For most of modern history, the dollar was backed by gold. Every dollar in circulation was redeemable for a fixed amount of physical gold held in reserve. If not perfect, the system was grounded. The currency meant something because the backing meant something.

In 1971, Nixon ended the gold standard and the dollar became purely fiat. 50+ years later, every major stablecoin still inherits this same flawed structure: dollar-denominated, backed by treasuries, bank deposits, or algorithms. As a result, yields compress at scale and don’t provide a fundamentally better system than their traditional alternative.

We built thUSD with a different foundation: the original one. The Gold Standard.

thUSD is a yield-bearing stablecoin powered by gold: the world's deepest, most liquid commodity market. It's designed to deliver the highest sustainable yield of any stablecoin, without the capacity constraints that limit every crypto-native alternative.

In this post, we break down what thUSD is, how it works, why it's backed by gold, and why it will be the premier yield-bearing stablecoin on the market.

The Stablecoin Trilemma

Most yield-bearing stablecoins today are constrained by one of three core tradeoffs:

1. Limited Capacity: some protocols offer compelling yields at launch, but have limited scalability. As TVL grows, yields compress rapidly, often after only a moderate amount of capital.

2. Volatile Collateral: others rely on crypto-native collateral like BTC or ETH to generate yield, implicitly exposing users to price risk and weakening the promise of stability.

3. Low Yield by Design: a third category prioritizes safety and scalability, typically through treasuries or similar strategies. These designs can scale, but yields are structurally capped and meaningfully lower.

These tradeoffs are structural constraints baked into stablecoin design. Every yield-bearing stablecoin on the market sits inside this trilemma: pick one or two, but sacrifice the third.

thUSD was built to break this trilemma.

How Does thUSD Work?

thUSD is a yield-bearing stablecoin built on top of the most liquid commodity market in the world: gold.

It’s powered by thGOLD, our tokenized yield-bearing gold product. thGOLD generates yield by lending gold to established retailers, like Mustafa Gold, one of Asia's largest, who use it for inventory and return it with interest. This fundamentally transforms the oldest store of value in history from a cost center into a productive asset.

When thUSD is minted, collateral goes long thGOLD and hedges that exposure by shorting gold futures across multiple exchanges, including major TradFi venues such as the CME. This creates a delta-neutral position: a structure that generates yield regardless of whether gold goes up or down.

The yield comes from two sources:

1. thGOLD Lending Yield: gold is lent to established retailers who pay interest on it. The fund is operated by FundBridge Capital, supported by Libeara's tokenization infrastructure (a Standard Chartered subsidiary), with security over gold inventory and a 20% first-loss buffer. Read our thGOLD blog here.

2. Gold Futures Basis and Roll Yield: the spread between spot gold and gold futures consistently generates positive carry. Because gold futures trade on the CME, the world's most liquid and regulated derivatives venue, this yield source is deep, reliable, and can absorb significant scale without compression.

These two yield streams are supplemented by a diversified reserve of cash equivalent RWAs (like thBILL) and digital assets (like delta-neutral BTC), creating a layered structure that maximizes returns while maintaining robust backing.

Why Gold?

thUSD isn't a bet on gold going up. It's built on the depth of gold's derivatives market, and that depth is what makes it structurally different from every yield-bearing stablecoin before it.

Consider the numbers:

• $247.7B In Average Gold Open Interest: 39x more than BTC ($6.3B) and 58x more than ETH ($4.3B)

• 14.4% Annualized Volatility: 57% less volatile than BTC (33.5%) and a quarter of ETH (60.8%)

• 8.27% Average APR: when run internally throughout all of 2025, delivering positive yield every single month

  
  

This is not a marginal improvement. Gold's derivatives market operates on a fundamentally different scale than crypto, which means thUSD can scale to hundreds of billions while maintaining industry-leading yields.

The Data

We ran thUSD's core strategy, a delta-neutral gold carry trade, internally throughout all of 2025.

Here are the results:

The yield was positive every single month. This kind of consistency is only possible when yield is sourced from real-world markets, not crypto-native loops.

The yield is composed of approximately 6.69% from roll yield and 2.50% from thGOLD lending: two structurally independent sources. When one compresses, the other provides a floor. This is the kind of stability a stablecoin demands.

For comparison, equivalent delta-neutral strategies on BTC and ETH averaged 4.60% and 4.41% respectively over the same period. The gold strategy outperformed both in 10 of 12 months with a higher floor, a higher ceiling, and zero months below 4%.

Get Started

thUSD is built for three audiences:

• For Depositors: thUSD enables easy access to industry-leading yields as a dollar-denominated savings instrument backed by the world's oldest store of value.

• For Institutions: thUSD enables delta-neutral exposure to the world's deepest commodity derivatives market, without the operational complexity of managing futures positions, custody, and settlement across multiple venues. 

• For Ecosystems: thUSD enables a composable building block that doesn't degrade as it scales. thUSD can serve as collateral, a base pair, or a yield layer across lending protocols, DEXs, and vaults, backed by a market deep enough that growth strengthens rather than strains the underlying strategy.

  
  

None of this is possible without the products and infrastructure we've already built, which serves as the backbone for thUSD.

• thBILL: our tokenized treasury product, scaled to $200M+ in TVL and over $1B in cumulative trading volume. It was the third-fastest tokenized treasury to reach $100M TVL, with 15+ onchain integrations and 80,000+ users across 60+ countries.

• thGOLD: our tokenized yield-bearing gold product, built on the same infrastructure stack and institutional partnerships.

  
  

To kick off the launch of thUSD, we’ll be opening a $100M pre-deposit into the thUSD Genesis Vault next week, powered by Concrete. Stay tuned.

Deposit early to secure your position ahead of full launch. Capital will be deployed into the thUSD strategy once the vault reaches sufficient scale.

About Theo

Theo is connecting the world's capital. We build financial products that enable onchain capital to access global markets, making real-world assets more powerful than traditional financial instruments.

Theo's infrastructure has powered thBILL to $200M+ TVL and over $1B in cumulative trading volume, with 15+ integrations and 80,000+ users across 60+ countries. Partners include Standard Chartered, Wellington Management, and FundBridge Capital, with liquidity from SIG, Flowdesk, and Amber. The platform has raised $20M in Series A funding led by Hack VC, Mirana Ventures, and Anthos Capital.

Learn more: theo.xyz

Disclaimer: Yield figures are approximate and based on the strategy run internally throughout 2025 using historical market conditions. Actual returns may vary and are not guaranteed. thUSD involves exposure to counterparty credit risk on gold retailer borrowers, basis and roll risk on gold futures positions, smart contract risk, and operational risk across multiple execution venues. Security over gold inventory and a 20% first-loss buffer mitigate but do not eliminate credit risk. Investors should review the full risk disclosures before depositing. Past performance does not indicate future results.