Christoph Hock, head of tokenization and digital assets at Union Investment, the second largest asset manager in Germany, demolished the claim that stablecoin are a safe investment at a digital money summit 2026 in London on Tuesday.
Stablecoin issuers such as Tether and Circle in fact hold a portion of their customers’ money in so-called “liquid” assets, in order to face redemption claims at any moment. Such “liquid” assets include securities, cash deposits in banks, gold, bitcoin etc.
“To be honest, a stablecoin, from my perspective, is not a stablecoin,” Hock said. “We discussed Tether, we discussed Circle’s USDC, and when looking at the invested assets, for example, of Tether, they have massive holdings in gold, they have massive holdings in bitcoin.” For that reason, USDT (Tether) and USDC look more like hedge funds. Hock cited the case of USDC, the coin issued by Circle, whose value dropped 13% when Silicon Valley Bank failed. Circle had 3.3 billion dollars deposited at SVB. The 1:1 peg to Treasuries was gone. Had SVB not been bailed out, USDC owners would have lost 13%.
