Tether launched the Scudo unit for its Tether Gold (XAUT) token on January 6, a move designed to make tokenized gold practical for everyday payments. Scudo is defined as one-thousandth (1/1,000) of a troy ounce of gold — or 1/1,000 of an XAUT token — and the company said the unit will simplify pricing and lower the barrier to fractional gold ownership.
The rollout included smart-contract updates on Ethereum and Tron and a developer-focused technology layer to support self-custodial wallets and integrations across devices, according to the company announcement. Tether framed the change as a usability push intended to blend gold’s store-of-value appeal with blockchain payment efficiency.
Scudo was implemented through updates to the XAUT smart contract on the blockchains that host the token. The technical package released alongside the unit included APIs and libraries aimed at firms, developers and AI agents to deploy wallets that handle XAU₮ alongside other stablecoins and Bitcoin. That layer is meant to let dApp builders and payments platforms offer exact gold-denominated transfers, micro-savings flows and in-app purchases without awkward decimal accounting.
By making a troy ounce divisible into 1,000 Scudos, Tether is following a divisibility model similar in intent to Bitcoin’s satoshis: smaller, human-friendly units that make pricing intuitive for retail payments and reduce friction for merchant billing and accounting.
Payments case, market effects and risks
Proponents argue Scudo improves accessibility and liquidity for tokenized gold. The expected benefits highlighted in the announcement include clearer pricing for small transactions, lower entry thresholds for fractional ownership, tighter spreads from easier transfers and greater DeFi composability as gold-denominated primitives become easier to express on-chain.
A short quote from Tether’s chief framed the rationale: ‘Scudo lowers barriers to entry by making gold easier to own, price and transact,’ Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, said
The design contrasts with Bitcoin: Scudo ties value to a physical asset held in custody and is centrally issued, while Bitcoin is native digital scarcity secured by decentralized consensus. Transaction speed and cost for XAUT depend on the host blockchain, whereas Bitcoin leverages Layer 2s to scale micro-payments.
Investors, payments providers and developers will now test whether Scudo actually lowers friction at scale. Market participants are likely to watch integration across Ethereum and Tron, wallet support and early merchant pilots to see if tighter spreads and smoother pricing materialize.
The long-term outcome will hinge on resolving custody trust issues, regulatory clarity and whether wallets and merchants adopt gold-denominated payment flows.
