Paxos Gold (PAXG) and Tether Gold (XAUT) combined cleared roughly 90.7 billion dollars of spot volume in the first quarter of 2026 — a level that puts tokenised gold ahead of several major gold ETFs by trading turnover.
Paxos Gold and Tether Gold — the two dominant tokenised-gold issuers — cleared roughly 90.7 billion dollars in combined spot volume across Ethereum and Tron through the first quarter of 2026. That puts tokenised gold at approximately ninety percent of total tokenised-commodity volume globally, and at trading turnover comparable to several of the larger physical gold ETFs.
Why gold tokenised early and well
Three reasons. Gold is functionally fungible — one ounce is one ounce — which makes 1:1 wrapping clean. Custody infrastructure for physical gold has been institutionalised for decades, which gives an oracle network a credible counterparty to verify reserves against. And the legal status of a digital claim on allocated gold is straightforward in the major issuance jurisdictions, which is materially less true of every other commodity.
PAXG is regulated by the New York Department of Financial Services and holds its physical reserves through Brink's vaults in London. XAUT operates from Switzerland and holds its physical reserves in Lugano vaults. Both publish through Chainlink Proof-of-Reserve feeds, giving holders the same continuous verifiability that the tokenised-treasury category now treats as baseline.
Tokenised gold is the quietest success story in the RWA stack — and the one most actively replacing a traditional fund product in real flows.
What it tells the rest of commodities
Silver, oil, copper, agricultural commodities — each have nascent tokenisation pilots, but volumes remain in the low millions per quarter. The gold case shows that demand exists for on-chain commodity exposure, that microstructure can sustain institutional flow, and that proof-of-reserve adoption is achievable at scale. The blocker for the rest is custody infrastructure of comparable maturity, which simply does not exist outside gold yet.
If gold is on track to clear roughly 360 billion dollars of tokenised volume in 2026 at current pace, the asset class has structurally graduated from experiment to a meaningful piece of global gold-market plumbing. The next domino is whether silver and oil can follow, and that question turns on custody — not on the chains.
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