Ledn Adds Tether Gold and USDT Loan Repayments, and Mauricio Di Bartolomeo Explains How Auto Top-Up Is Working
Ledn co-founder and chief strategy officer Mauricio Di Bartolomeo joined Simply Bitcoin Live to walk through the company's newest product update: tokenized gold now sits alongside Bitcoin on the platform, and borrowers can finally repay their loans in Tether's stablecoins instead of only USDC.
WHAT ACTUALLY CHANGED
The update, announced June 18, brings two things onto Ledn's platform. Ledn announced on June 18, 2026 that it will add Tether Gold (XAUT) as eligible collateral, allowing users to borrow against tokenized gold later this year, with XAUT now available for holding in Ledn Transaction Accounts and for trading across integrated pairs on the platform, sitting alongside BTC, USDT, and USAT. The lending product itself has not launched yet. The product does not exist yet, and XAUT-backed loans are expected to launch later in 2026, with no interest rates, loan-to-value ratios, or minimum borrowing amounts disclosed so far.
The second change is live today: borrowers can now settle existing loans in Tether's stablecoins rather than only USDC. Alongside the launch of XAUT-backed loans, Ledn has enabled users to hold, trade, and swap Bitcoin, Tether Gold, USDT, and USAT directly on its platform, and users can now receive and repay loans in USDT and USAT, simplifying the borrowing process.
WHY XAUT MATTERS TO TETHER
The partnership plugs into a much larger pile of gold Tether has been sitting on. Tether holds about 140 tons of physical gold and has been working to expand the use of XAUT in lending and physical redemption through an investment in Gold.com and a partnership with crypto financial firm Antalpha. On June 17, 2026, the day before Ledn's announcement, Tether wound down Alloy and aUSDT, its synthetic stablecoin, signaling a strategic consolidation around XAUT as its primary gold-facing product.
Ledn is applying the same custody promise it uses for Bitcoin loans to the new gold product. Ledn's explicit policy is to never rehypothecate client collateral, meaning the XAUT deposited to secure a loan cannot be lent out again to generate yield for the platform, and that 1:1 custody commitment is the specific practice that distinguishes Ledn from platforms that collapsed in 2022.
WHY THIS HITS DIFFERENT IN VENEZUELA
Di Bartolomeo, who grew up in Venezuela before moving to Canada, explained on the show why removing friction from loan repayment is not a minor feature for borrowers in countries without functioning banks. In his telling, stablecoins caught on fastest in places where people cannot legally hold dollars in a bank, where cash gets confiscated at the border, and where the local currency is actively being debased by the government. Being able to pay back a loan directly in USDT, rather than converting through a bank that may not exist for that borrower, is what he described as the real unlock for clients in the global south.
THE FEATURE THAT KEEPS LOANS FROM GETTING WIPED OUT
The conversation also covered Ledn's auto top-up feature, which Di Bartolomeo said has kept every properly funded loan from getting liquidated through the recent volatility. On the show, he laid out the mechanics: loans open at a 50 percent loan-to-value ratio, liquidation happens at 80 percent LTV, and auto top-up kicks in at 70 percent, automatically pulling Bitcoin from a client's transaction account to bring the loan back down to 65 percent LTV. He said on the show that the one client loan that was liquidated despite having auto top-up enabled had left no meaningful Bitcoin balance in the transaction account for the system to pull from, and that every other client who left a balance in the account has avoided liquidation entirely.
Di Bartolomeo tied the feature back to why crypto lending survived 2022's wave of collapses in the first place. "This is not a move away from Bitcoin," Ledn co-founder Adam Reeds has said. "Bitcoin stays at the center of how our clients build wealth. Gold sits beside it, the same hard-asset thinking applied to the oldest store of value there is," a contrast to the crypto lending niche that suffered significant setbacks in 2022 with the bankruptcy of firms like BlockFi, Celsius, Genesis, and Voyager Digital.
THE CAVEAT DI BARTOLOMEO GAVE ON AIR
He was direct about the risk of treating a Bitcoin-backed loan like free money. Sizing the loan too aggressively against a volatile asset, he said, is the actual danger, not the loan structure itself. His advice on the show was blunt: do not put a large share of a Bitcoin stack into a loan, use auto top-up, and treat borrowing as a tool for people who already understand how collateral and liquidation thresholds work, not a shortcut for people who do not.
