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Crypto tokens backed by physical gold quietly became some of the busiest gold products in global markets last year. A new report cited by CoinDesk shows that tokenized gold recorded about 178 billion dollars of trading volume in 2025, more than every major gold exchange traded fund except the largest one. This boom in on chain gold activity has arrived just as spot bullion itself surged toward the 5,000 dollar level, reinforcing gold’s role as a preferred safe haven during a period of macro stress.
Behind those numbers are a handful of dominant products, including Paxos Gold (PAXG) and Tether Gold (XAUT), which give holders claim on bars stored in professional vaults while letting them move that exposure across crypto rails. Separate data from the tokenized gold market shows that the combined value of these assets has climbed past 5.5 billion dollars, an all time high. The timing lines up with a powerful rally in the underlying metal, with gold recently trading above 5,300 dollars per ounce after gaining more than 90 percent over the past year and roughly 22 percent in January alone.
For many investors the appeal is that tokenized gold keeps the familiar store of value while adding crypto style flexibility. Tokens such as PAXG and XAUT can be split into tiny units, moved between wallets in minutes and used as collateral in decentralized finance applications, which is much harder to do with conventional ETFs or physical bars. As James Harris of Tesseract Group put it, the growing traction of tokenized gold has improved the metal’s utility by making it easier to transfer and divide, at a time when bitcoin is trading more like a high beta risk asset than digital gold in periods of macro uncertainty.
The rise of tokenized bullion also highlights a wider shift toward real world assets on chain. Banks, trading firms and crypto platforms are all experimenting with tokenized versions of traditional instruments, and gold has emerged as one of the clearest early winners thanks to its long standing role in portfolios and deep underlying liquidity. If trading volumes on these gold backed tokens continue to outpace all but the largest ETFs, it will strengthen the case that a meaningful slice of metals trading is migrating to blockchain infrastructure, not as a speculative side bet but as a parallel venue for one of the oldest safe haven assets in finance.
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