[Digital Today reporter Jinju Hong] Tether, the issuer of the stablecoin USDT, has introduced a new accounting unit called Scudo to increase the usability of the gold-backed stablecoin Tether Gold (XAUT).

Cointelegraph, a blockchain media outlet, reported on Monday that Tether announced it will apply the Scudo unit by subdividing XAUT into 1,000 parts. One Scudo equals one-thousandth of a troy ounce of gold and represents the value of a very small piece of gold of about 0.0311 grams.

The change will let users make transfers and set prices more intuitively using Scudo, an integer or simple fractional unit, instead of splitting gold into trades with long decimal points. It is designed to make it easier to trade expensive gold in small units in an on-chain environment.

Scudo borrows from the satoshi concept used as the smallest unit of Bitcoin. A satoshi is one hundred millionth of 1 bitcoin and has enabled small-unit trading of the high-priced asset. Tether expects Scudo will also help make gold more intuitive and practical to use in a digital environment.

Tether cited rising gold prices as the background for the move, saying fractional trading in ounce units is becoming inconvenient. As gold gets more expensive, decimal places become longer for small payments or transfers, hurting user experience, it said.

Gold has traditionally been seen as a representative store of value, but access for small investors has been limited due to constraints in physical storage and division. If XAUT eased some of those issues through the tokenisation of gold, Scudo is seen as further simplifying small on-chain transactions backed by gold.

In practice, 2025 is seen as a year in which gold far outperformed other major assets. Gold prices rose about 65 percent last year to a record high, and silver prices also surged more than 140 percent over the same period, nearing $80 per ounce. That is interpreted as demand for gold strengthening as a weaker dollar, inflation worries, geopolitical uncertainty and safe-haven preferences combined.

By contrast, bitcoin showed an annual decline over the same period, moving in the opposite direction from gold. The divergence between gold and bitcoin widened further in the fourth quarter after a market slump on Oct. 10. That suggests investors are moving into gold, a traditional safe-haven asset, to prepare for inflation and macroeconomic uncertainty.

Tether Gold is currently the largest product in the gold token market, accounting for about half of the gold token segment’s market capitalisation. Each XAUT token is backed 1:1 by physical gold, allowing investors to gain direct exposure to gold in an on-chain environment.

Tether’s strategy is to use Scudo to increase both accessibility and usability of gold-backed tokens and further expand gold’s role in the digital asset market. With gold prices entering a peak zone, attention is on whether real-world use cases for XAUT will increase as small-value trading and precise value transfers become possible.