6 January 2026: Tether today announced the introduction of Scudo, a new unit of account for Tether Gold (XAU₮), designed to bring back gold as a means of payment, accessible to everyone, as global gold interest and prices reach their highest levels on record.
Gold has surged to historic highs in 2025, driven by persistent inflation concerns, heightened interest-rate uncertainty, record central bank purchases, and growing demand for safe-haven assets. As investors increasingly turn to gold to preserve purchasing power, it creates an opportunity to restore gold as the ubiquitous, trusted, transparent payment method that accompanied humanity throughout history until recent times, when governments pivoted to FIAT currencies that inevitably led to uncontrolled money printing, rising inflation, and widespread economic failures.
The challenge for many individuals is not belief in gold’s value, but practicality. XAU₮ already made physical gold digital, a groundbreaking and necessary step in a world fully connected by the Internet, where the economy moves at the speed of light. Tether has also released a technology layer, called WDK, that allows any developer, company, or AI agent to easily build, deploy, and distribute self-custodial wallets that function on any device and operating system and support XAU₮, as well as other companies’ stablecoins, alongside Bitcoin.
Yet a final hurdle was left to make gold truly usable by people in their day-to-day lives. Transacting or pricing goods in fractions of an ounce often requires working with long decimal values, which can be unintuitive and difficult to use in real-world contexts.
Scudo addresses this by introducing a simpler unit of account, similar to how smaller denominations have historically made currencies usable as money rather than abstract stores of value. For people familiar with Bitcoin, this approach can be compared to the “Satoshi” unit of account to solve the same problem.
By defining one Scudo as one thousandth of a troy ounce of gold (or of an XAU₮), Tether Gold enables clearer pricing, easier transfers, and more intuitive use of gold-backed value. Instead of sending or pricing assets in complex decimal fractions of XAU₮, users can transact in whole or partial Scudo units, making gold more practical not only as a store of value, but also as a medium of exchange. For example, a good or service can be priced in Scudo rather than fractional ounces, allowing gold to function more naturally in everyday economic activity.
“Gold is once again proving its role as the ultimate store of value alongside Bitcoin,” said Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether. “XAU₮ makes gold digital, and now with Scudo, we are lowering the barrier to entry so that anyone can own, easily price, and transact even the smallest fraction of the historical world’s most trusted asset. User experience is still the most crucial weakness of the digital asset industry today. Being Tether, the biggest financial inclusion success story in the history of humanity, with more than 500 million users across emerging markets, we make accessibility one of our utmost priorities.”
Tether Gold remains fully backed by physical gold held in secure vaults, with ownership verifiable on-chain via Tether’s asset-tracking tools. Scudo does not change the structure or backing of XAU₮, but provides a simpler way to measure and transact gold value, particularly as prices continue to climb.
As of December 2025, Tether Gold continues to see growing adoption among individuals seeking long-term wealth preservation, portfolio diversification, and exposure to gold without the storage and custodial complexities of traditional ownership. This has resulted in its market cap doubling in just a few months. XAU₮ offers direct exposure to physical gold with no ongoing custodial fees, aside from a one-time transaction fee applied at issuance or redemption.
The introduction of Scudo reflects Tether’s broader strategy of modernizing access to traditional assets through blockchain-based infrastructure, making historically exclusive stores of value more inclusive, divisible, and usable in a digital economy.
For more information about Tether Gold and Scudo, visit gold.tether.to
Important Note:
This press announcement is not an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy Tether Gold (XAU₮). TG Commodities S.A. de C.V. will only sell or redeem XAU₮ pursuant to its gold token terms of sale and service available (as of the date of this press release) at https://gold.tether.to/legal
