Against a backdrop of rising macro uncertainty and a repricing of gold, both traditional gold ETF investment channels and on chain tokenized gold channels are expanding in parallel, with tokenized gold emerging as one of the fastest growing segments within RWA. Gate Research has released a special report on tokenized gold that reviews the market’s scale and structure, the key differences between the two leading solutions, XAUT and PAXG, and the new wave of competition among trading platforms centered on gold indices and perpetuals, as well as Gate’s concrete efforts to build a full stack gold trading platform.
- Duopoly established: Tokenized gold is dominated by the two leading solutions, Tether XAUT and Paxos PAXG, which together account for about 97% of total market capitalization. Both have recorded more than $4 billion cumulative on chain trading volume.
- Structural differences versus gold ETFs: Tokenized gold and traditional gold ETFs differ systematically across liquidity sources, custody structures, and redemption mechanisms. ETFs rely on secondary market trading and primary market creation and redemption arbitrage to keep prices close to NAV. Tokenized gold relies more on CEX and DEX liquidity and cross platform routing. Its advantages include divisibility, 24/7 transferability, and on chain composability, while it depends more heavily on custody, audits, redemption rights, and compliance boundaries.
- Gold indices and perpetual competition is fundamentally a contest for index governance: Whether XAUT and PAXG are included, how weights switch during market closures, and how external data sources and oracle feed structures are designed and constrained by risk controls together determine price quality in 24/7 trading and robustness under extreme market conditions, shaping basis dynamics, funding rates, and arbitrage opportunities.
- Gate’s execution path: Gate is building a full stack gold trading market by connecting multiple access points, including tokenized gold spot markets, leveraged ETFs, TradFi CFDs, metals perpetuals, and an on chain perp DEX. This brings holding, leverage, and hedging into a unified product matrix and account framework, improving the executability of allocation and trading.
The report argues that the expansion of tokenized gold, combined with the productization race around synthetic gold index perpetuals, is transforming gold from a single allocation instrument into an asset that can be traded and risk managed routinely within crypto account systems. Gate will continue to expand product coverage and improve the trading experience around its full stack gold offering to serve users with different risk preferences and trading workflows.
Discover more details today → Gate Research: Tokenized Gold Continues to Grow, Gate Builds a Full-Stack Gold Trading Market
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Investing in cryptocurrency markets involves high risk. Users are advised to conduct their own research and fully understand the nature of the assets and products before making any investment decisions. Gate is not responsible for any losses or damages arising from such decisions.
Gate Team
March 13, 2026
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