quiet Wind-Down
Alloy, launched in 2024, was a niche product built on Tether’s gold reserves. It allowed users to lock up Tether Gold tokens, known as XAUT, as collateral to mint a separate dollar-pegged token called aUSDT. This overcollateralised structure meant the gold backing was always worth more than the tokens issued, a design meant to cushion against swings in the gold price. Tether announced in June it would wind the platform down, and new minting of aUSDT has already stopped.
The platform stayed small throughout its life, with only five open positions remaining as of the closure announcement, about 399,089 aUSDT owed against 194.41 units of Tether Gold worth roughly 836,000 dollars. Across its lifespan, Alloy drew only 209 addresses in total, and the bulk of the remaining balance sits with just three holders. Measured against total Tether Gold in circulation, the amount ever locked in Alloy was minor, with one illustration suggesting only around 3,000 dollars of every 10,000 dollars in circulating Tether Gold value was ever inside the platform.
Massive Gold Reserves
Tether’s scale makes the story notable beyond the platform itself. The company is best known for USDT, whose peg to the US dollar is maintained by a reserve portfolio that totalled roughly 187.8 billion dollars as of its second quarter 2026 attestation, reviewed by accounting firm BDO. About 80% of that sits in US Treasury bills and cash equivalents, alongside roughly 7 billion dollars in Bitcoin and a smaller pool of secured loans and other investments.
The remaining 18.8 billion dollars is held in physical gold, more than 146 metric tons of bullion stored in a private Swiss vault, after the company added 14 tons during the quarter. That holding puts Tether ahead of many national reserves and cements its position as the largest private holder of gold outside of central banks and sovereign governments. For context, only China, Poland and Uzbekistan reportedly bought more gold than Tether during the first half of 2026, with Tether’s buying matching Kazakhstan’s central bank.
Expanding Gold Royalty Investments
Tether’s gold strategy extends beyond simply holding bullion. The company has been actively building exposure to gold royalties and streaming, a strategy it began pursuing with a large investment in Elemental Altus Royalties last year. Most recently, Tether International raised its stake in Metalla Royalty & Streaming to about 14%, deepening its push into Canadian gold royalty companies.
Tether bought 149,116 Metalla shares for $1.36 million, lifting its holding to 13.2 million shares. The steady buying shows one of the crypto sector’s largest pools of capital continuing to move into mining royalties as the group builds its exposure to gold. Royalty stakes give Tether exposure to mine revenue and higher metal prices without taking on mine construction and operating costs.
XAUT Trading Activity
While Alloy winds down, trading activity in Tether Gold’s XAUT token has been surging on major exchanges. Binance’s XAUT gold perpetual contracts have reached about $2 billion in daily trading volume, up from just $1.5 million in December 2025, marking a 1,300-fold increase. XAUT even peaked at $6.4 billion in daily volume in March 2026, showing robust market interest in the tokenized gold product.
Tether has been explicit that the Alloy closure is not a retreat from gold. The company said the decision reflects a wish to focus resources on areas with stronger user demand, deeper liquidity and broader long term opportunity, naming XAUT specifically as a product it intends to keep building on. Tether reported $1.5 billion in second-quarter operating profit and $187.75 billion of assets against $183.64 billion of liabilities at June 30, leaving a $4.11 billion cushion.
All of this points to a company that is doubling down on gold as a core strategic asset, not stepping back from it. The Alloy shutdown is routine housekeeping, closing an underused product to redirect resources toward XAUT and Tether’s core lineup. For a company already sitting on one of the largest privately held gold reserves in the world, the message appears to be that the bullion itself remains central to its strategy, even as one of the more niche ways of using it quietly winds down. The wind down itself looks like a routine decision rather than any signal about Tether’s confidence in gold as an asset, which it has explicitly reaffirmed as a continuing area of focus.
