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 27 November 2025 Bitcoin closed at $91,334, +0.9% against the previous day.

How much gold, and at what rate

The number that counts, though, isn’t the total, it is the speed: 26 tons bought in three months, equal to 2 percent of all the world’s demand for gold over the period and more than any central bank bought over those same three months. The expectation, again from that bank, was for 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 that way it sounds like a curiosity, and it isn’t. A private company buying two percent of the world’s gold in a quarter is, in fact, a monetary actor: gold is up 56 percent since the start of the year, past $4,100 an ounce, and whoever buys at that rate produces part of that move.

The problem is that the law doesn’t allow it

And the same company had announced it wanted to launch a second coin by year-end, compliant with the American rules, aimed at the regulated market. Put together, the two things sketch a forced choice: two different coins with two different rule books, the regulated one without gold and the historic one with the gold inside.

The question left open is which of the two the market will actually use. A coin backed by gold is more robust against inflation and less liquid when redemptions have to be met quickly; one holding only government bonds is the opposite. They are two different products with almost the same name, and it is the kind of distinction nobody looks at until it matters.

And meanwhile an exchange had its hot wallet emptied

The distinction everybody quotes and few explain is exactly the one that limited the damage: a “hot” wallet is connected to the internet because it exists to get clients’ money out in real time; a “cold” one stays disconnected, and moving it takes a physical procedure. The first is convenient and open to attack, the second is inconvenient and isn’t — and in this case everything that wasn’t needed to move money that same day was in cold storage.

It is the second big hit for the same platform after the one in 2019, when 342,000 units of the second cryptocurrency disappeared and the attribution landed on groups tied to North Korea. And it falls in the week the company that controls it announces a $10.3 billion merger. The hole is worth three parts in a thousand of that figure: covering it out of its own money, for a platform that size, is a line in the accounts — while for anyone who kept their savings there it would have been everything.

The etf on the private coins, and the price

Our archive, though, says something the press release doesn’t: that day zcash closed at $490, -7 percent against the day before and -25 against a week earlier. The news of institutional access arrives while the price is deflating, not while it is running — which is the reverse of the order in which these things get told afterwards.

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