This Crypto Platform Buys Gold Like a Central Bank — and for the Very Same Reasons — Barrons.com

By Paul R. La MonicaGold's bounceback is mostly because of five buyers scooping up tons and tons of the precious metal. Who are they? Four foreign central banks and a company that deals in currency — cryptocurrency's Tether.Tether is making its massive buys for the very reasons that the central banks are — to diversify its holdings and to hedge against inflation and any significant weakness in the dollar, which Tether's crypto stablecoin USDT is pegged to.It's almost as if Tether is a new-age central bank.In the first half of the year, Tether bought more than 27 metric tons of gold — matching the purchase of Kazakhstan. Only Poland, Uzbekistan, and China made bigger buys.Tether's gold buys escalated in the second quarter and might be one reason why the metal has jumped this summer, according to analysts at Jefferies.Gold now hovers around $4420 an ounce — a 12% rebound from this year's low of just under $4000 an ounce from at the start of July."Tether is no longer a niche participant, but a meaningful source of incremental physical gold demand," the Jefferies analysts wrote.Tether's CEO, Paolo Ardoino, has acknowledged that the crypto platform's massive buys could help to prop up the metal in times of volatility.Tether also issues a tokenized version of gold, converting ownership of the metal into digital rights on a blockchain. The Jefferies analysts argue that Tether Gold should stabilize the price as well."We continue to believe that stablecoin reserve management and the broader tokenization of financial assets could become increasingly important sources of incremental gold demand over time," they said.Just a week ago, Tether posted Tether Gold's second-quarter holdings on its website — up 9.5% from the first quarter.Ardoino pointed out that Tether Gold holders aren't just buying the tokenized version of the metal when gold is rising."They are using periods of market weakness to increase their ownership of physical gold through a product that is fully backed, transparent, portable, and accessible on-chain," Ardoino said.It's also worth noting that Tether is still amassing gold despite volatility in cryptos. Bitcoin has tumbled more than 25% this year and other digital currencies such as Ethereum and Solana are each down nearly 40%.Tether's USDT, of course, is designed to trade around $1. That's the stable in stablecoin.A crypto company buying tons of gold, acting like a central bank. It's a different — if not strange — world, indeed.Write to Paul R. La Monica at [email protected] content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.