Tether has published a particularly important news regarding the launch of a new gold-collateralized stablecoin.

It is called Alloy by Tether and has the symbol aUSDT.  As the symbol itself says, it is always a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar, but unlike USDT

Tether has announced the launch of a new gold-collateralized stablecoin called Alloy, which will be pegged to the US dollar (aUSDT).

This new stablecoin will differ from Tether's existing gold-pegged stablecoin, XAUT, in several key aspects. While XAUT is directly pegged to the price of gold and is exchangeable for physical gold at a rate of 1:1 (1 XAUT = 1 XAU), aUSDT will instead be pegged to the US dollar and will not be directly exchangeable for gold.

Instead, aUSDT will be an algorithmic stablecoin whose price stability around 1 USD will be maintained thanks to algorithms that act on demand and supply, and not by being over-collateralized in gold. Moreover, technically it will not be directly collateralized in physical gold, but in XAUT tokens, which are in turn collateralized in physical gold. Therefore, aUSDT will be an algorithmic stablecoin pegged to the US dollar and collateralized in tokenized gold (XAUT).

According to the official Tether announcement, aUSDT will be “a pegged asset designed to track the price of a specific reference asset (e.g., USD). To maintain this price peg, they employ stabilization strategies such as over-collateralization (i.e., holding more value as collateral than the value of the assets issued), backed by secondary market liquidity pools.”

In other words, users who want to mint new aUSDT tokens will need to provide as collateral a greater value of XAUT tokens than the aUSDT tokens obtained. The additional collateral will act as a safety net, absorbing potential fluctuations in the value of the collateral.

All the technical details are available at https://docs.alloy.tether.to.

Several observers believe that the launch of this algorithmic stablecoin collateralized in XAUT could be Tether's response to the upcoming entry into force of the new European crypto regulation on stablecoins, the Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA), which is expected on June 30.

Indeed, fiat-collateralized stablecoins will need to be somehow approved in order to continue to be present on centralized platforms in the European Union, and there are doubts on whether USDT will manage to obtain this kind of approval, with the risk of having to be considered an unauthorized stablecoin in the EU.

Instead, aUSDT does not fall into the category of so-called e-money token, because it is not convertible into USD. From this point of view, it is more similar to XAUT, that is a so-called asset-referenced token, since it is in fact convertible into Tether Gold.