The company behind the biggest digital dollar is buying gold like a central bank

The issuer of the main dollar stablecoin holds 116 metric tons of physical gold, according to an estimate from November 2025. On November 27, 2025 Bitcoin closed at $91,334, a move of +0.9% on the previous day.

How much gold, and at what rate

What strikes me more, though, is the speed: 26 tons bought in three months. That’s 2 percent of all the world’s demand for gold in the period, and more than any central bank bought over the same three months. The same bank expected another 100 tons by year-end, paid for out of the year’s profits.

The issuer’s gold reserve: 104 metric tons as security for the dollar stablecoin, 12 behind a token that represents gold, for a total of 116 tons and about $14 billion. In the third quarter of 2025, 26 were bought, equal to 2 percent of world demand.

Put like that, it sounds like a curiosity. But a private company buying 2 percent of the world’s demand for gold in a quarter is a monetary actor. Gold is up 56 percent since the start of the year, past $4,100 an ounce, and anyone buying at that pace is driving part of the move.

The problem is that the law doesn’t allow it

And the same company had announced it would launch a second coin by year-end, compliant with the American rules and aimed at the regulated market. Put the two together and you get an almost forced choice: two coins under two different rule books, the regulated one without gold and the original one with the gold inside.

The open question is which of the two the market will actually use. A coin backed by gold holds up better against inflation but is less liquid when redemptions have to be paid quickly. One backed only by government bonds is the opposite. They’re two different products with almost the same name, and that’s the kind of distinction nobody looks at until it matters.

And meanwhile an exchange had its hot wallet emptied

The distinction everyone quotes and few explain is exactly what limited the damage. A “hot” wallet is connected to the internet because it exists to pay clients out in real time. A “cold” one stays offline, and moving funds out of it takes a physical procedure. The first is convenient but exposed, the second awkward but safe. In this case, everything not needed for the day’s withdrawals was in cold storage.

It’s the platform’s second big hack, after the 2019 one, when 342,000 units of the second-largest cryptocurrency disappeared and the blame landed on groups tied to North Korea. It also comes in the week its parent company announced a $10.3 billion merger. The loss comes to about three thousandths of that figure. For a platform that size, covering it is a line in the accounts. For anyone who kept their savings there, it would have been everything.

The etf on a privacy coin, and the price

Our archive, though, says something the press release doesn’t. That day zcash closed at $490, down 7 percent on the day before and 25 percent on the week before. So the news of institutional access arrived while the price was deflating, the opposite of how these stories usually get told afterwards.

Bitcoin, for its part, closed at $91,334 against $90,484, a move of +0.9%. That day’s sources talked about a four-and-a-half percent bounce, but that measured the recovery from the intraday low. Close to close, the move is the one above. The rest was macro: a large bank had reversed its rate forecast and now expected a cut in December.