Tether and USDC are 'stealth hedge funds,' warns $620B asset manager — and a liquidity crisis could prove it!

Christoph Hock, head of Tokenization and Digital Assets at Union Investment — one of Germany's largest institutional asset managers with nearly $620 billion in AUM — delivered a blunt verdict at the Digital Money Summit 2026 in London: USDT and USDC are not stablecoins. His argument centers on reserve composition. Tether holds an estimated 148 tonnes of gold (valued at roughly $23 billion as of January 2026) alongside significant bitcoin positions, making its reserve structure behave more like a speculative fund than a fiat-pegged cash instrument.

Hock pointed to USDC's March 2023 depeg — when the token dropped 13% to $0.87 following the collapse of a crypto-tied bank — as proof of the catastrophic mark-to-market risk these instruments carry for corporate treasuries relying on them for overnight cash settlement. A further depeg to $0.74 occurred on three separate occasions in March…