Ledn Goes Beyond Bitcoin: Tether Gold Trading Now Live, Loans Next

**Mauricio Di Bartolomeo** (0:00)
Bitcoin is the king of digital, unsensorable, unseizeable money, and gold has held that crown for 5,000 years. So I think of them both as compliments as opposed to one replacing the other.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (0:19)
Ledn just launched its lowest loan rates ever. The larger the loan, the lower the rate. Plus your Bitcoin stays protected, never lent out for interest. With auto top-ups, LTV alerts and more, you're always in control. Learn more at ledn.io. Mauricio, welcome to Coin Desk.

**Mauricio Di Bartolomeo** (0:36)
Hey Jen, good to see you again.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (0:37)
Nice to see you again too. And I'm excited that you're back because the last time you and I spoke, we talked about all Bitcoin all the time, and now Ledn has actually introduced tokenized gold.
So, just lay a foundation for me. Talk to me about where you are in the Ledn journey and where gold comes into the picture.

**Mauricio Di Bartolomeo** (0:56)
So, Ledn is a Bitcoin company. We've been a Bitcoin company since day one. This is our bread and butter, and it's how we've earned our reputation over the years, by letting people come and use their Bitcoin as collateral.
As you know, many people that are hard money fans or hard money enthusiasts love both Bitcoin and gold. So, many of our clients that are with us today have also precious metals positions elsewhere and other brokerages. Many of them hold them in physical vaults.
And funny enough, sometime midway through last year, when the metals were rallying, as everyone can recall, many of our clients had taken Bitcoin back loans to invest in precious metals. And those precious metals investments did very, very well for them. And they were coming to us and saying, hey, I took a Bitcoin back loan, I invested in precious metals, I've done really well with them, and I don't want to exit my precious metals positions. Could I bring my precious metals to Ledn? Could I, could you guys, is there any plans for you to allow me to use my gold in the same way that I use my Bitcoin with you guys? Because I love the service at Ledn and I want to stay with you and I want to bring my precious metals and do the same thing. And right around that same time is when we were having deeper and deeper conversations with the Tether team who ultimately ended up making an investment into Ledn in November of 2025 But through that sort of relationship, we learned a lot about their XAUT product, Tether Gold.
And we've been to Lugano in Switzerland. They, we met with them many times. They explained the product to us. I think it's a very elegant product. It's really just buying gold and storing the vault, the physical gold bars in vaults in Switzerland and issuing you a token based on that. And we then connected the dots and said, well, if there is a tokenized version of Tether Gold that we could work with and accept as collateral and offer to our clients, this would be a great compliment. So we started basically iterating and trying to design what the product could look like. We went to a lot of our clients, explained to them what will be possible. The feedback across the board was positive, and we made the decision to support Tether Gold. Right now, you can buy and sell Tether Gold on the Ledn platform, and very soon you'll be able to use it as collateral to borrow dollars in the same way you use your Bitcoin at Ledn today.

**Jennifer Sanasie** (3:24)
I like the anecdote of folks who are previously invested in Bitcoin, taking out these Bitcoin backed loans to get on to the gold train. I'm curious if you've seen it go the other way around. Are you seeing gold bugs, the folks who are die hard gold investors coming into Bitcoin?

**Mauricio Di Bartolomeo** (3:44)
I'll walk you through some of the conversations that I'm having with these precise clients, right? Many of them, when they took their Bitcoin backed loans and they invested in precious metals, precious metals started performing a lot more positively than Bitcoin, especially through 2025 So they went over indexed into precious metals away from Bitcoin. So the way I look at it is these clients think of their portfolio as a spectrum, and they'll try to position themselves in the best hard money instrument or investment that has the best relative set up, okay? So in mid 2025, that set up was favorable to precious metals.
Right now, you have precious metals at near historic highs and Bitcoin showing you all the signs that the bear market is basically closing, coming to its close. And so we are starting to see a lot of clients come back to Bitcoin. So start moving some of that positioning away from precious metals and back at the Bitcoin. And that has been true for the past, I want to say a few months, and particularly after February, when Bitcoin reached 60 and kind of stayed within that range. I think the relative set up between allocating more of your portfolio away from gold and into Bitcoin in the current market is a much more attractive proposition, and we are starting to see some of it.