This week, Tether Gold introduced a new unit of measurement for the tokenized gold in its XAUT stablecoin: the Scudo. What should you know?
Tether introduces the Scudo to account for tokenized gold
Like many other precious metals, gold is currently trading close to its all-time high (ATH). In 2025, the asset had a particularly positive year, rising by nearly 65%: Gold price in daily data
In this context, Tether’s XAUT stablecoin saw significant adoption in 2025, and its $2.3 billion market capitalization puts it in 8th place in the overall stablecoin rankings. Over the course of a year, this same market capitalization has grown by nearly 250%.
In light of this development, Tether Gold announced on Tuesday the adoption of a new unit of measurement for its XAUT stablecoin: the Scudo.
One Scudo is equivalent to one thousandth of a XAUT. As a reminder, the price of XAUT, which is currently $4,434 at the time of writing, actually tracks the price of an ounce of gold. An ounce of gold is equivalent to 31.104 grams of gold. Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, compared the Scudo to the satoshi, while confirming the imminent arrival of this standard on Tether wallets:
Scudo, as a means of accounting for 1/1000 of an ounce (1 XAUT), improves the XAUT user experience for transfers, payments, and pricing. All future Tether WDK [wallet development kit, editor’s note]-based wallets will integrate the Scudo denomination. In the same way as satoshis for Bitcoin.
More broadly, let’s recall Tether’s appetite for the famous precious metal. According to the Tether Gold website, nearly 16.24 tons of gold are used to collateralize XAUT, while more broadly, the latest transparency report available at the time of writing (for the third quarter of 2025) reports more than $12.92 billion in precious metal assets. In July 2025, Paolo Ardoino revealed to Bloomberg that Tether had its own secure vault in Switzerland.
