(Kitco News) – Fintech company Antalpha, which bet big on gold last year when they entered a massive position in Tether Gold (XAUt), appears to be ready to lock in its nine-figure profit windfall on the yellow metal.
Back in September, the firm purchased $241 million worth of XAUt, representing 1.8 tonnes of physical gold, at an average price of $3,693 per ounce. After gold prices skyrocketed in late 2025 and early 2026, the position has now gained over $100 million in unrealized profit.
Deanonymized on-chain activity data from crypto intelligence platform Arkham now indicates that the company has begun taking profits on their position, with $15 million worth of XAUt transferred from wallets associated with Antalpha to crypto custody platform Cobo, suggesting they may be preparing to liquidate.
Tether and its gold-backed stablecoin have been attracting significant attention since the company announced its official gold holdings in January. The leading stablecoin issuer holds between 125 and 150 tonnes of gold according to analysts’ estimates.
“Tether remains the largest non-sovereign buyer of physical gold and now ranks within the top 30 global gold holders, surpassing countries like Australia, UAE, Qatar, South Korea, and Greece,” said Fahad Tariq, Senior Vice President, Equity Research at Jefferies, in early February.
Not only is Tether Gold the world’s largest gold token, but the company also holds large amounts of gold as a reserve asset to back its U.S. dollar stablecoin. Roughly 7% of its total holdings are in gold.
But Tether is not just competing against sovereign national banks. Commodity analysts at Société Générale said that XAU₮’s holdings would rank as the eighth-largest ETF globally in terms of tonnage held, despite not being an ETF at all, but rather a digital-asset issuer.
The French bank said that, according to its analysis, flows into XAU₮ in December were the second-highest among all global ETFs, behind only SPDR Gold Shares (NYSE: GLD), the world’s biggest gold-backed ETF.
SocGen also noted that Tether flows are competing with speculative interest among hedge funds.
“In the last week of January, Tether’s flows became dominant and were a clear driver of market behavior into month-end, especially compared to ETFs,” the analysts said. “But aggregate hedge funds still dominated the influence on prices into month end and early February. After the sharp price decline on Friday the 30th, Tether added a further 11 metric tonnes — effectively ‘buying the dip’, and the flows by Tether outsized those of ETFs but certainly not hedge funds.”
In late January, Tether announced they had added 27 tonnes of gold in the fourth quarter of 2025, after purchasing an estimated 26 tonnes in Q3.
As gold prices have appreciated, the crypto company has become a significant source of gold demand due to the high speed of purchases it has reported for reserves backing the Tether USDT stablecoin, with $187 billion worth of tokens in circulation, and the Tether XAUT gold token, with a market cap above $2.7 billion.
“We are operating at a scale that now places the Tether Gold Investment Fund alongside sovereign gold holders, and that carries real responsibility,” said Paolo Ardoino, Tether CEO, in Tether’s statement.
Ardoino also said that the company is planning to increase its gold exposure to between 10% and 15% of its total portfolio.
