Tokenized Wire

What the UK's Tokenized Gold Paper Actually Asks, and the October 23 Deadline

Dakota Yates — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 23:00:00 GMT

The UK’s financial regulator has asked the market a direct question: should tokenized gold have its own rules?

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published a Call for Input on September 14, 2026. It runs to 14 numbered pages. It is not a rule and not a proposal. It is a request for evidence. Responses are due by October 23, 2026, by email to tokenisedsecurities@fca.org.uk. The FCA’s web page and the paper itself both give that date.

We read the paper. Here is what it says.

Why now

In May 2026 the FCA and the Bank of England asked for views on tokenization in UK wholesale markets. People who replied raised gold specifically, the FCA says. The paper says London’s over-the-counter market is “the biggest for spot gold trading in the world,” and the FCA wants to know whether tokens could build on that.

The FCA says its aim is not to regulate the parts of the gold market that sit outside its reach today. It wants to know whether tokens could improve how gold is “traded, mobilised, pledged and held.”

What the FCA thinks tokens could do

Wholesale collateral. This is the main use the paper discusses. Allocated gold, where specific bars are recorded as the owner’s, is slow and costly to move, so it is hard to pledge. The paper says tokens could let firms use “previously under-utilised gold holdings” as collateral in securities lending, repo, and derivatives.

Settling both sides at once. Today the gold and the cash in a trade settle through separate systems. The paper gives the example of swapping gold tokens for US dollar tokens in one step.

Retail products. The paper says a well-designed token could let people buy and sell gold in an app, in small amounts, outside market hours.

The legal knot: is a gold token a fund?

This is the heart of the paper. UK law has two broad fund definitions that overlap a lot: the collective investment scheme (CIS) and the alternative investment fund (AIF). If a gold token falls into either, the paper says that could trigger extra authorization, distribution, disclosure, and supervision requirements for the firm managing it. The paper says that even uncertainty about the label “may impact the desirability or feasibility” of holding a token for some classes of investor.

The FCA gives two signposts:

A token that gives direct ownership of an allocated gold bar, with no pooling and no management of the property as a whole, is “more likely to fall outside” the fund definitions.
If customers hold fractional interests in a single bar that is managed or sold collectively, that points toward pooling, which is what the fund rules were written for.

Industry groups have argued for a middle path, where tokens give direct co-ownership of a share of an allocated bar. The FCA says it is “open to hearing further” on why such structures would fall outside the definitions.

Five possible responses

The paper says these “are not firm proposals.” They could be used alone or together:

Watch the market and publish a note on good and poor practice.
Clarify how existing rules apply, through guidance.
Create a recognised “eligible gold token” classification, with conditions on rights, custody, redemption, governance, and technology.
Assess targeted rule or law changes where there is strong evidence that current rules produce “unintended or disproportionate outcomes.”
Consider a bespoke regime for tokenized gold, or for tokenized commodities more broadly.

The FCA would lead the first two. The Treasury would share the third and fourth. The fifth would involve the FCA, the Treasury, and the Bank of England. The paper adds that any exemption from fund rules is up to the Treasury.

Twelve things any new regime would have to cover

If some gold tokens are taken out of the fund rules, the FCA says something else has to protect holders. Its list:

The legal nature of holders’ ownership rights
The nature and quality of the gold
Custody, vaulting, and segregation
Issuance, redemption, and matching vault records to on-chain records
Independent audit and assurance, including of custody records
Governance, including control over changes to product terms
The gold-price benchmark and how tokens are valued
Dealing arrangements, “including where the issuer or an affiliate is the sole liquidity provider”
Operational resilience and cyber security
Financial crime and market integrity controls
Disclosure, especially to retail investors
Orderly wind-down, and protection of holders if a firm becomes insolvent

What it says about today’s tokens

The paper names no gold tokens and no token issuers. It notes that products that “assert to be tokenised gold products” have grown a lot in market value and have “driven price discovery on weekends” because they trade longer hours. It also makes two pointed remarks.

First, its policy options cover only products that give ownership rights in physical gold and have “transparent and consistently evidenced backing,” clear ownership rights, and reliable redemption. Tokens that lack those are not what it has in mind.

Second, it compares the field with gold exchange-traded funds, where disclosure is well established, and says “inconsistent practice continues to exist in the tokenised gold space.” It lists what any holder should be able to compare:

how the gold is kept safe, and any insurance
whether and how redemption works
how far the product is regulated and supervised
the fees and minimums
what happens if an issuer, custodian, vault, technology provider, or intermediary fails

Our tokenized gold primer checks some of the same things: custody, redemption, fees, and minimums.

The five questions

Where are the biggest benefits of gold tokenization for the UK, and what risks come with wider wholesale or retail use?
Where does interoperability matter most, and what must be solved for tokenized gold to be trusted as collateral?
Should a defined set of gold tokens be regulated outside the CIS and AIF regimes? On what conditions, and with what protections?
Where else is more regulatory clarity needed, for retail and for wholesale?
How can gold tokenization work alongside other industry and regulatory projects?

What happens next

Nothing changes yet. The FCA says it will review the responses and use them “to shape our future approach,” which may include guidance or considering a bespoke regime for tokenized gold. It gives no timetable beyond the October 23 deadline.

The paper also says its lessons may carry over to the tokenization of other commodities.

How PAXG Redemption Fees Work Since September 1, 2026

Dakota Yates — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 22:59:00 GMT

Since September 1, 2026, Paxos has charged customers who redeem PAX Gold (PAXG), the second-largest gold token by market value, in a new way.

The fee now depends on how much an account has taken out, net, over the past 30 days. The details are on Paxos’s fee page. We first read it on September 17 and checked it again on October 17. It had not changed.

The redemption fees

Paxos adds up an account’s redemptions over a rolling 30 days and subtracts its creations. The fee applies to that net figure, in bands:

Net redemptions, rolling 30 days	Rate
First $2 million	0.125%
$2 million to $10 million	0.250%
$10 million to $20 million	0.350%
Over $20 million	0.500%

The rates are marginal. Each one applies only to the slice that falls inside its band.

An example. An account with $3 million of net redemptions in 30 days pays 0.125% on the first $2 million, which is $2,500. It pays 0.250% on the next $1 million, which is another $2,500. The total is $5,000, or about 0.17% of the amount.

Paxos says accounts with “balanced two-way activity,” where creations and redemptions roughly cancel out, stay at the 0.125% base rate.

A new fee for taking gold

Since September 1, a fee of 5 basis points, or 0.05%, applies to “in-kind conversions” from PAXG into allocated or unallocated gold.

Redeeming for a physical London Good Delivery bar still requires at least 430 PAXG per bar, plus the fee, under Paxos’s terms.

What it replaces

Paxos’s page says the new schedule “replaces the previous size-based redemption fee schedule.” The current page does not show the old rates. A copy of the same page saved by the Internet Archive on July 10, 2026 does. It shows one table for creating and destroying PAXG, set by order size in PAXG tokens: a flat 0.02 PAXG from 0.03 to under 2 PAXG, 1.000% from 2 to under 25, then lower steps down to 0.125% at 800 PAXG and up.

On those numbers, small redemptions now cost much less. Redeeming 10 PAXG cost 1.000% under the old table and costs 0.125% now. Very large redemptions can cost more. The old table’s lowest rate, 0.125%, applied at 800 PAXG and up. Now, net redemptions above $2 million in 30 days pay 0.250% to 0.500% on the amount above that line.

The change in method is clear, though. The old fee looked at the size of a redemption. The new one looks at the direction of an account’s flow over a month. An account that redeems far more than it creates, whether for dollars or gold, pays higher rates on net redemptions above $2 million.

Who this affects

Only customers who create or redeem PAXG inside a Paxos account. Paxos’s terms also say a customer’s own pricing supplement overrides its published fee guide where the two conflict, and that Paxos may offer some customers reduced fees. Paxos says these fees “do not apply” to buying and selling through its exchange order book “or anywhere else outside the Paxos wallet.” If you hold PAXG on another exchange or in your own wallet and sell it there, this schedule does not touch that trade.

Creation is free for now

Paxos says creation fees are waived through January 1, 2027, as a promotion. After that, its standard schedule applies:

Order size	Rate
Under 2 ounces	Flat 0.02 PAXG
2 to 25 ounces	1.000%
25 to 50 ounces	0.750%
50 to 75 ounces	0.500%
75 to 200 ounces	0.250%
200 to 800 ounces	0.150%
Over 800 ounces	0.125%

A separate Paxos support page, marked as last updated six months ago when we checked on October 17, puts the minimum purchase on Paxos.com at 0.03 PAXG because of the 0.02 PAXG fee. It does not mention the waiver.

Storage is still free

Paxos says it charges no storage fee “at this time.” Its terms let it add one later by issuing itself new PAXG, with at least 30 days’ notice. We cover that clause in PAXG vs. XAUT.

Attestation, Audit, or Proof of Reserves: What Each One Proves About a Backed Token

Dakota Yates — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 22:58:00 GMT

A backed token is a promise. The issuer says there is an ounce of gold, or a dollar, behind every token. You cannot walk into the vault. So you rely on a report.

Issuers use several words for these reports: audit, attestation, assurance, proof of reserves. They are not the same thing. Here is what each one covers, in plain terms, with real examples.

The short version

Kind of proof	Who does it	What it checks	Biggest limit
Financial statement audit	An independent audit firm	The whole company: what it owns and what it owes	Not offered on the PAXG or XAUT reserve pages, and slow
Attestation or assurance report on reserves	An independent accounting firm	Management’s claim that reserves matched tokens on a date	One claim, one date
“Proof of reserves” or agreed-upon procedures	An accounting firm or another service provider	Whatever steps the company chose	In agreed-upon procedures, the company picks the steps
On-chain reserve feed	A data network	It relays a reserve number on a schedule	The number comes from someone else

1. A full audit

An audit of financial statements looks at the whole business. That includes debts. It matters because reserves can be real and still be owed to someone else.

Neither Paxos’s PAXG pages nor Tether Gold’s reports page offers audited financial statements for the issuer. When an issuer says “audited,” read the document and see what kind of report it is.

Here is a real case. Paxos’s PAXG product page says the gold is “audited monthly.” Its transparency page describes the same work more exactly: monthly attestation reports from KPMG LLP, done under attestation standards from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. That is a recognized professional standard. It is a different kind of work from auditing a company’s books.

2. An attestation or assurance report on reserves

Both large gold tokens, PAXG and XAUT, use this kind. Management states a claim, such as “on this date we held at least one ounce for every token.” An independent accountant examines that claim and reports on it.

Two examples:

PAXG. Paxos publishes a report every month. Reports posted since February 28, 2025 come from KPMG LLP. Earlier reports came from WithumSmith+Brown.
XAUT. Tether Gold publishes a reserves report every quarter. Management prepares it. An accounting firm in the BDO network then issues its own report under international standards for a “reasonable assurance” engagement. Tether’s page names BDO Italia, and the most recent signed opinions come from BDO Advisory Services S.r.l. in Milan. The latest report on Tether’s site, as of June 30, 2026, showed 707,747.139 ounces held by the custodian against 707,747.09 tokens minted.

Tether Gold’s page is direct about the limits. It says the reports “are not financial statements.” It says BDO’s work is limited to the reserves report and to the gold held on a specific date.

What this kind of report does well: an outside firm, working under professional standards, checked the number. What it leaves out: everything that is not the number, and every day that is not the report date.

3. “Proof of reserves” reports

This label covers a wide range of work, and some of it is thin. The PCAOB warning below is not limited to the thin kind. It says reserve reports that claim reasonable or limited assurance are also not done under PCAOB standards, or under any uniform standard.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), which oversees audits of US public companies, published an investor advisory on March 8, 2023. Its Office of the Investor Advocate wrote it. The page says it gives that office’s views, not necessarily the Board’s. Its main points:

Proof-of-reserve reports are not audits. The PCAOB does not oversee them.
They show a single point in time. They say nothing about the next day.
They likely do not address what the company owes, the rights of token holders, or whether the assets were borrowed to make the reserves look bigger.
They give no assurance about the company’s controls or governance.
In an “agreed-upon procedures” engagement, the company decides what gets checked.

The advisory says customers should use “extreme caution” before relying on such a report to conclude there are enough assets to cover what is owed to them.

4. On-chain reserve feeds

Some tokens publish a reserve number on a blockchain, updated on a schedule, so that software can read it. Chainlink’s Proof of Reserve feeds are one example.

A feed does not inspect a vault. It relays a number from somewhere. For assets held off the blockchain, such as gold or dollars, Chainlink’s documentation lists three places that number can come from:

A third party, such as an auditor or accounting firm, that verifies reserves.
The custodian, meaning the bank or custodian that holds the assets, which reports the number directly.
The issuer itself, through an API the issuer hosts. Chainlink’s documentation marks this type with a warning. It says self-reported data “carries additional risks” and that Chainlink Labs is not responsible for its accuracy.

So the useful question is not “does this token have a reserve feed?” It is “who supplies the number?”

What no reserve report tells you

Whether the backing is pledged. Gold can sit in the vault and still secure someone else’s loan. Only a look at the company’s debts would show that.
What happened between reports. A quarterly report leaves about 90 days uncovered. A monthly one leaves about 30.
Your legal claim. Tether Gold’s disclosure document says each token represents ownership of gold on a specific bar. Paxos says that if you own PAXG, you own the underlying gold. Those are the issuers’ own statements. Whether they hold up if an issuer fails depends on the terms and on the law where the issuer sits.
Whether you can redeem. A report can confirm the gold exists. It does not say you are allowed to go and get it. See PAXG vs. XAUT for how much redemption rules differ.
Whether a regulator stands behind it. Registration is not a seal of approval. Tether Gold’s own disclosure document says its registration with El Salvador’s digital assets commission “does not imply certification” of the token’s quality or the issuer’s solvency.

Seven questions to ask about any backed token

What kind of report is it? Read the first page of the report, not the marketing page.
Who signed it? Is it an accounting firm you can look up?
How often is it published, and how old is the latest one?
Does it cover only the reserves, or the company’s debts too?
Who picked what was checked: the accountant’s standards, or the company?
If there is an on-chain feed, who supplies the number?
Can you, in your country, actually redeem? For what, with what minimum, and at what fee?

A token that answers all seven in public documents has done more than most.

PAXG vs. XAUT: Who Can Buy, How Redemption Works, and Who Checks the Gold

Dakota Yates — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 22:57:00 GMT

PAX Gold (PAXG) and Tether Gold (XAUT) are the two largest gold tokens. In our October 17 market snapshot, the two made up about 89% of the reported value of the 13 gold tokens we counted. On a price chart they are nearly the same line. The differences are in the paperwork.

Everything below comes from the issuers’ own pages and documents, the LBMA, and CoinGecko, which we link at the end. Where a statement is the company’s claim, we say so.

Side by side

	PAXG	XAUT
Issuer	Paxos Trust Company, N.A. (United States)	TG Commodities, S.A. de C.V. (El Salvador)
One token is	One fine troy ounce of a London Good Delivery bar	One fine troy ounce of a London Good Delivery bar
Where the gold is	“LBMA vaults in London,” Paxos says	A custodian’s vault in Switzerland, its disclosure document says. The custodian is a related party of Tether Gold.
Oversight the issuer cites	Paxos says it is regulated by the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC)	Authorized as a stablecoin issuer by El Salvador’s National Commission of Digital Assets (CNAD)
Reserve reports	Monthly, by KPMG LLP, under AICPA attestation standards	Quarterly, by BDO in Italy, under international assurance standards. The latest is signed by BDO Advisory Services S.r.l.
Smallest direct purchase	0.03 PAXG on Paxos.com, per its support page. Its product page lists 0.01 troy ounce.	50 XAUT, plus a non-refundable 150 USDT verification fee
Who the issuer will not serve	Not available in the EU	US persons may not purchase or redeem. Its terms bar Canadian and Singaporean persons from holding XAUT at all.
Storage or custody fee	None at this time. The terms let Paxos add one later (see below).	None. Its fee schedule says it can be changed at any time without prior notice.
Dormant account fee	$2.00 a month after 12 months with no issuance or redemption	None listed in its FAQ
Issuer fees	Creation fees waived through January 1, 2027. Redemption 0.125% to 0.500%, set by 30-day net redemptions, since September 1, 2026. 0.05% to convert into gold. No on-chain transfer fee.	0.25% on purchase or redemption, plus delivery costs
Blockchains	Ethereum and Solana	Ethereum and BNB Chain, per its FAQ
Look up your bar	Yes, by wallet address	Yes, by wallet address
Market value on CoinGecko, 22:47 UTC Oct. 17, 2026	$1.83 billion	$3.36 billion

Who can actually buy

This is the biggest practical difference, and it is easy to miss.

Tether’s FAQ says US persons are “prohibited from purchasing or redeeming” XAUT. Paxos says PAXG is “currently unavailable in the EU.”

Paxos’s limit is about dealing with Paxos. Tether Gold’s reaches further. Its disclosure document says anyone who holds XAUT is bound by its terms, including people who bought on an exchange. Those terms bar Canadian and Singaporean persons, and people in countries on its prohibited list, from holding XAUT at all. US persons, except some large investors Tether approves, may not open a Tether Gold wallet or use its services. What an exchange offers in your country is a separate question with its own rules. But if you cannot deal with the issuer, you cannot redeem with the issuer. Your only way out is selling to someone else.

Redeeming for real gold

Both issuers say you can turn tokens into metal. In practice that means whole bars.

A London Good Delivery bar weighs about 400 troy ounces, according to the LBMA, which sets the standard. At a gold price near $4,150, one bar is worth about $1.66 million.

Tether’s FAQ says redemptions happen only in full bars. It advises depositing 430 XAUT to be sure of covering one, because bars vary in size. It delivers to an address in Switzerland only. If you do not want the metal, Tether will try to sell the bar on the Swiss market and wire you US dollars, less its 0.25% fee. Its fee schedule says the sale may also carry a brokerage fee or dealer mark-up.

Paxos says PAXG can be redeemed for Good Delivery bars, that institutional customers can also redeem for unallocated gold in London, and that anyone with an account can redeem for US dollars at the market price. Its terms set the bar minimum: 430 PAXG per bar, plus a fee set in the Paxos user guide. Tokens above the bar’s actual weight are credited back. Only verified Paxos customers can redeem, and the tokens must first be sent to a Paxos address.

One claim does not line up. Paxos’s page calls PAXG “the only gold token you can redeem” for Good Delivery bars. Tether’s FAQ describes doing the same thing with XAUT, in Switzerland. Both statements are on the companies’ sites today.

For nearly all holders, redeeming for metal is not realistic. What matters more is whether you can redeem for cash, and whether the token trades enough to sell.

Paxos’s redemption fees since September 1

Since September 1, 2026, Paxos charges to redeem PAXG in bands, based on an account’s net redemptions over a rolling 30 days: 0.125% on the first $2 million, rising to 0.500% above $20 million. A new 0.05% fee applies to converting PAXG into gold. Creation fees are waived through January 1, 2027. These fees apply only inside a Paxos account, not to trades on an exchange. Details are in How PAXG Redemption Fees Work.

Two lines in the Paxos fine print

Paxos markets PAXG with “zero storage fees,” and today that is true. Its terms and conditions, last modified on December 12, 2025, keep a door open. Section 15.2 says Paxos “may charge storage fees to all token holders by issuing to Paxos new PAXG tokens, thereby diluting the value of existing PAXG tokens.” It promises at least 30 days’ notice of the method and timing.

Section 15.5 adds a separate charge. An account with a balance, and no issuance or redemption activity for 12 months, pays $2.00 a month.

The same terms describe what a holder owns. PAXG tokens are “akin to a warehouse receipt” for beneficial ownership of a share of the allocated gold. The terms mention insolvency once, about the clearing bank used for unallocated gold. We found no section on what happens to token holders if Paxos itself fails. Section 4.3 says the gold is held “on a segregated basis for the benefit of PAXG holders.”

Tether Gold’s FAQ and fee schedule list no custody fee and no dormancy fee. Its terms of sale, last updated September 9, 2025, have no storage-fee clause like Paxos’s. But its fee schedule says it “may be amended, changed, or updated by Tether Gold at any time and without prior notice.” Paxos’s terms, section 15.6, also let it change fees at any time, effective when posted.

Who checks the gold, and how often

Paxos publishes a report every month. Reports posted since February 28, 2025 come from KPMG LLP. Earlier ones came from WithumSmith+Brown. Paxos says the work follows attestation standards set by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

Tether Gold publishes a reserves report every quarter. Management prepares it. An accounting firm in the BDO network in Italy then reports on it under international standards for “reasonable assurance” engagements. The most recent opinions are signed by BDO Advisory Services S.r.l. The latest report on Tether’s site, as of June 30, 2026, showed 707,747.139 ounces held by the custodian against 707,747.09 tokens minted. Tether’s page also says the reports “are not financial statements.”

Monthly is more often than quarterly. Neither is a full audit of the company. We explain the difference in Attestation, Audit, or Proof of Reserves.

A small wording point: Paxos’s product page says the gold is “audited monthly,” while its transparency page describes monthly attestation reports. Those are different kinds of work, and the transparency page is the more exact of the two.

The regulator question

Paxos’s PAXG page says Paxos is “regulated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency,” and the site footer names Paxos Trust Company, N.A. When we checked, its transparency page still named the New York State Department of Financial Services as the regulator that approved its accounting firms. We report both as we found them.

Tether Gold’s disclosure document says TG Commodities is authorized by CNAD in El Salvador as a stablecoin issuer and registered as a digital asset service provider, number PSAD-0032. The same document says registration “does not imply certification” of the token’s quality or the issuer’s solvency.

What this comparison does not tell you

We did not inspect any gold. We did not test a redemption. Fees, minimums, and eligibility change, so check the issuer’s page before you act. This article is not advice to hold either token.

What Is Tokenized Gold? How Gold-Backed Tokens Work and Seven Things to Check

Dakota Yates — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 22:56:00 GMT

Tokenized gold is gold in a vault with a digital receipt on a blockchain. The receipt is a token. You can send it, trade it at any hour, and split it into tiny pieces. The gold does not move.

That is the whole idea. Everything else is detail, and the detail is where the risk lives.

How it works

An issuer buys gold bars. The large issuers say they hold London Good Delivery bars. That is the standard set by the LBMA, the London Bullion Market Association. A Good Delivery bar weighs about 400 troy ounces.
A custodian stores the bars in a vault. Paxos says the gold behind PAX Gold sits in LBMA vaults in London. Tether Gold’s disclosure document says its gold is held by a custodian in a vault in Switzerland.
The issuer creates tokens to match. For PAXG and XAUT, one token is one fine troy ounce. Several smaller tokens are priced at about one gram of gold.
Tokens trade on exchanges and move between wallets. They can be split. Tether Gold says XAUT divides to six decimal places.
Some holders can redeem. That means handing tokens back to the issuer for metal or for cash. The rules are strict, as you will see below.

Both large issuers run a lookup tool. You enter a wallet address, and it shows the serial number and weight of the bar linked to your tokens. Paxos notes its tool works for tokens held in your own wallet, not for tokens an exchange holds for you.

How big is it?

Small, next to the gold market. On October 17, 2026, the 13 gold tokens we counted from CoinGecko data came to about $5.8 billion. CoinGecko’s own category total is higher, about $5.9 billion, because it includes tokens we left out. Tether Gold (XAUT) and PAX Gold (PAXG) held about 89% of that. Our market snapshot has the full table.

Why people use it

Issuers make three main points. These are their claims:

It trades all the time. Tether Gold points out that token markets run 24 hours a day, every day, while traditional gold markets close.
It comes in small sizes. Paxos’s product page lists a minimum purchase of 0.01 troy ounce. A Paxos support page says 0.03 PAXG, because of a 0.02 PAXG fee that Paxos now says is waived through January 1, 2027. A whole Good Delivery bar costs well over a million dollars.
Storage is cheap. Paxos says it charges no storage fee at this time. Tether Gold says it charges no custody fee. Tether Gold charges 0.25% when you buy from or redeem with it directly. Paxos charges a fee when you redeem with it directly. It says its fee for buying new tokens is waived through January 1, 2027. Read the terms too. Paxos’s terms let it add a storage fee later by issuing itself new tokens, with at least 30 days’ notice.

Paxos publishes a table comparing PAXG with gold funds, futures, and bars. It is a useful list of things to compare. It is also a seller’s table, so read it that way.

Where the risk is

You are trusting an issuer and a custodian. The token is a claim. If the issuer fails, what you own depends on its terms and on the law where it sits. Read the terms.

A reserve report is not an audit of the company. In 2023, staff at the PCAOB, the US regulator of public company auditors, warned that proof-of-reserve reports are not audits. We explain the different kinds of report in Attestation, Audit, or Proof of Reserves.

You may not be allowed to redeem. Tether Gold’s FAQ says “U.S. persons are prohibited from purchasing or redeeming XAU₮.” Paxos says PAXG is currently unavailable in the EU. If you cannot deal with the issuer, your only exit is selling to another buyer.

Redeeming for metal means whole bars. Tether Gold redeems only in full bars. It advises depositing 430 XAUT to be sure of covering one, and it delivers within Switzerland only. For most holders, “redeemable for gold” really means “sellable for cash.”

It may not trade. Market value is price times reported supply. It is not a count of buyers. In our October snapshot, one token showed $12.8 million of market value and no reported trading in a day.

The technology can fail. Tokens live on blockchains and in smart contracts. Bugs, hacks, and lost keys are real risks that a gold bar in a vault does not have.

Registration is not approval. Tether Gold’s own disclosure document says its registration in El Salvador “does not imply certification” of the token’s quality or the issuer’s solvency.

A regulator’s view

In September 2026 the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority wrote that “inconsistent practice continues to exist in the tokenised gold space,” unlike the gold ETF market. It listed what holders should be able to compare: how the gold is kept safe and insured, whether redemption works, how far the product is regulated, the fees and minimums, and what happens if a firm in the chain fails. We cover that paper in What the UK’s Tokenized Gold Paper Actually Asks.

Seven things to check before you trust a gold token

Who is the issuer, and where? Find a legal name and a country. No name, no trust.
Where is the gold, and who holds it? Look for a named custodian or vault location in a document, not only on a marketing page.
Who reports on the reserves? How often, under what standard, and how old is the latest report?
Can you look up your bar? A serial number tied to your wallet is a good sign. It is not proof on its own.
Can you redeem? In your country, for what, with what minimum, and at what fee?
Does it trade? Compare daily volume with market value. A token you cannot sell is not like gold.
What is one token? An ounce and a gram are very different prices.

If an issuer answers all seven in public documents, you can at least judge it. If it does not, that tells you something too.

This article explains how these products work. It is not advice to hold any of them.

Tokenized Gold Snapshot: $5.8 Billion Reported, and Two Tokens Hold 89% of It

Dakota Yates — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 22:55:00 GMT

Tokenized gold is a small market with two very large players. We pulled the numbers for every gold token that the data site CoinGecko tracks in its tokenized gold category. Here is what they show, and what they do not.

The numbers

Market value and 24-hour trading volume are as reported by CoinGecko at 22:47 UTC on Saturday, October 17, 2026. Prices are in US dollars. We list only tokens whose data CoinGecko had updated within the previous 24 hours.

Token	Price	Reported market value	24h volume	Volume as % of value
Tether Gold (XAUT)	$4,149.69	$3,357,000,969	$74,392,037	2.22%
PAX Gold (PAXG)	$4,151.06	$1,829,056,441	$50,149,178	2.74%
Kinesis Gold (KAU)	$132.12	$526,196,431	$7,223	0.0014%
Matrixdock Gold (XAUM)	$4,123.39	$70,143,130	$427,004	0.61%
Streamex GLDY (GLDY)	$4,165.28	$12,819,612	$0	0.00%
Digital Gold (DGLD)	$4,176.44	$10,073,381	$14,611	0.15%
VNX Gold (VNXAU)	$134.40	$5,913,443	$6,570	0.11%
GoldZip Gold (XGZ)	$133.50	$5,206,554	$9,577	0.18%
Comtech Gold (CGO)	$132.49	$3,179,799	$877,923	27.61%
Herculis Gold Coin (XAUH)	$134.18	$2,080,301	$119,104	5.73%

Three more tokens with reported values under $1 million bring the count to 13 and the total to $5,822,617,132. CoinGecko’s own category page showed a higher total, about $5.91 billion, because it includes tokens we left out. Our method notes below list them.

What stands out

Two tokens are the market. XAUT and PAXG hold 89.1% of reported value between them. They also do almost all of the trading: about $124.5 million of volume in 24 hours, against about $1.5 million for the other 11 tokens combined.

A big market value does not mean you can sell. Kinesis Gold, third in our table, reported $526 million in market value and $7,223 of trading on the exchanges CoinGecko tracks. All of the Kinesis Gold trading that CoinGecko tracks is on Kinesis Money, Kinesis’s own exchange. Streamex GLDY showed $12.8 million of value and no reported trading. Market value here is price times the circulating supply CoinGecko lists. It says nothing about who would buy your tokens tomorrow.

Some tokens are an ounce. Some are a gram. XAUT and PAXG each represent one troy ounce. Several others are priced between about $132 and $134, close to what one gram of gold costs at this price, which is about $133. Check the unit before you compare prices.

The ounce tokens tracked each other closely. XAUT and PAXG were $1.37 apart, which implies gold near $4,150 an ounce. Matrixdock’s XAUM sat about 0.6% below that and Digital Gold about 0.6% above. Thin markets can print odd prices, so treat small-token prices with care.

The same token, two different sizes

Tether Gold’s home page showed a market cap of $3,446,657,783 when we looked, backed by 2,090 bars weighing 25,735.58 kilograms. CoinGecko showed $3,357,000,969 for XAUT. That is a gap of about $90 million.

Most of it comes from what each one counts. Tether says its figure is based on its custodian’s gold records and the market price of gold. CoinGecko’s figure uses XAUT’s circulating supply, 808,994.63 tokens. Its total supply is 827,417.63, a difference of about 18,400 tokens, or roughly $76 million at today’s price. Tether’s 25,735.58 kilograms works out to about 827,418 ounces, which matches the total supply. The rest of the gap is price. Tether’s figure uses the market price of gold, about $4,166 an ounce, and Tether says its figure may be delayed. CoinGecko’s uses XAUT’s trading price, $4,149.69.

Tether’s own reserves report uses the word “circulation” differently. Its latest report, as of June 30, 2026, counted all 707,747.09 minted XAUT as “in circulation.” Of those, 612,823.66 had been sold and 94,923.43 were “available for sale” and held by an affiliate of the issuer. That report is now more than three months old, so we do not use it to explain today’s numbers.

Neither number is wrong. They answer different questions. When you read a market cap for any backed token, ask which supply it uses.

How we did this, and the limits

Market data is from CoinGecko’s tokenized gold category. We did not verify any issuer’s gold. Backing claims belong to the issuers.
Supply figures are often reported by the issuers themselves.
We dropped four tokens whose CoinGecko data had not updated in more than 24 hours: Pleasing Gold, Tenbin Gold, Kinka and Gold rStock. The largest, Pleasing Gold, showed $80.6 million. A stale price is not a market.
We also left out seven tokens for which CoinGecko showed no market value.
We left out “Tether Gold Tokens” (XAUT0), which CoinGecko lists as its own entry at $113.6 million. XAUT0 is a version of XAUT that moves across blockchains. USDT0, the team that runs it, says its assets are backed “1:1 by Tether Gold.” Adding the two together could count the same gold twice.
Any token covered by our recusal policy is left out. See the disclosure below.
We pulled the data on a Saturday, when the main gold markets are closed. Weekend trading may not look like weekday trading.
The ounce and tonne estimates divide reported value by a gold price of about $4,150. They are rough.

We plan to repeat this snapshot on a regular schedule, using the same method, so the numbers can be compared over time.