Tether Lets You Borrow Money Using Digital Gold

Tether opens up its $23 billion gold reserve, letting people borrow cash against tokenized gold without selling it.

Imagine owning gold but never having to sell it to get cash. That's the idea behind a new move by Tether, one of the biggest companies in the crypto world.

Tether is best known for making USDT, a "stablecoin" (a digital coin designed to always be worth $1). But the company also owns a huge pile of real, physical gold — worth about $23 billion — stored in vaults in Switzerland.

To make use of this gold, Tether created a digital token called XAUT (Tether Gold). Each XAUT token represents one troy ounce of real gold (a troy ounce is the standard unit used to weigh precious metals, roughly 31 grams). Owning XAUT is like owning a digital claim on actual gold sitting in a vault.

Now Tether is teaming up with a crypto lender called Ledn to let people borrow money against their gold tokens — without selling them. Here are the key facts:

Tether's gold reserve is worth around $23 billion
Each XAUT token = 1 troy ounce of physical gold
Loans backed by XAUT are expected to launch later this year
Ledn will support XAUT alongside Bitcoin (BTC) and Tether's stablecoin USDT

Why is this a big deal? Normally, borrowing money using gold as backing is something only banks and big institutions do. By turning gold into a digital token, Tether makes it possible for regular crypto users to use gold as collateral (an asset you pledge to a lender; if you don't repay, the lender keeps it).

Ledn says customer gold will be held safely 1-to-1 — meaning it won't be lent out or used to earn extra returns. The company is keen to stress this, because several crypto lenders collapsed in 2022 after risky lending practices wiped out customer funds.

In short: Tether is finding a clever way to make its enormous gold stash work harder — letting people unlock cash from their gold while still holding onto the precious metal itself.

This is an AI-generated summary. Read the original article at: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/06/27/tether-putting-usd23-billion-gold-stockpile-to-work-with-bullion-backed-loans