The creator of the biggest stablecoin in the cryptocurrency space, Tether Holdings Ltd., said on Monday that a new synthetic dollar backed by gold has been created. This new token, called aUSDT, can be created through over-collateralization by depositing another Tether token that monitors the value of gold. It will be traded via smart contracts on the Ethereum Mainnet network.
This action demonstrates Tether's goals to grow beyond its main stablecoin, USDT, which is backed by reserves of US Treasury bills and other securities and has a market valuation of $112.5 billion. Members of the Tether Group Moon Gold NA S.A. de C.V. and Moon Gold El Salvador S.A. de C.V. developed the new aUSDT token on the Alloy by Tether platform. Tether's Alloy is intended to serve as an open platform for the development of more tethered assets, maybe including yield-bearing goods.
Tether states that "Alloy by Tether introduces a novel category of digital assets known as tethered assets, designed to track the price of reference assets through stabilization strategies like over-collateralization with liquid assets and secondary market liquidity pools."
With a $573 million market capitalization, Tether Gold is backed by real gold that is kept in storage in Switzerland. The goal of the new aUSDT is to enable users to transact, pay, and send money using a currency that is comparable to the US dollar without having to sell their digital assets backed by gold.
With its USDT stablecoin, Tether has made substantial earnings despite the rising interest rate environment; according to its publicly available attestation, the company made $4.5 billion in profits in the first quarter.
