He did not hand anyone a futures ticket. He meant borrow dollars against a hard asset, spend or invest the cash, and keep the asset. The loan can take the asset first.
This is not a recommendation to buy gold, sell the dollar, borrow against a bar, buy a token, or buy a mining share. Adam Reeds runs a lender. A lender describing a loan is describing his product. A loan can be called. A token can fail to match the bar it points at. A dollar can rise while you are paying to bet against it. Nothing here is personal advice.
The headline uses his verb. The sentence he spoke, to Kitco News, was narrower. “You don't want to hold a million dollars. You effectively want to short the dollar by borrowing it, and you want to hold something hard like Bitcoin or gold.” Short, in that line, is not a ticket that profits if the dollar index falls. Short, in that line, is a debt. You post the hard thing. You receive dollars. You owe the dollars back, plus interest. If the hard thing falls far enough, the lender can sell it. That difference is the article.
The name, first
Kitco’s October 19, 2026 story, written by Ernest Hoffman, spells him Adam Leeds, over and over. The man is Adam Reeds. He is co-founder and chief executive of Ledn. CoinDesk, Cayman Finance, and Ledn’s own record use Reeds. A misspelled name does not change the quotes. It does mean a search for “Leeds” will not find the person, and a search for the person should not repeat the error.
He is Canadian. He told Kitco he spent about 12 years investing in renewable power before this firm. A published bio puts about a decade of that work at Dream Asset Management, where he helped build and finance a renewable portfolio the bio puts at $1.5 billion. He holds an engineering degree and a business degree from the Ivey school at Western, then still often called the University of Western Ontario. He and Mauricio Di Bartolomeo started Ledn in 2018 so people could borrow against bitcoin without selling it. The firm later moved its headquarters to the Cayman Islands and registered there as a virtual-asset provider. Those facts locate him. They do not make a loan safe.
He is also the person who would like to lend against tokenized gold before the year is out. He told Kitco to look for an announcement in November or December. When a man in that seat says “hold gold” and “borrow the dollar,” he is talking about a market he intends to intermediate. Hear the argument. Then price the seat.
What he actually told people to do
He did not publish a gold price forecast. He did not name a dollar index level. He did not say “sell all your cash on Tuesday.” He said people who have come into real wealth are scared of holding dollars, because they think inflation is eating the pile. His number for that eating was “5%, maybe 6% a year on real inflation.” Then he said to forget the official print and look at prices in the real world. Then he joined two acts into one sentence. Do not hold a million dollars. Borrow dollars instead. Hold bitcoin or gold with the other hand.
Those are three decisions, not one. Holding less cash is a choice about the unit. Borrowing dollars is a choice about leverage and about an interest rate. Holding gold is a choice about a bar that pays no yield and can fall in price. You can do any one of them and refuse the other two. He folded them together because that fold is the product. You keep the gold. You spend borrowed dollars on living costs, or on something that yields more. You do not sell the gold to raise the dollars. “If used responsibly,” he said, gold is like real estate. It has gone up a lot over long stretches. So borrow an inflating currency against it. “Borrowing responsibly at respectable loan-to-value ratios” was his limit. He did not put a ratio on the gold loan, because the gold loan is not launched.
Responsible is doing a lot of work in that sentence. A respectable ratio, in plain words, means you borrow much less than the gold is worth, so a drop does not hand the bar to the lender. His own later picture of a safer structure was a million-dollar loan backed by a million dollars of bitcoin and a million dollars of digital gold. Do the arithmetic. Two million of collateral against one million of debt is a 50 percent loan, if both piles are counted and if both piles hold their price. He offered that mix as extra protection, because he thinks the two assets do not usually fall together. The protection exists only while that belief is true, and only while you can post more collateral if it stops being true.
A short that charges you rent
A futures short of the dollar does not require you to post a gold bar, and it does not charge you 10 percent for the privilege. A loan does. Ledn’s posted bitcoin-loan card, not a gold-loan card, runs from 11.49 percent a year on loans under $250,000 to 9.25 percent on loans of $2 million and more. Those are the figures on the card. A 2 percent administration fee can apply when a loan starts, and Ledn’s help center says that fee does not apply to clients in Canada or the United States. Do not read the Canadian rate as a 7 percent base with a fee stacked on top. The card a Canadian sees is still 11.49 down to 9.25. Di Bartolomeo has named those two ends. He has not recited the steps between them, and one of those steps does not even match from one Ledn page to the next. The ends are the numbers his sentence has to beat.
Put his inflation guess next to that ladder. He said the dollar is costing you 5 or 6 percent a year in lost buying power. The cheapest posted bitcoin loan at his firm costs 9.25 percent a year. The common posted loan costs 11.49 percent. Interest at those rates is larger than the inflation he named. It is much larger than the official print. If you borrow a million dollars at 9.25 percent, you owe about $92,500 in a year before any other fee, assuming the rate is charged on the whole balance and nothing is paid down. If the dollar’s buying power falls 6 percent, the million you owe is “easier” by about $60,000 in that homemade sense. You are still behind by roughly $32,500, and you still owe the million. The short has not paid you. The short has billed you.
That arithmetic is the whole trick, and it is why the headline is louder than the loan. Borrowing an inflating currency is a winner only if the currency’s loss, plus any gain on what you bought with the proceeds, beats the interest, and only if you are not forced to sell the collateral on the way. Gold’s price can rise and cover the gap. Gold’s price can also fall and widen it. He said the gold has, over history, increased a lot. History is not a coupon. A coupon is what the loan charges every year whether history shows up or not.
None of those rates is a gold-loan rate. He said the gold product is still ahead, with an announcement due in November or December. A gold loan could be cheaper. It could be dearer. It could demand a lower ratio because gold moves less than bitcoin, or a higher one because the token is new to the desk. Until the sheet exists, the only rates a reader can check are the bitcoin rates. They are the cost of borrowing dollars at this shop today. They are the number his sentence has to beat.
The print he told you to forget
The official print is not a rumor. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said consumer prices rose 3.7 percent in the year through September 2026, up from 3.4 percent in August. Core prices, which leave out food and energy, rose 2.6 percent. The monthly headline rise was 0.6 percent. Energy did a large share of that work. Energy prices were up 20.4 percent on the year. Gasoline was up 34.2 percent. Shelter was up 3.2 percent. Food was up 2.5 percent.
He said forget the print. Look at the store. That is a fair instinct and a loose number. People do not buy the index. They buy a basket, and a basket with a lot of gasoline in it felt worse than 3.7 percent this autumn. A basket with little energy in it felt closer to the core rate, which is 2.6 percent. His “5%, maybe 6%” is not a second official series. It is his estimate of what he thinks the index misses. He may be right about his own bills. He is not reading a line the government published. Treat 5 to 6 as his claim. Treat 3.7 and 2.6 as the prints.
The gap matters because his trade is a race against a rate. If the dollar is losing 6 percent and you can borrow at 4, the loan has a tailwind before gold even moves. If the dollar is losing 3.7 percent on the official measure, or 2.6 percent on the core, and the loan costs 9 to 11, the tailwind is a headwind. You are then relying on the gold price, or on whatever you bought with the borrowed dollars, to pay the spread. That is a speculation on the asset. It is not a free short of the unit.
He also said the education on inflation, since COVID, has reached people who are not investors. “Everyone, including those who are far from being sophisticated investors, is talking about inflation and how to combat it.” The feeling is real. The prescription does not follow from the feeling. A person who is afraid of the grocery bill is not helped by a loan that costs double the official inflation rate, secured by an asset that can drop 10 percent in a month. Fear of the dollar is not a plan. A plan has a rate, a ratio, and a way out.
Why he says hold the metal
His case for gold, stripped of the loan, is the old one. Gold is hard. A government does not print it. Over long periods it has held buying power better than cash. He called it the safe haven, the place you store wealth, as against bitcoin, where he said people go looking for something like a 25 percent annual return. “Gold remains the safe haven,” he said, “but not maybe hit the 25% annualized returns that you can do with Bitcoin.” The “you can do” is his experience of bitcoin’s good years, not a promise. Bitcoin has also cut people in half. He knows that. He lends against it.
He thinks the next stretch favors the hard stuff for a policy reason. He expects higher inflation to become stuck, and he expects the Federal Reserve to move from raising rates to quantitative easing, which means buying bonds and adding dollars. He is “pretty bullish” on the bitcoin price about six months out, once that shift shows up in the numbers. He said oil and gold should start to “perform better” in that same turn. He did not put a gold price on it. A direction is not a target. A six-month window is not a date you can diary with a bell.
He also thinks the economy looks like it should break and has not. “All of the information is showing that the US economy should crack, that there's going to be more pain, but the information that keeps coming out isn't showing that.” People watch the policy, he said, and ask how the show can go on. It keeps going. He still thinks “eventually things will have to come back in order,” and that order means higher inflation and more bond-buying. That is a forecast of a turn that is late on his own telling. A turn that is late can arrive. It can also be a description of a world that is not the world in the data. He said the data are not confirming the crack. Believe him on that sentence too.
Gold as an inflation hedge is a claim about long stretches, not about every CPI morning. The September print landed on Wednesday, October 14. Spot gold fell as much as about 1.7 percent that day, to around $4,080. Futures dropped on the order of $67, toward roughly $4,095. By early Thursday the loss was back. It was a same-day hit, not a week-long rout. A hedge that dips on the inflation news is a hedge against a long debasement, not against a single print. His own story is the long one. The Fed hikes, the economy refuses to crack, then later the Fed has to ease and the currency gives way. You can hold gold for that story. You do not need his loan to do it. The loan is a second bet, that the easing arrives before the interest bill and the margin call do.
The bar, the vault, and the token
The gold he wants people to hold, in this interview, is not a coin in a drawer. It is Tether Gold, the token with the ticker XAU?. Ledn says each token is one fine troy ounce of physical gold, tied to a specific bar in a Swiss vault. The firm says clients have been able to hold and trade it on the platform since June 2026. Loans against it are the part still on the roadmap. Reeds said those loans are a partnership with Tether, and that the point is to make one ounce and a hundred tons the same claim, because the gold sits in one place and the token is the same token everywhere.
His reason is geographic, and it is the oldest part of his pitch. He came from power plants. A wind farm is stuck in a country. He said the Caribbean had better sun and wind than Canada, and worse property rights, so the capital stayed where the rights were duller and the resource was poorer. “The main thesis of what we tried to do with Ledn is standardize rates and terms of service regardless of where individual investors are in the world.” Tokenized gold, he said, is the next step. A bar in Switzerland, a digital claim, the same borrowing terms whether you live in Toronto or Bogotá.
He used Colombia as the picture, not as a case file. Someone there may understand gold, and may not want to keep a bar in the house, and may not trust local property rights. A token, he said, is a ledger entry and a claim on gold “in a really safe place,” and “no one has to know I have it.” That is an access argument. It is also a custody argument wearing a privacy coat. You have not removed jurisdiction. You have moved it. The vault is under Swiss law. The token is issued by Tether. The account may sit at a Cayman firm. Your own country’s rules on holding, reporting, and tax do not vanish because the bar is in Zurich. A claim that is hard to see is not the same thing as a claim that is hard to break.
Kitco described his hope that this token would be a “gateway” for people who trust gold and fear bitcoin’s swings. The Colombia passage is his. The gateway label is the article’s shorthand. Either way, the sales path is clear. Start with the metal people already understand. Hold it as a token. Later, borrow against it. Later still, mix it with bitcoin so a loan has two kinds of collateral. Each step is optional. The firm would like you to take all three.
What can break the token is not mysterious. The issuer can be wrong about the bars, or slow to redeem them, or captured by its own reserves. The vault can be fine and the token’s market can still gap, because a token trades, and a trade can panic. The platform can freeze a withdrawal, or demand more collateral, or be hacked, or be told by a regulator to stop. Ledn’s gold page says you can withdraw the token to a compatible Ethereum wallet if it is not already pledged to a loan. Pledged is the word that matters. Once it backs a loan, it is not yours in the way a bar in your own box is yours. It is collateral. Collateral has a job, which is to be sold if you do not meet the terms.
Most of your life is already in one place
He thinks the deeper problem is concentration. “If you're American, you probably have 99% of your assets in the U.S. If you're Canadian, it's probably the same, maybe a little bit of U.S. dollar exposure.” That 99 is a sketch, not a survey. It is still a useful sketch. A house, a job, a pension, and a bank account in one country are one bet on one set of rules. He wants to turn that person into what he called “a bit more of a global investor.” The tool is a claim on a Swiss bar, or on bitcoin, held through his rails.
Canadian readers should hear the Canadian part without turning it into a patriotism test. He was investing in Canadian renewable projects, he said, because the rights were better, even when the wind was worse. Canada’s advantage, in his story, was law, not geology. The same sentence cuts the other way. If your pay, your house, and your stocks are all Canadian, you are concentrated, and a gold token does not fix the house. It is one line in a portfolio. It is not an exit from the country.
He is not saying sell Canada. He is saying a physical asset inherits the law of the ground it sits on. A mine in one province is not a bar in Switzerland. A token pointing at Switzerland is not a mine either. Three different maps. People mix them because all three contain the word gold.
Bitcoin is in the sentence too
The headline on this piece stops at gold. His sentence did not. He said hold “something hard like Bitcoin or gold.” He has been surprised, he said, that bitcoin held up as rates rose. He also said retail investors want it to outperform, and that a sideways market loses their attention. Over the past year, he said, that attention went to artificial intelligence, to SpaceX, and to other bets that feel like risk. Gold, in his contrast, is where you store. Bitcoin is where you hunt a large return. He wants both in the loan book, because he thinks they do not usually move together.
“History is showing that they're not generally moving in the same direction,” he said, so a bad day for gold may not be a bad day for bitcoin, and the reverse. There is also, he said, less volatility in gold, which matters when a lender is watching a ratio. The cross-collateral idea follows. If one asset drops and the other does not, the loan survives a day that would have killed a single-asset loan.
Test the word “generally.” There have been months when bitcoin and gold rose together, and months when both fell because people were selling whatever they could sell. A crisis that needs dollars does not check the history book before it sells the collateral. In a liquidity scramble, the non-correlation he is counting on is the first thing to disappear. The loan does not care about the lecture. The loan cares about the price tonight. If both prices fall, the “extra protection” of holding both is two falling prices, and the margin call arrives with company.
Kitco reported that he does not favor schemes that stake bitcoin to squeeze a yield out of it. He prefers the asset plain, and the yield, if any, to come from what you do with the borrowed dollars. That is consistent. It is also convenient. A yield paid by a third party on the collateral is a second credit risk. The firm’s point is the loan, not that yield. The yield he does want is whatever you earn after you have borrowed. That yield has to clear his interest rate. If it does not, you paid 9 to 11 percent to hold an asset that paid you nothing, and you called it a short of the dollar.
The dollar, and the price of the bar
A weaker dollar and a higher dollar price of gold often travel together, and the reason is arithmetic before it is politics. Gold is quoted in dollars. If the dollar buys less of other currencies, the same bar is worth more dollars, even if nothing about the bar has changed. Central banks that want fewer dollars in their reserves have been buying bars. That bid does not require Reeds, and it does not require a loan. It is a separate fact sitting under his story.
The path also breaks, and it has broken recently. When inflation runs hot and traders mark up the odds of higher rates, the dollar can firm and gold can fall in the same week. Real yields are the hinge. If bonds pay more after inflation, the metal that pays nothing has to work harder to justify itself. His forecast is that this hinge eventually swings back, because the government cannot live with the high rates and the Fed ends up buying bonds. Until that swing, a weaker-dollar story is a forecast, not a description of every tape.
How a weaker dollar affects gold prices, in the short version, is this. The quote goes up when the unit goes down, if other things stay still. Other things do not stay still. Rates, oil, and the need for cash all shove the quote around. Oil is in his story because expensive energy feeds the inflation he expects, and because he thinks oil itself “performs better” once the Fed is easing. Expensive oil can also force rate hikes, which is the opposite of the easing he wants. The September CPI, with energy up more than 20 percent on the year, is what that tension looks like in a table. The print gave him his inflation. The same print gave the rate hawks their argument. Both sides are reading one number.
A U.S. dollar outlook that says “short it” has to say short it against what, for how long, and at what cost. Against gold, with no loan, the cost is the chance the gold price falls and the chance you needed the cash. Against gold, with his loan, the cost is that chance plus the interest plus the chance of a forced sale. He was explicit that the second version is the one he means. “You effectively want to short the dollar by borrowing it.” Effectively is a soft word in front of a hard contract.
Small firms, and a treasury that is not a strategy
He said small businesses are starting to think about holding bitcoin on the treasury, and that later they might hold digital gold too, “because everybody is scared of holding dollars right now.” Everybody is his audience, not a census. A small firm that holds its working cash in a token has mixed the reserve that pays the payroll with a reserve that can gap overnight. A large firm with a surplus can take that risk on a slice. A firm that needs the money in six weeks cannot.
He called wealth preservation “a very privileged problem.” That is the most useful plain sentence in the interview. The people who can post a bar, borrow against half of it, and sleep, are people who did not need the borrowed dollars for rent. Using the loan for living costs, which he also mentioned as a use of proceeds, is a different household. You have turned a savings asset into a credit line. Credit lines get used. Then they have to be paid, or the asset is gone. A privileged problem becomes an ordinary one the day the ratio breaks.
Canadian gold stocks are not this trade
Canadian gold stocks are how a lot of readers will try to express his sentence, and they are not his sentence. A producer on the Toronto Stock Exchange is a business. It has ore, costs, a mill, a country, and a share count. A royalty or a stream is a contract on someone else’s ore. A junior on the TSX Venture Exchange is a drill program and a treasury. None of those is a Swiss bar. None of those is a token. None of those is a dollar loan.
The gold price can rise and a mining share can fall. Costs can rise faster than the metal. A permit can stall. A pit can flood. The company can issue shares until your slice of the ounce is smaller. Reeds did not tell you to buy that risk. He told you to hold the hard thing and, if you borrow, to borrow against the hard thing. A stock is a claim on a management team. His gold investment strategy, as spoken, does not pick a team.
There is still a lawful reason the stocks are in the conversation. If he is right that gold “performs better” once the Fed shifts from hikes to bond-buying, the dollar price of the metal is the wind at a miner’s back. The same wind hits every miner, and the boats are not the same. A low-cost producer with a clean balance sheet keeps more of a higher price. A high-cost mine can stay poor at a price that makes the headlines. A junior can reprice on a hole, or on the hope of a hole, and give the gain back when the assays arrive. Using his macro view as a reason to buy “Canadian gold stocks” as a blob skips the only question that matters, which is which business survives a gold price that does not do what he hopes.
A fund that holds many miners spreads the pit risk and keeps the gold-price risk. A single share does the opposite. Neither one is a short of the dollar. Both can fall if the dollar rises and the metal falls. If you wanted his trade and you bought a developer instead, you bought a different trade and kept his headline.
What the loan looks like on a bad week
Walk through a plain case. You hold tokenized gold worth $200,000. You borrow $100,000 at a rate in the neighborhood of the firm’s current bitcoin loans, call it 11 percent, because no gold rate has been posted. You spend the $100,000. A year later you owe about $111,000 if you paid nothing along the way. For you to be ahead on the dollar bet alone, the buying power of that $111,000 has to have fallen by more than the extra $11,000, which means inflation above roughly 10 percent on the money you owe. His guess was 5 or 6. The print was 3.7. You are not ahead on inflation. You are ahead only if the gold you kept has risen by enough to matter, and if you did something clever with the $100,000.
Now let the gold fall 20 percent. Your collateral is worth $160,000. The debt is still about $111,000 if the year has run, or $100,000 if it has not. The ratio has jumped. If the contract says the lender can sell at a line you have crossed, the lender sells. You do not get to wait for the Fed to ease. You do not get to explain that the dollar is a bad currency. The sale is in the contract you signed because you wanted to short that currency. The short closed itself out at the worst moment, which is what forced sellers do.
He said “if used responsibly.” Responsible, in this picture, means you borrowed $40,000 against $200,000, not $100,000, and you kept cash to post more if the price fell, and you did not spend the loan on something you cannot sell. That is a cautious loan. It is also a small short. The excitement in the headline comes from the large version. The survival comes from the small one. He told a story that needs the small one and sold a verb that sounds like the large one.
What would make his reading wrong
His reading is wrong if inflation keeps cooling, or even if it stays near 3 percent, and the Fed does not turn to bond-buying. He said the economy should crack and the numbers say it has not. If the numbers keep saying that, the “eventually” can be a long time. In that world the dollar does not need to be shorted, and a 9 percent loan against gold is an expensive way to express a view that is not showing up.
His reading is wrong if gold and bitcoin fall together the next time people want cash. The cross-collateral story depends on them taking turns. A shared selloff makes the two-asset loan into one problem with two tickers. He said history is on his side “generally.” Generally leaves room for the week that matters.
His reading is wrong if the token is not the bar. A Swiss vault and a one-ounce claim are only as good as the issuer, the custodian, the audits, and the redemption desk. If any of those fails, you did not hold gold. You held a promise about gold, and you may have borrowed against the promise. The lender’s promise and the issuer’s promise can fail in the same season. That is not a reason to refuse every token. It is a reason not to talk about the token as if it were a coin in your hand.
His reading is wrong if you hear “short the dollar” as a free trade. The dollar can rise for a year while your loan compounds. Importers, foreign governments, and anyone who owes dollars will buy dollars when they are scared. Fear does not only run against the dollar. It also runs toward it. A short that is really a loan cannot be closed by changing your mind for free. You close it by repaying, or by losing the collateral.
The three questions people are asking
Why does Ledn’s Reeds say investors should hold gold? Because he thinks the dollar is losing buying power faster than the official print admits, and because he thinks a bar in a strong legal place is a hard asset a government does not print. He also thinks gold stores wealth more calmly than bitcoin, and that tokenized gold can give people outside the rich jurisdictions the same claim. He did not give a price target. He gave a direction. Higher inflation, then easier policy, then a better tape for gold and oil, on his clock, which he admits is early.
Why does he say investors should short the U.S. dollar? Because he does not want a large cash pile sitting still. His method is specific. Borrow the dollars. Do not merely dislike them. Use gold or bitcoin as the collateral, at a ratio he calls respectable, and spend or invest the proceeds without selling the collateral. That is a loan. Ledn’s posted bitcoin-loan rates run from 11.49 percent down to 9.25 percent. Those rates are higher than his 5 to 6 percent inflation guess, and higher than the 3.7 percent September CPI. The gold-loan rate is not posted yet. Until it is, the short he describes costs more, per year, than the decay he describes.
How does a weaker dollar affect gold prices? The bar is priced in dollars, so a cheaper dollar usually means a higher dollar price, if rates and forced selling stay quiet. A cheaper dollar can also arrive with panic, and panic sells gold to raise dollars. Hot inflation can lift the dollar and hurt gold if traders expect higher rates. His bet is that the rate pressure breaks, the Fed buys bonds, and the unit gives way. That path helps the dollar price of gold. It does not pay the interest on a loan by itself, and it does not stop a lender from selling collateral on the way there.
A loan, said once
The gold price prediction people want from this interview is a number. He did not offer one. The gold market outlook he did offer is a policy story. The economy should have cracked. It has not. Inflation, in his view, is hotter than the print. The Fed will have to stop hiking and start buying bonds. Oil and gold then do better. Bitcoin, he thinks, does better within about six months. You can agree with the destination and still refuse the vehicle.
The vehicle is the sentence. Hold the hard asset. Borrow the dollar. He thinks that pair is how you stop going backward. The pair only stops going backward if the asset’s gain, or the dollar’s decay, beats the interest, and if the price never hits the line where the lender sells. Ledn’s bitcoin loans already show what the rent on borrowed dollars looks like at his firm. It is not a small rent. A gold loan, when it is announced, should be read against that rent and against a ratio, not against a headline.
Gold investment opportunities, in his mouth, are the bar, the token that claims the bar, and the loan that uses the token. Canadian gold stocks are a fourth thing, and he did not recommend them. They can rise if his policy story comes true. They can fall for reasons that have nothing to do with the dollar. A miner is not a short of the currency. A token is not a miner. A loan is not a hedge. It is a debt secured by the hedge.
He told people not to hold a million idle dollars. He told them to borrow the dollar and hold gold. The first instruction is a view about cash. The second is a contract. Contracts have rates. This one, on the only sheet the firm has published, charges more each year than the inflation he asked you to fear. Hold the gold if you want the bar. Sign the loan only if you have priced the rent, and if you can watch the bar be sold without pretending that was not the trade.