The chart making the rounds is striking: Tether purchased roughly 26 tonnes of gold last quarter, more than any central bank in the dataset and certainly more than countries like Kazakhstan, Brazil or Turkey. It is tempting to interpret this as yet another sign of accelerating de-dollarisation, weakening trust in fiat and the slow gravitational pull bringing gold back toward the monetary core. And perhaps all of that is true.
But there is a much less comfortable angle that almost no one seems willing to consider. If a private issuer of a dollar substitute becomes one of the largest marginal buyers of physical gold, then the system also becomes exposed to the inverse scenario: what happens if that same entity is suddenly forced, through regulation, litigation or a shutdown order, to liquidate a meaningful portion of those reserves? People talk endlessly about the buying pressure. They rarely ask what the selling would look like.
Imagining Tether being regulated, constrained or closed is not some remote hypothetical - it is a scenario discussed openly in multiple jurisdictions. And if such an event compelled them to dump their gold holdings onto the open market, the price impact would be immediate, disorderly and likely the opposite of what gold enthusiasts assume. A market that celebrates Tether as a major buyer should at least recognize the risk embedded in relying on a buyer who is not a sovereign, not a central bank and not protected from forced liquidation.
So yes, the headline is dramatic. Tether is buying more gold than governments. But the more important question is what happens if those tonnes ever have to go the other way. In that light, this isn’t just a story about resilience being accumulated. It is also about the fragility created when a single private actor becomes a key part of the gold market’s plumbing.
