Tether’s Silver Connection: What Changes When Bullion Is Lent?

Gold.com’s filings show a Tether affiliate storing gold and silver at its Las Vegas facilities and US$1.454 billion owed to Tether at 30 June 2026 — about 45% of the company’s liabilities. They give no quantity of silver and identify no silver lease. Storing metal, trading it and lending it are different things, and lending changes whose performance an owner depends on.

Published October 4, 2026 · 13 min read

Key Takeaways

• Gold.com reported US$1.454 billion of payables and advances owed to Tether at 30 June 2026 — up from US$362.6 million at 31 March and nil a year earlier, and equal to about 45% of its US$3.2 billion of total liabilities. It is a dollar balance with no split by metal, not a silver stockpile.
• The silver in the record is one disclosure: a registration statement of 15 May 2026 says a Tether affiliate is storing gold and silver at Gold.com facilities under an agreement dated 24 March, alongside separate leasing (25 February) and trading (3 March) agreements. No filing we have found gives a quantity of silver or identifies a silver lease.
• The only lease terms on file are for gold: a February term sheet for a US$100 million facility at 1.75% a year, with title staying with the lessor and equivalent gold returned at maturity. Retained title is not certainty of recovery — the LBMA’s guide says a metal lender has full credit exposure to the borrower.
• Gold.com’s annual report says it can sell metal it has leased and settle by returning similar metal or paying cash, and that most of its recent liquidity has come from precious-metal leases, a majority from Tether — a shareholder with about 12% of the company and a seat on its board.
• A lending return is paid by a borrower, not by the metal: the fee on 1,000 ounces lent for a year arrives only if the borrower performs. A conflict to note: Gold.com owns 55.4% of Silver Gold Bull, a dealer that pays GoldSilverPortfolio an affiliate commission.

Tether’s interest in precious metals now reaches well beyond its gold token. On 5 February 2026 the stablecoin group announced a US$150 million investment in Gold.com, the US precious-metals company formerly known as A-Mark Precious Metals, and a plan to bring its gold token, XAUT, into Gold.com’s business. By 30 June, Gold.com’s annual report shows, the company owed Tether US$1.454 billion in payables and advances. Bloomberg, reporting on that filing on 16 September, described Tether as having become a major bullion lender, with about US$1.5 billion of financing to the dealer. Amounts in this article are US dollars, and the information is as of 30 September 2026.

Most of that story is about gold. The silver in it is a single disclosure: a registration statement Gold.com filed on 15 May says an affiliate of its new shareholder is storing gold and silver at the company’s facilities in Las Vegas, under an agreement dated 24 March. It is not a September purchase announcement and it gives no quantity. Commentary published since mid-September has nonetheless put ounce estimates on Tether’s silver and quoted double-digit silver lease rates. Neither appears in any filing we have found, and the only lease rate in the filings is 1.75% a year, contemplated for gold in February.

The distinction matters because holding metal, storing it for someone else and lending it are different activities. Before asking whether a large participant’s involvement is bullish for silver, there is a more basic question to settle: what does the arrangement require another party to do, and what happens if that party cannot do it?

US$1.454 billion Gold.com’s payables and advances to Tether at 30 June 2026 — a balance the company owed, not a valuation of silver. Reported as 1,453,848 in a related-party table stated in thousands of US dollars. The balance was US$362.6 million at 31 March 2026 and nil at 30 June 2025. The filings do not split it by metal or state a quantity of silver.

What do the silver disclosures actually establish?

They establish that an affiliate of Tether stores silver with Gold.com and that the two groups have a framework under which silver could be leased — not how much silver there is, and not that any of it has been lent. The registration statement of 15 May 2026 describes three agreements, each with an affiliate of the Tether company that bought the shares.

Source: Gold.com, Form S-3, 15 May 2026, “Transactions with the Company”; the filing prints “sliver” in the storage sentence and “silver” in the leasing one. These are three separate arrangements. The filing does not quantify the stored silver, identify a silver lease that has been carried out, or say that stored metal and leased metal are the same metal. Silver is also a late arrival in the paperwork: the February purchase agreement spoke only of gold lending and gold storage. Storage plus a leasing framework is not evidence that the stored silver was lent.

Is the US$1.454 billion a silver stockpile?

No. It is what Gold.com reported owing Tether in payables and advances at 30 June 2026 — a liability on Gold.com’s side of the relationship, measured in dollars. The annual report says the company leases precious metals from Tether, and that Tether also buys and sells metal with it and uses its storage and logistics services; three months earlier the quarterly report had described the balance, then US$362.6 million, as precious-metal leases and customer advances. Neither report splits it between gold and silver, and Bloomberg’s account of the annual report describes the financing as gold loans. It is not a valuation of silver, a total of silver purchases or a single cash loan.

Its scale is easier to judge against the company’s own balance sheet. Gold.com reported total liabilities of US$3.199 billion at 30 June, so the Tether balance was equal to about 45% of them, by our arithmetic. The annual report’s risk factors make the same point in words: in recent months the company’s liquidity has come primarily from precious-metal leases, a majority of them from Tether, where before that it generally came from its trading credit facility — and dependence on financing is listed among the risks to the business. A note to the accounts puts all of the company’s precious-metal leases at US$1.688 billion at 30 June, against US$246.5 million a year earlier; it does not say how much of that is Tether’s, and the Tether balance is reported as payables and advances rather than as leases alone. Tether is not only a lender. It is a shareholder with about 12% of the company and a nominee on the board since 16 March, and a customer that accounted for about US$1.19 billion of Gold.com’s US$25.5 billion of revenue in the year.

Together these disclosures establish an important financing relationship. They do not justify converting a dollar balance into ounces of silver, or adding it to the equity investment as though both were purchases of bullion. An equity stake, a financing balance and a holding of metal answer three different questions, and a disclosed dependence on one lender is a reason to look closely, not a finding of distress. The balance is also a snapshot: the dollar value of an obligation to return metal moves with the metal’s price even when the quantity owed does not.

Why would a business borrow metal?

Because it needs metal rather than money, and the trade is an old one. The LBMA’s guide to the London market calls it “incorrect” that precious metals have no interest rate: lenders of metal seek a return, and borrowers range from miners hedging future output to industrial companies that use the metal in production. A loan runs for a set term; the borrower returns the metal and pays interest, in metal or — where the borrower has cash rather than metal — in a currency agreed at the outset.

A simplified example, not a Tether transaction: a business takes 1,000 ounces of silver and agrees to return 1,000 ounces of the same purity in a year, plus a fee. The fee is paid by the borrower. The silver does not grow, and both the metal and the fee come back only if the borrower performs. The owner’s question changes from “where is my silver stored?” to “what must be returned, by whom, and on what conditions?”

Gold.com’s annual report gives its own answer to part of that question. It describes the company’s precious-metal leases as short-term arrangements under which it has the ability to sell the metal advanced, and which it can settle by returning similar metal or by paying cash. That is a general accounting description of the company’s leases, not the text of the Tether agreements — but it is a reminder that a borrower usually borrows metal in order to use it.

Lending does not create silver. It makes existing metal available for use; it is not mine production and it is not a measure of investment demand, so the existence of a lease says little about the price. Nor is a lease rate a fixed yield. It is a market price for borrowing, and it moves: tight supplies of readily available metal pushed London silver lease rates unusually high during 2025, as we described in our analysis of the silver deficit, and platinum lease rates fell from above 10% to about 2% in the course of 2026, a move we covered in our review of the platinum market.

Does keeping legal title make a metal lease safe?

Retained title helps, but it does not settle what a lender recovers if a borrower fails. The only lease terms in the public record are for gold, and they are a term sheet rather than an executed contract. Attached to the purchase agreement of 4 February, it sketched a US$100 million facility at 1.75% a year, payable monthly, and described the structure in these words: “True lease of fungible gold. Title to leased gold at all times remains with Lessor.” No draw-down was to run longer than 18 months, though it could be extended; the lessee was to return an equivalent quantity and purity of gold at maturity; there was a redemption right “Upon 60 days prior notice at the option of Tether”; and failure to return the gold, non-payment, insolvency, breach and change of control were listed as events of default. The whole was conditional on a definitive lease agreement, which the parties had agreed only to use reasonable commercial efforts to negotiate.

Three cautions follow. First, those are contemplated gold terms. They are not the terms of any silver lease, and the relationship soon outgrew them: Gold.com’s announcement spoke of a gold leasing facility of “no less than” US$100 million, and by 30 June the balance owed to Tether was more than fourteen times that. Second, the document cuts against a blanket claim in the other direction — that every metal lease hands title to the borrower, or is simply an unsecured loan. Third, retained title is not by itself a conclusion about recovery. Equivalent gold is by definition not the same bars; the LBMA’s guide says of a metal loan that the lender has “full credit exposure to the borrower”; and what happens in an insolvency turns on the final contracts and the governing law. This article does not determine any of that. The protections are in the arrangement itself, not in the word “physical” or the label “lease”.

What does allocated storage settle?

Allocated storage settles who owns which bars. It leaves open everything the custody agreement says about access, insurance and permitted use. The Bank of England states the first point most clearly: it stores gold on an allocated basis, “meaning that the customer retains the title to specific gold bars in our vaults, rather than a claim on the Bank for a certain weight of gold”. That describes the Bank’s own vaults, not Tether’s storage terms at Gold.com. The LBMA draws the same line between an allocated account, backed by specific bars on a weight list, and an unallocated one, in which “the account holder has a contractual claim against the clearer – rather than a specific bar” and so carries credit exposure to the institution.

Keeping specific bars in custody is therefore a different position from depending on a borrower to return equivalent metal. The LBMA’s guide is blunt about it: “it’s not possible to lend allocated metal”. Metal that is lent becomes unallocated, and it comes back as different bars. But allocation does not remove the need to read the terms — the same guide says the owner of allocated metal is responsible for arranging its insurance unless the custodian expressly agrees otherwise — and the adjective does not always carry the same meaning. The Royal Canadian Mint’s exchange-traded receipts, which we examined on 2 October, are owned outright by their holders and yet stored unallocated, with the Mint permitted to use the metal in its operations. Direct possession raises a third set of questions again — security, authenticity, insurance and eventual sale — that neither custody nor lending answers.

The comparison is generic and educational; it is not a diagram of any Tether transaction. It draws on the LBMA’s guide, the Bank of England’s description of its vaults and the gold term sheet filed by Gold.com.

Is the stored silver backing USDT or XAUT?

Nothing in the disclosures says so. Tether’s dollar token, USDT, and its gold token, XAUT, are separate products, and the companies involved are separate too. XAUT is issued by TG Commodities, S.A. de C.V., and Tether’s announcement of 26 March 2026 describes one full token as representing “one troy fine ounce of gold on a London Good Delivery bar”, sold and redeemed only under that issuer’s terms. The Gold.com shares were bought by a different company, TPM, S.A. de C.V., and the filings describe the lessor and the storage customer only as affiliates of it. They do not identify the stored silver as backing any token, and they do not show that bars backing XAUT were lent through this relationship. That is a limit on the evidence, not a finding about every Tether company’s assets.

The one token link the filings do document runs the other way: Gold.com agreed to use US$20 million of the share-sale proceeds to buy XAUT. A shared brand is not enough to trace assets between legal entities, contracts and token holders. Whether a token is allocated, redeemable or exposed to lending depends on that product’s own terms; putting an interest on a blockchain changes how it is transferred, not what it is a claim on. The questions to ask of any gold token are set out in the tokenised-gold section of our Learning Academy.

What would make the silver story materially different?

A disclosed quantity would. A filing or statement that put a number on the affiliate’s silver holdings or net purchases, identified a silver lease and its terms, or explained how stored inventory relates to lent metal would change what can be said. Without one, a claim that Tether has removed a given share of annual silver supply is not a calculation anyone outside the companies can make, and a quoted silver lease rate would need a date, a term, a location, a repayment basis and confirmation that it was a completed transaction rather than an indication before it could be applied to this relationship. Those are research requirements, not hints that something is hidden. The absence of public detail limits conclusions in both directions.

What does a yield on bullion require?

It requires someone else to perform. Bullion in a vault is often described as an asset that is no one else’s liability — the property on which Grant Williams builds his case for physical gold held outside the banking system. Bullion that has been lent is, by construction, somebody’s obligation to return. The income is real, and so is the dependence that produces it. For an investor the practical questions are short:

• Who is contractually responsible for returning the metal?
• May it be sold, reused or pledged in the meantime?
• What secures performance, and what happens on default?
• Is the return paid in metal or in cash, and on what timetable?

An investor whose holding exists to limit dependence on counterparties is making a separate decision when lending it out, and the yield is the price of that decision rather than a property of the metal. Our article on where central banks keep their gold looked at why location and access matter; this case adds what the holder has authorised someone else to do with the asset. It follows the same method as our review of China’s gold imports: separate what a document records from what a headline assumes.

The Bigger Picture

Tether’s arrival as a lender to a major US bullion dealer is a real development, documented in the dealer’s own filings. The silver part of it is, so far, one sentence about storage and one clause in a leasing agreement. The durable lesson is not about Tether at all. Metal that is held and metal that is lent can be the same ounces on the same day, and they are different assets: one depends on a custodian keeping what is yours, the other on a borrower returning what it owes.

Bullion can be an asset you hold or an asset you authorise someone else to use. The difference is not only whether it earns income, but whose performance you depend on to get the metal and the income back.

Sources and Methodology

The account of the relationship between Gold.com and Tether rests on Gold.com’s filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The three agreements and their dates, the storage of gold and silver, the share purchase and the board appointment are from the Form S-3 registration statement filed on 15 May 2026, “Transactions with the Company”. The related-party balance of 1,453,848 (thousands of US dollars), revenue from Tether of 1,193,340, total revenue of 25,513,409 and total liabilities of 3,198,553 are from the Form 10-K for the year ended 30 June 2026, filed on 10 September 2026 — Note 14, the income statement and the consolidated balance sheet — and the US$362.6 million balance at 31 March is from the Form 10-Q filed on 11 May 2026. The gold lease terms are from Appendix A to Exhibit B of the Securities Purchase Agreement dated 4 February 2026, filed with a Form 8-K on 9 February; it is a term sheet for gold, and no executed lease or lease confirmation has been published. The stake of about 12% is Tether’s own description; the registration statement and a later ownership filing put it slightly lower. Two statements from the annual report are paraphrased, not quoted. That the company can sell leased metal and settle in similar metal or cash is from Note 15, on financing agreements, which also gives the total for precious-metal leases. That recent liquidity has come primarily from precious-metal leases, a majority of them from Tether, is from the risk factors; the full document was too long for us to open, so we confirmed that wording phrase by phrase through the SEC’s full-text search of the filing. Bloomberg’s report of 16 September 2026 sits behind a subscription and was read through its public summary. Statements about what the filings do not disclose rest on a full reading of the registration statement, the purchase agreement and the related-party notes, and on searches of the annual report. The share of liabilities (45%), the multiples of the 31 March balance and of the US$100 million term sheet, and the figure for all other liabilities are our own arithmetic. General descriptions of metal lending and of allocated and unallocated accounts follow the LBMA’s guide to the London market and the Bank of England’s description of its own custody; the 1,000-ounce example is hypothetical. We did not audit any bullion, see any lease confirmation, assess either company’s solvency or determine ownership or recovery rights in a dispute. Information is as of 30 September 2026.

Conflicts of interest, stated plainly. This article is about a company with a commercial link to this site. GoldSilverPortfolio may earn a commission through two links elsewhere on this site: an affiliate link to SilverGoldBull, a bullion dealer, and a referral link to Wealthsimple, a brokerage. Gold.com’s annual report lists Silver Gold Bull as a 55.4%-owned subsidiary, so the subject of this article is the majority owner of one of the two companies that pay us. Gold.com also owns JM Bullion, which appears on our dealer comparison page without any commission arrangement. Neither Gold.com nor Tether had any input into this article. Both are the sources for their own filings and announcements and have an interest in how the relationship is seen. The LBMA is the trade association of the London bullion market, whose members lend and store metal, and the Bank of England describes its own custody business. Grant Williams, cited for a documented view rather than for any figure, is an adviser to a Swiss gold-storage firm. No company, token, lease or product mentioned here is recommended.

Primary sources

• Gold.com, Inc. — Form S-3 registration statement, 15 May 2026, “Transactions with the Company”: the purchase of 3,370,787 shares at US$44.50 under an agreement of 4 February 2026; US$20 million of the proceeds used to buy XAUT; the Master Agreement for Precious Metal Leases (25 February 2026), the Trading Agreement (3 March 2026) and the Precious Metals Storage Agreement (24 March 2026); the board appointment effective 16 March 2026
• Gold.com, Inc. — Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended 30 June 2026, filed 10 September 2026: Note 14, payables and advances to Tether of 1,453,848 (thousands of US dollars) and revenue from Tether of 1,193,340; total liabilities of 3,198,553 and total revenue of 25,513,409; Note 15, precious-metal leases of US$1.688 billion (US$246.5 million a year earlier) and how they may be settled; the financing risk factor; Exhibit 21, listing Silver Gold Bull, Inc. as 55.4% owned
• Gold.com, Inc. — Form 10-Q for the quarter ended 31 March 2026, filed 11 May 2026: Note 14, US$362.6 million of precious-metal leases and customer advances with Tether
• Gold.com, Inc. — Securities Purchase Agreement with TPM, S.A. de C.V., 4 February 2026 (Exhibit 10.1 to the Form 8-K filed 9 February 2026), Exhibit B and Appendix A, “Gold Metal Lease Term Sheet”: a US$100,000,000 facility at 1.75% a year; title remaining with the lessor; return of equivalent gold at maturity; the events of default; the condition of a definitive lease agreement
• Tether — “Tether Makes $150 Million Strategic Investment in Gold.com, Expanding Global Access to Tokenized and Physical Gold”, 5 February 2026, and Gold.com — “Gold.com Announces $150 Million Strategic Investment from Tether”, 5 February 2026: the investment, the plan to integrate XAUT, and a gold leasing facility of no less than US$100 million
• Bloomberg — “Tether Gold Loans Swell With $1.5 Billion for US Bullion Dealer”, 16 September 2026: Tether as a bullion lender, with about US$1.5 billion of financing to Gold.com
• LBMA — “A Guide to the Loco London Precious Metals Market”, chapter 9, “Lending and Borrowing Metal”, and chapter 8, “Precious Metal Accounts”: why metal is lent and borrowed, the lender’s credit exposure, the lending of allocated metal, and allocated and unallocated accounts
• Bank of England — “Gold”, under “Who owns the gold at the Bank of England?”: storage on an allocated basis, with title to specific bars retained by the customer
• Tether — “Tether Gold, the World’s Leading Tokenized Gold Product, to be Listed on BNB Chain”, 26 March 2026: XAUT issued by TG Commodities, S.A. de C.V.; one full token representing one troy fine ounce of gold on a London Good Delivery bar