Tether Introduces Scudo: A New Way to Use Tokenized Gold for Payments

Tether has rolled out Scudo, a fresh unit of account for Tether Gold (XAUT), designed to enhance the ease of pricing, transferring, and utilizing gold in daily financial activities.

Key Takeaways

Tether has launched Scudo, a new unit of account for Tether Gold (XAUT).
Scudo aims to simplify gold transactions and enhance its usability in everyday exchanges.
The new unit allows pricing in smaller denominations, addressing challenges with fractional gold transactions.
The initiative is part of Tether’s broader efforts to modernize the gold payment ecosystem through blockchain technology.

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In a press release, Tether highlighted that this launch coincides with soaring global gold prices and demand, driven by rising inflation worries, uncertainties around interest rates, and significant purchases by central banks.

Gold’s Resurgence Meets Digital Solutions

Gold prices have surged throughout 2025 as investors look for security against diminishing purchasing power and macroeconomic fluctuations. While confidence in gold's long-term worth persists, its use as a transactional medium has diminished since the global shift towards fiat currencies.

Tether believes this shift, coupled with rampant money supply growth, has rekindled inflationary pressures, renewing interest in gold as a stable store of value.

XAUT was developed to bridge this gap by tokenizing physical gold, allowing it to be traded on blockchain networks. Every token is backed one-to-one by gold bars stored in secure vaults, with ownership verifiable on the blockchain. However, practical issues remained, particularly when it came to pricing or transacting in small gold fractions.

Addressing the Fractional Issue with Scudo

Scudo provides a solution to this final usability problem. One Scudo equals one-thousandth of a troy ounce of gold, creating a more manageable and intuitive denomination for XAUT. This model is similar to Bitcoin's use of satoshis, which enables payment scaling without relying on lengthy decimal numbers.

By using Scudo in transactions instead of fractional ounces, users can price goods and services more naturally, enhancing gold's role not only as a store of value but also as a medium of exchange. This unit simplifies transactions, accounting, and daily applications as gold prices continue to rise.

Expanding the Gold Payments Ecosystem

The launch of Scudo contributes to Tether’s broader infrastructure initiatives. The company has also introduced a technology layer tailored for developers, allowing businesses, developers, and AI agents to create self-custodial wallets that support XAU₮, various stablecoins, and Bitcoin across different devices and operating systems.

“Gold is once again asserting its position as the ultimate store of value alongside Bitcoin,” stated Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether. He noted that Scudo lowers entry barriers by making gold easier to own, price, and transact, emphasizing that user experience is one of the digital asset industry's key challenges.

Growing Adoption as Gold Moves Onchain

Scudo does not change the backing or framework of XAUT, which remains fully collateralized by physical gold. Instead, it offers a more user-friendly measurement system as adoption increases.

By December 2025, the market capitalization of Tether Gold had doubled within just a few months, indicating a strong demand for gold exposure without the traditional complications of storage or custody.

The introduction of Scudo is part of Tether’s overarching strategy: to modernize access to traditional assets using blockchain technology, making historically exclusive stores of value more divisible, transparent, and usable in a digital first economy.