Tether is winding down Alloy by Tether, its gold-backed borrowing platform, and says customers who have not returned their aUSDT by Sept. 17 will no longer be able to recover XAUT through the platform. Alloy launched on June 17, 2024 as a system where users deposited Tether Gold, or XAUT, and borrowed the dollar-tracking aUSDT against it, but the product remained small relative to Tether’s broader business. Alloy’s June 30 attestation valued total collateral at about $1.9 million, and by Aug. 10 the platform’s vault data showed just five open positions with 399,088.74 aUSDT of debt backed by 194.41497 XAUT. That implied borrowers had already repaid more than half of the 907,994.8205 aUSDT outstanding on June 30, while collateral had dropped from 470.4215 XAUT. The locked gold was worth about $850,000 at an XAUT price of $4,372, and represented only about 0.03% of XAUT’s 707,747-token supply, leaving Tether Gold itself unaffected by the shutdown. Alloy’s terms require borrowers to fully repay outstanding aUSDT to withdraw remaining collateral and include a 25-basis-point exit fee. Tether has not published another operational recovery route after the cutoff, and buying aUSDT on the secondary market does not give holders a claim on any borrower’s locked gold.