Tether has introduced a new unit of account tied to its digital gold token, XAUT, in a move designed to lower barriers to fractional gold ownership amid record demand from institutions and central banks. On Tuesday, the stablecoin issuer unveiled Scudo, a unit of account representing one-thousandth of a troy ounce of gold. Each Scudo corresponds to 1/1,000 of an XAUT token, Tether’s gold-backed asset, which is supported by more than 1,300 gold bars held in custody and carries a market capitalization of about $2.3 billion.
Tether said the introduction of Scudo is designed to make gold ownership more accessible. While gold has long been considered a reliable store of value, direct ownership has historically been constrained by storage, custody, and divisibility issues.
Although XAUT already addressed many of those challenges by tokenizing physical gold, Scudo is intended to further simplify smaller, on-chain transactions backed by the metal. According to the company, the move represents a step toward making gold more easily transactable on modern digital rails, rather than serving solely as a long-term store of value.
Paolo Ardoino, Tether’s chief executive, described gold as the ultimate store of value alongside Bitcoin in the context of recent bullion strength. In discussions around Scudo, Ardoino likened the new unit to satoshis, the smallest unit of account for Bitcoin. The development underscores a broader trend of on-chain demand for fractional gold exposure alongside digital assets.
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