Editor’s Note: On Tuesdays, we often turn the spotlight outside of Porter & Co. to bring you exclusive access to the research, the thinking, and the investment ideas of the analysts who Porter follows.
These are analysts Porter has known and followed for years, if not decades, whose ideas and insights have withstood the test of time, and who have helped Porter make better, more profitable investments.
If you’ve seen our new interview with Garrett Goggin, you’ll already know why Porter says he is the best gold stock investor in the world (and his track record proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt).
You’ll also have heard Porter and Garrett explain how several immense economic forces are converging to drive gold demand even higher over the next several years.
But there was one additional force that they didn’t touch on.
This tailwind is something that almost nobody in the gold sector is accounting for (or even knows about) but, as you’ll see below, it could be one of the most consequential.
In today’s Spotlight, Garrett shares all the details.
Enjoy.
P.S. If you haven’t watched Porter and Garrett’s interview yet, do it today. It details why we’re on the cusp of the largest monetary re-alignment in decades, and how to best capitalize on it.
*Disclaimer: Porter & Co. may receive compensation, referral fees, or other benefits if you purchase products or services mentioned in this email.
Tether Is Coming. Few Are Ready.
From Garrett Goggin
The U.S. government is making an enormous mistake backing crypto and stablecoins.
The Genius Act ensures billions of USD’s will initially flow into interestless stablecoins.
Crypto was created to provide an alternative to the inflation-driven USD money printing system.
Crypto holders aren’t going to hang onto stablecoins backed only by short-term U.S. debt that is guaranteed to be worth less in time due to money printing, debt growth, and devaluation.
The head of business development at Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin company, Juan Sartori, told me at Beaver Creek, “Tether Gold will be bigger than Tether USD”.
Tether USD stablecoin holds about $200 billion in assets. Tether Gold only holds $2 billion.
The U.S. opened Pandora’s box allowing stablecoins into the banking system. U.S. consumers will soon have a choice of their medium of exchange, and it’s not going to be USDs.
Billions will soon be coming for gold.
After attending the Precious Metals Summit at Beaver Creek in Colorado and the SMI Gold conference at the Dolder Grande in Zurich, Switzerland, it’s obvious to GP that few understand the implications of the Genius Act, and even less understand how Tether and stablecoins work.
This bill is the largest change to the USD system since Bretton Woods, and it’s going to be great for gold.
What’s A Stablecoin?
Tether is a crypto token that is pegged 1 to 1 to the USD.
Once you convert USDs into crypto it’s preferable to hold your assets in crypto.
Exchanging from crypto back to USDs can be costly and time intensive. Also, the traditional banking system faces KYC and money-laundering restrictions. Crypto platforms also now face the same legal requirements, but U.S. banks connected to the Fed wire system care about the laws more.
Let’s say you converted $100,000 USD into BTC. You believe BTC is due for a downturn so you would sell your BTC for $100,000 in Tether USD tokens (USDT).
You can instantly transfer these USDT tokens to any crypto platform for very low costs.
There are hundreds of crypto only exchanges and platforms across the internet. You can stake your USDTs there to receive interest provided by the platform. The problem is many of these platforms and exchanges fail.
I know crypto. I understand crypto.
I’ve gone to the conferences where drug addicts and scam artists were trying to peddle crypto products to suckers.
If you did a raise in tokens it wasn’t subject to U.S. securities regulations and USD-based money regulations.
Crypto was simply used because it provided access to investor funds subject to no laws. That’s why I stick to gold. Most crypto businesses are frauds and outright scams.
Cryptography, on the other hand, does have its merits.
Crypto’s instant settlement and transfer of asset solution is a great deal better than the spreadsheet and database days-long settlement process we have now.
I’m a seed investor in Securitize, which is digitizing real world assets slated to go public at Unicorn status in a month or so. You don’t need to reconcile or balance transactions. It’s all done automatically using cryptography.
I bought BTC at $10 in 2010 and sold it a couple years later and bought a house.
I’m also a seed investor in Kraken, a leading crypto exchange, also set to go public soon as a Unicorn.
I’ve staked BTC and USDT tokens at FTX, Celsius, Cryptsy, and Blockfi.
When the rumors started I panicked first and got my assets out of these platforms before they locked their doors causing investors to lose access to assets for years as the bankruptcies were sorted out.
The U.S. government and banking system is going to be on the hook now that stablecoins are part of the banking system.
What’s Tether?
Tether consists of Tether USD (USDT) stablecoin which holds $181.2 billion in assets, Tether Gold (XAUT) stablecoin with $1.4 billion in assets, and Tether Corporate which oversees the two entities and rakes in all the profits from from the current $182.6 billion in assets.
USDT is as transparent as any U.S. money market fund releasing quarterly reserve reports. USDT holds $181.2 billion as of 9/30/25: 7.13% is held in gold and silver, 5.44% in Bitcoin, and 77.23% in short term cash equivalents which are U.S. Treasury Bills that currently yield about 3.68%.
USDT makes about $6.7 billion per year in interest which flows to Tether Corporate.
USDT doesn’t pay any interest.
In fact the recent Genius Act prohibits USDT from paying interest. The crypto bill endorses stablecoins as the U.S. government believes USDT and other tokens will fill the gap in flagging demand for U.S. debt from our trade partners. The Treasury has already been shifting to short end T-bill sales while reducing long term bond issuance.
Tether Gold also issues quarterly reserve reports. As of the last report on 9/30/25 XAUT holds 375,000 gold ounces worth $1.4 billion with each XAUT token backed by an ounce of gold.
The retail fees to buy and sell XAUT is 0.25 basis points.
Assuming each token purchaser paid the 25 basis points XAU has already conservatively made $3.5 mil in profit which, again, all flows to Tether Corporate.
Don’t forget Tether Gold is buying 2 tonnes of gold per week, 108 tonnes per year, and storing the gold in their own vault outside LBMA and COMEX.
This makes Tether one of the largest gold buyers in the world. USDT holds gold worth $12.9 billion, and XAUT $1.4 billion. Tether Corporate owns even more gold, but since Tether Corporate is still a private entity no financial reports are published.
At $4,000/oz gold, total gold held by USDT, XAUT and Tether Corporate is 3.6 million ounces equal to 111 tonnes which matches the estimate above.
Gold Royalties Are Going For Tether Gold
Take a look at the cell phone of Elemental’s CFO David Baker.
You are looking at Elemental’s Tether Gold holdings. Remember Tether is now 51% shareholder of Elemental. Instead of cash on the balance sheet, Elemental chooses to hold $1 million of its $14 million cash in Tether Gold.
Elemental pays Tether’s institutional exchange fees of 1 basis point per buy and sell equal to only $100 fee per million.
Remember Juan Sartori from Tether met with World Gold Council (“WGC”) members Paul Brink CEO Franco, Randy Smallwood CEO Wheaton, Nolan Watson CEO Sandstorm in Beaver Creek.
The WGC is a slow-moving organization that seeks to develop a gold token. GP believes it’s just a matter of time before WGC adopts Tether Gold as their official gold token.
This endorsement would open the door to Newmont with $6 billion in cash and Barrick with $5 billion cash to hold cash reserves in Tether Gold.
Now factor in Visa and Stripe, the world’s largest payment processors. Visa already supports Circle’s USDC and Euro Coin (EURC), PayPal’s PYUSD, and Global Dollar (USDG) across Ethereum, Solana, Stellar, and Avalanche.
“There is much more to come in this space,” McInerney told investors, signaling Visa’s intent to turn stablecoins into a mainstream payments rail for global commerce.
Last October, the payments giant Stripe announced a blockbuster $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge, a little-known startup focused on the dollar-backed cryptocurrency stablecoins.
Long a feature of the insular world of blockchain diehards, the technology had yet to break into Silicon Valley.
But Stripe’s acquisition, alongside the thawing regulatory environment under the Trump administration, has catapulted stablecoins into the mainstream.
Almost a year after buying Bridge, Stripe is launching a product that will entail the $106 billion fintech’s further incorporating stablecoins into its core business—and potentially upending global payments.
The new offering, announced on Tuesday, is called Open Issuance and will allow businesses to launch and manage their own stablecoins, including capturing the valuable yield earned off their reserves.
Those reserves, typically consisting of U.S. Treasury bills and bank deposits, earn interest and ensure a stablecoin maintains a 1:1 peg to real-world dollars.
Popular stablecoins such as Circle’s USDC and Tether don’t pass on the earnings to holders.
Crypto Gold Is The World’s Ultimate Currency
The U.S. government believes stablecoins will fill the demand gap for USD bills.
Our leaders are making a big mistake, however, assuming assets will remain constant in stablecoins.
Tokens like USDT are only a conduit between crypto products. Crypto was invented to avoid the inflationary USD system. Crypto holders don’t want dollars, especially those that don’t pay any interest.
When U.S. banks open the doors to stablecoins, USDs will rush into crypto gateway.
Some USDTs will be staked on multiple crypto platforms to receive interest.
Many of these yield-generating platforms will fail, no better than a classic Ponzi, leaving the government on the hook for billions of investor losses. Others, once in USDT, will quickly transfer into crypto tokens pegged to real assets like Tether Gold.
GP (Golden Portfolio) uses Stripe for processing.
It’s not long before GP could choose to receive Tether Gold tokens instead of USD payments from subscribers paying with USDs and CADs through their credit cards.
Once big U.S. banks like Bank of America and JPMorgan open up to stablecoins enabled by the Genius Act, GP will likely be able to send Tether Gold directly as payment for USD denominated expenses.
Tether Gold trades 24/7/365 with instant settlement. GP would be gone from USDs instead opting for Tether Gold as its medium of exchange and store of value. Billions will flow from USDs to USDTs to Tether Gold. The Genius Act is a gateway to gold.
Tether Makes Billions
Tether Corporate conservatively makes $7 billion per year in profit.
Tether only has about 100 employees versus major U.S. banks with hundreds of thousands of workers. This is similar to precious metal royalty companies that are managed by small teams vs. gold miners which need thousands of employees to produce the gold.
If Tether began to pay interest, the yield would crush high overhead U.S. banks that wouldn’t be able to keep up.
Tether Corporate is using billions of profits to buy real assets that will rise as the USD continues to be devalued.
Tether purchased a 70% stake in Adecoagro for $600 million in 2024.
Adecoagro owns 210,000 hectares of farmland across Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.
Tether purchased a 10% stake in Italian soccer team Juvantus for $130 million in 2025, and is now the second largest holder. However, Tether was rejected from a board seat.
Tether also just purchased an undisclosed stake in Parfin, a Latin America platform for digital asset custody, tokenization, trading and institutional management.
Tether’s investment reflects a commitment to establishing USDT as a core settlement and liquidity asset for high value institutional transactions.
Tether Is Coming For Royalties
Tether sees precious metal royalties as their counterpart in the real world asset space. Which is why Tether Corporate has been aggressively moving into the sector.
In June 2025, Tether announced a purchase of 31.9% of Elemental shares for $90 million. Tether increased their interest to 51.8% for $100 million in October 2025.
COO Fred Bell and CFO David Baker see Tether as a helpful partner, naming Juan Sartori, Tether’s head of business development, as Chairman of Elemental.
When COO Fred and CEO David Cole find a new deal that costs a few hundred million they can just send a text to Sartori. Instead of tapping public markets in a debt or equity raise, Sartori would get them the money in an instant allowing Elemental unlimited cheap capital backed by deep pocket Tether.
The Dollar Is Dead
Your money is changing in ways you can’t even imagine.
U.S. consumers will soon have a choice of their medium of exchange and store of value for the first time in 100 years, and it’s not going to be USDs.
Gold, the world’s best store of value for 1,000 years, combined with crypto’s instant transfer and frictionless exchange, creates the world’s ultimate currency.
Billions of USDs will flow out of banks to debt-backed stablecoins, then to gold, driving the price much higher.
The world hasn’t seen a gold rally like this in over 50 years. It’s the real deal. For the first time in over 100 years, gold is being brought back into the monetary system as a medium of exchange driven by crypto technology.
Demand and price are only moving higher.
And in my new interview with Porter, I show you exactly how I’m preparing for this unprecedented monetary re-alignment… and why I believe investors who own certain gold stocks could see remarkable returns.
