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General information only. This article does not consider your objectives, financial situation or needs and is not a recommendation to acquire, hold or dispose of any digital asset. Digital assets can go up and down and past performance is not necessarily indicative of future performance.
Tokenised gold has emerged on the scene in the past decade, bridging the gap between one of the world’s oldest assets and the modern, digital era.
Over the past few years, several crypto projects have emerged providing exposure to the price of gold. This trend has taken hold alongside a notable increase in gold volatility, with the precious metal’s value recording several new all-time highs in the 2020s.
But does tokenised gold present a compelling case in comparison to other gold access methods, and how does its adoption stack up?
A brief history of tokenised gold
While tokenised gold adoption has increased in the past 12 months, investing in gold on-chain has actually been around for over a decade.
Did You Know?
Interestingly, digital gold even pre-dates the blockchain. In 1996, a US company named E-gold burst onto the scene, offering users a virtual token for trading of precious metals online. E-gold is often considered one of the first digital currencies.
In its heyday, E-gold managed $14 million USD worth of gold spread across more than one million accounts. Despite its success, the platform was subject to significant security issues throughout its time, falling victim to hacks, data compromises and the alleged illegal use of funds.
Due to these issues, E-gold was eventually indicted by a federal US jury and shutdown – however, some argue the platform’s failures helped inform later thinking about Bitcoin and, ultimately, blockchain-based tokenised gold.
Most sources cite DigixGold (DGX), created by a Singaporean-based firm, as one of the earliest adopters of merging gold and the blockchain. Launched in 2014, DGX became available for trade on Ethereum’s public protocol in 2018. However, by the dawn of the new decade, the project’s community voted to dissolve the Treasury, rendering the token essentially inactive.
One drawback for DGX was its storage fee of 0.6% – reducing one of the reported advantages of using blockchain technology instead of institutional, custodial alternatives.
This served as a proof-of-concept for the modern era of tokenised gold. Lower storage-fee models, paired with the rise of decentralised applications, may have helped newer projects capture market share in a way previous ventures did not.
The adoption of tokenised gold
Gold has been popular across civilisations for millennia, whether as an investment or a piece of jewellery you can hang around your neck.
As of early 2026, market data placed the broader tokenised gold market at around AUD $7.4 billion (USD $5.25 billion), with demand rising alongside gold price movements and growing interest in tokenised real-world assets.
While products like Tether Gold sprung to life in the 2020s, market activity appears to have increased more materially in 2025.
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Using market cap to measure adoption isn’t an exact science, as it includes value fluctuations in its calculations. However, it does give us a baseline measure of an asset’s circulating supply – and the XAUt market cap chart shows a clear increase in 2025. Between January 2025 and January 2026, Tether Gold’s market cap reportedly increased by 250%.
If we zoom in a little further, using Tether’s quarterly attestation reports, we can see that reported circulating supply of XAUt increased from 246,000 to 550,000 through that same period.
Notably, proportional growth in the market cap of tokenised gold outpaced that of physical gold markets by 2.6x between December 2024 and 2025.
This may indicate a change in the way some investors are accessing gold exposure.
Why has tokenised gold adoption accelerated?
Tokenised gold offers price exposure to the precious metal while attempting to address one of the asset’s barriers to entry – storage.
Naturally, holding (or if you’re Ron Swanson, burying) mounds of gold can be quite cumbersome, especially if you must move regularly or don’t have the space for a safe or similar setup.
This is why several gold investors use products such as ETFs and custodians – essentially making the price movements of gold accessible without the holder needing to manage its storage. In this instance, the custodian/issuer will be responsible for preserving the gold, with much of it held in vaults across the globe.
Tokenisation offers a similar solution, but with a couple of differences. For one, as a cryptocurrency, the tokens aren’t subject to the ins and outs of traditional markets, which may invoke different fees, settlement times, and significantly, are typically only open during specific trading hours.
Some 2026 market activity suggests that 24/7 liquidity for gold-linked tokens has attracted interest. For example, the perpetual trading protocol Hyperliquid, which offers round the clock access to on-platform cryptocurrencies, reportedly recorded a 24-hour high for commodities token trading immediately following a conflict escalation in the Middle East.
In the current 24/7 news cycle, some investors may value the ability to respond to geopolitical events outside traditional market hours – something that certain tokenised gold products may offer.
Key Takeaway
The advent of email, and eventually instant messaging, revolutionised the way humans interact important information. No longer did society have to wait out Sundays before sending/receiving letters (or wait for their pigeon to fly home) – they could communicate instantly. Tokenised gold brings this same logic to the gold market...but will it have the same appeal?
Considerations of tokenised gold
Like every asset, tokenised gold doesn’t come without potential downsides.
For starters, it can be easy to assume that gold is a ‘safe investment’ due to its long history as both an asset and a financial benchmark. This is not the case, as there is no such thing as a ‘safe’ investment. In fact, commodities like precious metals can be volatile when compared to T-bills or fixed-income assets.
Additionally, there is an element of counterparty risk when buying tokenised gold. While the decentralised, public nature of blockchain may address some transparency issues encountered by historic failures (like E-Gold), investors are still relying on the issuing party for transparency and physical reserves.
Tokenised assets are an emerging technology, and may be subject to changing regulations depending on jurisdiction. It can be worth keeping informed of regulatory changes both locally and abroad to consider how they may impact certain assets.
Summary
It’s not quite the same as Australia’s 19th-century gold rush – but the adoption of tokenised gold has seen some investors pull out their digital prospecting pans.
Virtual tokens pegged to the price of gold isn’t a new concept (having been around since the 90s), but the modern financial and geopolitical climate, paired with technological advances, has put tokenised gold back in focus.