Tokenized Gold Statistics 2026

Market size and growth

Tokenized gold went from a fringe product to a multi-billion-dollar category in five quarters.

• Tokenized gold's market value passed $6 billion in February 2026, having added about $2 billion in the opening weeks of the year.
• The tokenized commodities category, almost entirely gold, rose from $1.43 billion in January 2025 to $5.55 billion in March 2026, a gain of 289%.
• Tokenized commodities first crossed $5 billion on 19 January 2026 and peaked at $6.69 billion on 5 February 2026.
• Q1 2026 spot volume was 2.8 times the previous quarterly record of $32 billion, set in Q4 2025.

Tether Gold and Pax Gold

Two tokens carry almost the entire category.

• Tether Gold's market value passed $3.3 billion on 31 March 2026, backed by 707,747 fine troy ounces, up 36% on the quarter from about 520,000 ounces.
• Tether's total gold holdings, including bullion backing USDT, reached about 132 tonnes by the end of March 2026, six times the 22 tonnes backing XAUT.
• As of mid-August 2026, XAUT's market value stood at $2.83 billion, with 24-hour volume of $351 million.
• PAXG's market value was about $2.02 billion in late August 2026, with 24-hour volume of $192 million.
• PAXG charges a 0.02% transfer fee, while XAUT charges 0.25% on direct mints and redemptions.
• In the month to August 2026, gold tokens added more than $362 million in value, about $237 million of it from XAUT.

Market concentration

• XAUT and PAXG held 96.7% of tokenized gold by value in February 2026.
• 15 of 39 tracked commodity-linked tokenization products were gold-backed in early 2026.
• More than 90% of tokenized gold supply, measured across PAXG and XAUT, sits on Ethereum mainnet.
• Ethereum held 55.94% of the wider tokenized RWA market by mid-May 2026, covering 700 assets worth $18.9 billion.

DeFi adoption

Almost all tokenized gold sits idle.

• Total value deployed on-chain for tokenized gold rose 123% in Q1 2026 to more than $193 million.
• Collateral equalled just 0.07% of the $90.7 billion traded in Q1 2026.
• XAUT deposits on Aave rose from about $40 million in early June 2026 to $76.7 million by late August, up 91.7%.
• Aave V3 holds more than 50% of all tokenized gold deposited in lending protocols.
• Gold's 10% weekly fall in March 2026, its worst in more than four decades, triggered Aave's largest-ever cluster of XAUT liquidations on 23 March, which cleared without disruption.

Holders and adoption

• Tokenized gold added more than 44,500 holder wallets in Q1 2026, its largest quarterly increase on record.
• PAXG reached 86,190 holder addresses in August 2026, ahead of XAUT's 79,130.
• The tokenized commodities category counted 185,690 holders by March 2026, with 54,639 monthly active addresses.
• Holders across tokenized RWAs reached 788,388 by mid-May 2026, up 7% in 30 days.

The wider RWA market

• Tokenized RWA market value reached $19.32 billion on 31 March 2026, up from $5.42 billion at the start of 2025.
• By mid-2026, the on-chain distributed value of tokenized RWAs reached about $33.5 billion, close to triple the $11.8 billion a year earlier.
• Tokenized commodities made up 28.7% of the RWA sector at the end of Q1 2026, behind tokenized Treasuries.
• RWA perpetual futures volume reached $524.8 billion in Q1 2026, against $313 billion in all of 2025.

Institutional sentiment

• 63% of institutional investors say they're very interested in tokenized assets in 2026, up from 57% a year earlier.
• In a January 2026 survey of more than 350 institutional investors, 73% planned to increase digital asset allocations during the year.
• 64% of asset managers surveyed in early 2026 were interested in tokenizing their own assets, up from 40% in 2025.

Physical gold and the 2026 outlook

• Tokenized gold and other tokenized commodities were worth $5.55 billion at the end of Q1 2026, about 0.04% of the $15 trillion investible gold market.
• Total global gold stock reached 220,000 tonnes worth $31 trillion at the end of 2025.
• Global gold ETFs took in a record $18.7 billion in January 2026.
• Global gold ETF assets peaked at a month-end high of $604 billion in mid-2026 before settling near $530 billion by August.
• Gold market trading averaged $356 billion a day in July 2026, so a full quarter of tokenized gold spot trading equals about six hours of physical market turnover.
• Gold reached a record intraday high near $5,619 in early 2026.
• Forecasts put tokenized gold at about $15 billion by the end of 2026, and forecasts for all tokenized financial assets by 2030 range from $2 trillion to $16.1 trillion.

FAQs

Sources

1. CEX.IO, Tokenized Gold Q1 2026 Report, April 2026
2. CoinGecko, RWA Report 2026, April 2026
3. CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko, Tether Gold and PAX Gold market data, August 2026
4. Crypto.news, Tether Gold market cap tops $3.3B as reserves jump 36% in Q1 2026, May 2026
5. World Gold Council, Gold ETF flows reports, May and August 2026
6. The Clarity, Half of DeFi's tokenized gold sits in Aave, August 2026
7. CryptoRank, Aave gold deposits surge 91% as XAUT gains ground, August 2026
8. EY-Parthenon and Coinbase, Institutional Investor Digital Assets Survey, 2026
9. Paxos Newsroom, OCC national trust charter conversion, December 2025

Statistics compiled from third-party sources as of August 2026 and may have changed. Different data providers measure market value and volume differently, so figures from separate sources aren't always directly comparable. This page is for information only and isn't financial advice.