Tether Gold (XAUT) is a digital asset formed by Tether Gold Commodities Limited, a product of the Tether ecosystem on the Ethereum blockchain. The platform aims to digitalize the value of gold using their native token XAUT. The asset seeks to give XAUT holders the ability to own digitally allocated gold in small, highly transferable sums with relatively low fees. By implementing the technology and functionality of the Tether network’s stablecoin to physical gold, the platform aims to mobilize the gold markets, significantly lowering the barriers to enable entry for non-institutional traders in the process.

As per the whitepaper, Tether’s introduction of a gold-backed product is a development in the advancement of currency. Since gold is more intricate than a traditional currency, the benefit of a gold-backed stablecoin is more significant than the traditionally backed currency. Tether Gold aims to provide users access to an asset with a scarcity basis and price stability parallel to gold, but with the transactional utility of a digital token.

Furthermore, the XAUT token is an ERC20 token, a token standard, which defines a common set of rules followed by tokens in the Ethereum ecosystem. Each XAUT token represents one troy fine ounce of London Good Delivery gold held in a vault in Switzerland. The token is capable of being fractionalized up to six decimal places. 

Additionally, when an on-chain transaction transfers the token to another on-chain address, the physical gold linked with the XAUT held at each address is reallocated by Tether Gold. This process is done on behalf of the token holders to minimize the number of physical gold bars associated with each address holding XAUT. This reallocation happens instantly so that each token could always represent ownership of physical gold on a particular gold bar.

Tether formed the Tether Gold platform in January 2020. JL Van de Velde leads Tether as the CEO. The whitepaper was published on January 20, 2022.