This week, it emerged that Tether has quietly accumulated more than 140 tons of physical gold, worth roughly $23 billion, making it one of the largest private holders of gold in the world. Equally striking is where it’s stored: inside a nuclear bunker.

While the news doesn’t necessarily make a full audit any more likely, it reflects a longer-term strategy: CEO Paolo Ardoino has indicated that Tether aims to hold 10-15% of its reserves in physical gold, mirroring the portfolio composition of central banks.

The timing’s also interesting. Just this week, Tether’s new U.S. subsidiary officially launched its GENIUS-compliant stablecoin, USAT. In effect, the onshore vehicle is loading up on U.S. Treasuries, while the offshore entity is rotating reserves into hard assets like gold and Bitcoin.

Today, we’ll take you behind the scenes of:

• Bitwise’s entry into onchain vaults

• RWA perpetuals gaining traction as gold and silver rally

Bitwise Enters Onchain Vaults, Marking a First for Asset Managers

Onchain expansion: On Monday, $15 billion digital asset manager Bitwise announced the launch of its first non-custodial onchain vault, built on the infrastructure of lending protocol Morpho. This marks the first time a traditional asset manager is directly entering onchain asset management.

Growing trend: Vaults have emerged as one of the fastest-growing primitives in the onchain economy. In essence, they function like traditional funds, offering yield through professionally managed strategies. The key difference is that they are non-custodial, meaning the asset manager never holds user assets, which remain in smart contracts at all times.

• Powered by Morpho: Much of the infrastructure behind today’s largest vaults is provided by Paris-based Morpho, the second-largest lending platform after Aave, with more than $6.8 billion in total value locked.

Successful case studies: Vaults are already being used by major institutions to extend their product offerings.

• Coinbase, for example, relies on vault-based structures for its lending product, enabling users to post BTC and ETH as collateral for USDC loans. Since launching early last year, the product has attracted nearly $2 billion in deposits.

• Société Générale’s blockchain subsidiary, SG-FORGE, also uses onchain vaults to support distribution and liquidity for its euro- and dollar-denominated stablecoins.

Why it matters: Bitwise’s move differs from these approaches. While Coinbase and SG-FORGE outsource vault management to third-party risk curators such as Steakhouse Financial, Bitwise plans to manage strategy and risk in-house. In doing so, it becomes the first traditional asset manager to directly enter onchain asset management.

Interview: We spoke with Jonathan Man, Bitwise’s Head of Multi-Strategy Solutions & DeFi Strategies, who will oversee the vault’s strategy, and with Paul Frambot, co-founder and CEO of Morpho, about why Bitwise is expanding into vaults, how it plans to build distribution over time, and what is still missing for vaults to reach institutional scale.

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On why Bitwise decided to enter the vault curation market:

On the initial design of Bitwise’s vault and future design space:

On how Bitwise aims to drive AUM for its vaults:

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Gold and Silver Rallies Spark Breakout in RWA Perpetual Futures

All-time highs: This week, trading activity in so-called real-world asset (RWA) perpetual futures surged to record levels, led by silver and gold contracts. On Hyperliquid, crypto’s leading decentralized trading platform, daily RWA perp volumes hit $2.2 billion for the first time, just three months after launch.

• Why it matters: Originally limited to cryptocurrencies, perpetuals are the dominant crypto derivative, offering leveraged price exposure through non-expiring futures contracts. They account for roughly $5 trillion in monthly trading volume, or about 77% of all crypto trading activity.

Market dislocation as catalyst: Although RWA perps launched as early as October 2024, demand only accelerated in recent months as muted crypto markets coincided with U.S. equities and metals pushing through all-time highs. The resulting divergence pushed traders toward non-crypto price exposure inside crypto-native venues, accelerating activity in RWA perpetuals.

Maturing infrastructure: The foundation for this surge was laid last October, when Hyperliquid activated its HIP-3 upgrade. The change materially expanded the design space for RWA perpetuals, enabling permissionless creation of perp markets for virtually any asset on Hyperliquid’s battle-tested infrastructure and broadening global trader access.

• Growing ecosystem: Since then, the market has expanded steadily. Today, Hyperliquid offers 24/7 exposure to roughly 30 equities and commodities, with leverage of up to 25x.

Rising footprint: This expansion is increasingly visible in the data. Open interest across Hyperliquid’s RWA perps stands at about $930 million, representing roughly 10% of total platform open interest and making it the largest venue for these instruments.

Onchain migration: The rise of decentralized venues like Hyperliquid is also eroding CEX dominance, with DEX perp market share increasing from 1.8% in 2023 to 11.7% by November 2024.

CEX counteroffensive: This shift has forced incumbents like Binance, which still controls around 40% of the global crypto perpetuals market, to respond. In early January, Binance launched gold and silver perps, followed by its first equity perp tied to Tesla stock earlier this week.

• Legal constraints: Part of Hyperliquid’s growth is also explained by the legal constraints facing centralized and regulated players. In the U.S., single-stock perpetuals are effectively prohibited by legacy securities rules and clearing requirements, sidelining incumbents such as Robinhood and Coinbase.

• Europe’s challenge: In Europe, regulatory hurdles exist as well. Offering perpetuals to retail clients requires a Multilateral Trading Facility (MTF) license under MiFID, while the instruments’ unlimited duration creates uncertainty over their classification as Contracts for Differences (CFDs). If treated as CFDs, EU product rules would cap leverage at 2x, undermining the product’s commercial appeal.

TradFi is (still) watching: Despite these constraints, traditional European market infrastructures are actively assessing how perpetual-style products could be offered within existing regulatory frameworks, according to Blockstories sources familiar with the matter.