Last year, the single biggest buyer of gold on the planet was not a central bank or a sovereign wealth fund. It was a little-known crypto company called Tether, based in El Salvador, which keeps its bullion in a James Bond-style Swiss former nuclear bunker, according to its boss.
Tether runs USDT, the world's largest stablecoin – a form of cryptocurrency backed by hard currency that acts as an offshore dollar. It is a giant: it owns $135bn (£101bn) of US government debt, more than South Korea, and employs just 200 people. Yet Tether is also, perhaps inadvertently, entangled in questions around the funding of Nigel Farage's Reform party.
“Crypto firm Tether, whose shareholder gave Farage £15m, bought more gold than any nation in 2024.”
One of Tether's significant shareholders is Christopher Harborne. Last August, Harborne gave £9m in cash to Reform – the biggest party donation in British history – followed by £3m in October and another £3m in January. All were declared. But he also gave £5m directly to Farage, a previously undisclosed personal gift that became the subject of parliamentary investigations before Farage resigned as an MP. Both men have said there were no strings attached.
Questions have now turned to whether Harborne's business interests influenced Farage's political activities. The Bank of England's governor, Andrew Bailey, recently confirmed that Farage raised the issue of cryptocurrency regulation with him in September last year. Farage made his views "very clear", Bailey said, but the "intervention" did not change the Bank's policy, and he knew how to spot "lobbying" and discount it.
Specifically, Farage was concerned about speculation that the Bank would limit holdings of potential sterling stablecoins to between £10,000 and £20,000 – a move the industry was lobbying hard against. My understanding is that Farage did not raise Tether by name, but he did talk about stablecoin regulation in general. That raises reasonable questions about the precise details of that conversation and the scope for any possible benefit to Tether and its shareholders from shifts in Bank of England policy.
The Reform leader has spoken openly about embracing cryptocurrencies. "Tether is about to be valued as a $500bn company," he told LBC presenter Nick Ferrari.