CoinDesk
The head of digital assets and tokenization at Union Investment, one of Germany's largest asset managers with roughly $620 billion in assets under management, argued at the Digital Money Summit 2026 in London that Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC are not stablecoins in any meaningful sense. Christoph Hock said the reserve composition behind both tokens — heavy allocations to gold and bitcoin alongside T-bills — makes them behave structurally more like speculative hedge funds than fiat-pegged cash equivalents.
Hock pointed specifically at Tether's reported 148 tonnes of gold reserves, valued near $23 billion as of January 2026, as evidence that the issuer is running an asset book far riskier than the "1:1 cash" framing implies. He framed a hypothetical 13% mark-to-market loss on a position corporates were told was overnight cash as catastrophic — and warned that taxpayer backstops are likely the next stop in any real stress event. The USDC depeg to $0.74 in March 2024, and an earlier 13% plunge to 87 cents in 2022 after a crypto-linked bank failure, were cited as proof of concept.
Why it matters
Hock's comments arrive as European regulators intensify scrutiny of private stablecoins, and they carry weight that a typical analyst quote does not: Union Investment is a mainstream Frankfurt-headquartered asset manager with hundreds of billions under management, not a crypto-native fund. Institutional treasury desks have been the single biggest growth vector for stablecoins in the past 18 months — corporates parking idle cash in USDT and USDC for yield rather than settling trades. If that cohort starts treating the instruments as hedge-fund exposure, the marginal bid for both tokens thins out overnight, and the cost of reserves issuance rises for Tether and Circle.
Market impact
The structural critique lands differently on each issuer. Circle has been pushing a more conservative reserve mix and a US regulatory framework; Hock's framing is a reputational headwind but plays into Circle's narrative that licensed, audited USDC is the safer alternative.
Frequently asked questions
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Who is Christoph Hock and why does his stablecoin criticism carry weight?
Hock is head of Tokenization and Digital Assets at Union Investment, one of Germany's largest institutional asset managers with roughly $620 billion in assets under management. His comments at the Digital Money Summit 2026 in London carry weight because Union is a mainstream Frankfurt institution, not a crypto-native…
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Why does Hock argue USDT and USDC are not real stablecoins?
Hock argues that the reserve composition behind both tokens — heavy allocations to gold and bitcoin alongside T-bills — makes them behave like speculative hedge funds rather than fiat-pegged cash equivalents. He cited Tether's reported 148 tonnes of gold reserves, valued near $23 billion as of January 2026.
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What depeg events did Hock reference as evidence of risk?
Hock pointed at the USDC depeg to $0.74 in March 2024 and an earlier 13% plunge to 87 cents in 2022, hours after a crypto-linked bank failure. He argued a 13% mark-to-market loss on a position corporates were told was overnight cash would be catastrophic.
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How could this framing affect Tether and Circle differently?
Circle has been pushing a more conservative reserve mix and a US regulatory framework, so Hock's critique is a reputational headwind but plays into the narrative that licensed, audited USDC is safer. Tether is the harder hit — its gold and bitcoin reserves are the explicit revenue and float story, and any erosion of…
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What should investors watch next after these comments?
Watch European MiCA enforcement actions against unauthorized stablecoin issuers and any move by large asset managers to disclose stablecoin exposure to clients. A shift in corporate-treasury behavior away from USDT and USDC would be the cleanest signal that the "not a stablecoin" framing is gaining traction.
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