This week, Tether Gold introduced a new unit of measurement for the tokenized gold backing its XAUT stablecoin: the Scudo. What’s the takeaway?
Tether Introduces the Scudo to Account for Tokenized Gold
Like many other precious metals, gold is currently trading near its all-time high (ATH). In 2025, the asset had a particularly strong year, rising by nearly 65%: Daily Gold Prices
Daily gold price
Against this backdrop, Tether’s XAUT stablecoin saw significant adoption in 2025, and its $2.3 billion market capitalization ranks it 8th among all stablecoins. Over the past year, this 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.
Thus, 1 Scudo is equal to one-thousandth of an XAUT. As a reminder, the price of XAUT—which currently stands at $4,434 at the time of writing—actually tracks the price of an ounce of gold. One ounce of gold, in turn, is equivalent to 31.104 grams of gold.
Paolo Ardoino, Tether’s CEO, compared the Scudo to the satoshi, while confirming that this standard will soon be available in Tether wallets:
Scudo, as a way to account for 1/1000 of an ounce (1 XAUT), improves the XAUT user experience for transfers, payments, and pricing. All future wallets based on the Tether WDK [wallet development kit, ed.] will incorporate the Scudo denomination, just as satoshis do for Bitcoin.
More broadly, it’s worth noting Tether’s appetite for the famous precious metal. According to the Tether Gold website, nearly 16.24 metric tons of gold are used to collateralize XAUT, while more broadly, the latest transparency report available at the time of writing (the one for the third quarter of 2025), reports more than $12.92 billion in precious metal assets.
In July 2025, Paolo Ardoino also revealed to Bloomberg that Tether had its own secure vault in Switzerland.
