Tether, a stablecoin issuer, has unveiled a new denomination called Scudo for its Tether Gold (XAUt) token. It is a gold-backed crypto, which represents the ownership of physical gold. As gold prices have reached record highs, Tether aimed for everyday payments in gold, expanding its token use case beyond a traditional store of value.
According to Tether’s official post on Jan 6th, Scudo is defined as one-thousandth of an XAUt. While XAUt is already tokenizing physical gold, where daily usage is limited, any gold-backed deals can be done with very small or decimal units of gold. Now users can use whole or partial units of Scudo to send or receive for any day-to-day transactions.
XAUt’s Core Structure Remains Unchanged
The newly launched Scudo will not affect the underlying structure of the XAUt token, where Tether Gold is still entirely underpinned by real gold kept in safe vaults, and Tether’s asset reporting tools allow ownership to be confirmed on-chain.
As this new Scudo is not a new token or crypto, it is just a denomination, so no fees will be charged. Still, XAUt charges regular issue and redemption fees; there are no continuous custodial fees.
Gold Climbs to Record Highs
In tether’s official post, they mentioned that Gold has risen to unparalleled highs in 2025, which is pushed by ongoing inflation fears, increased interest-rate concerns, massive central bank purchases, and surging demand for safe-haven assets. For that, XAUt already made physical gold digital, Scudo addressed the real usability for people.
They also noted that this approach is just like Bitcoin, which is mainly a store of value, and satoshis as their units for everyday transactions instead of being just a storage.
With that, in the crypto market, the gold-backed market capitalization currently stands at $3.6 billion with 7% surge in trading volume, and XAUt leads the gold-backed token market, trading at $4,460.10 with $1.8 billion market cap at the time of writing, as per CMC data.
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