“The companies plan to expand global access to tokenized gold and allow the buying of bullion with Tether’s stablecoins.”, — write: www.coindesk.com
The investment, announced on Thursday in a blog post, gives Tether a 12% stake in Gold.com, a platform that enables access to both physical and tokenized gold. As part of the partnership, Tether will integrate XAUT, its gold-backed token, into Gold.com’s infrastructure.
The companies will also explore enabling purchases of physical gold using Tether’s US dollar stablecoin USDT and its recently launched US-regulated stablecoin, USAT.
Gold.com’s publicly-traded shares rose 6% after Thursday market hours.
Tether’s investment follows a steep rally in gold prices, which topped $5,000 per ounce last week. Meanwhile, the market for blockchain-based gold tokens also ballooned, growing from $1.3 billion to more than $5.5 billion. Tether’s XAUT token currently makes up over 60% of the tokenized gold market and is backed one-to-one by physical gold held in Swiss vaults.
“Gold has played a central role in preserving value for centuries, particularly during periods of monetary stress and geopolitical uncertainty,” said Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether.
“Gold exposure is not a trade for Tether,” he added. “It is a hedge and a long-term allocation to protect our user base and ourselves in a world that is becoming increasingly unstable.”
Earlier Thursday, Tether also announced an investment in Anchorage Digital, a US federally regulated crypto bank and key partner in the rollout of USAT.