A digital token issued against gold held by an issuer, giving the holder a contractual claim on that issuer rather than title to identified bars. The metal sits in the issuer’s own holding, under the issuer’s name, and the register that determines who owns the bars is the vault operator’s, not the blockchain. The chain records the token position; the issuer’s terms and the law of the place where the token is issued and redeemed determine what that position is worth. The category is written tokenized gold in US usage and covers what is sold as gold-backed tokens, gold-backed stablecoins and digital gold tokens.
What the holder holds
Two positions are routinely described in the same words and are not the same thing.
An owner of identified bars has property in specific objects. The bars carry serial numbers, are recorded against the owner’s name in a vault register, and are separated from the holding party’s own stock. If the holding party fails, the bars are not part of its estate.
A token holder has a claim. The claim is against the issuer, or against whichever entity the arrangement names as the redeemer, and it ranks with that entity’s other obligations unless the reserve is legally separated from its estate. What the holder can compel — conversion into metal, delivery, a cash payment at market value — is whatever the arrangement’s documentation grants, enforced under whichever law governs it. The token is the evidence of the claim, not the thing claimed.
Everything else in this entry follows from that distinction: pricing, redemption thresholds, insolvency ranking, evidence, and how a bank counterparty is permitted to treat the position.
The structures sold under the name
Four structures circulate under the same label. They differ in what stands behind the token, not in how they trade.
| Structure | What stands behind it | What the holder can convert into |
|---|---|---|
| Issuer-backed redeemable token | Metal held by the issuer, in a stated weight per token | Metal, subject to the issuer’s minimum, fees and delivery terms; or sale on a venue |
| Price-referencing token | A price feed and whatever collateral the arrangement holds; no claim on specific metal | Sale on a venue only |
| Tokenised unit of a fund or ETF | A unit in a regulated vehicle that itself holds metal | Whatever the vehicle’s own rules permit, which is usually cash |
| Wholesale pooled interest | Co-ownership of a defined pool of vaulted bars under a purpose-built legal framework | An interest in the pool, transferable between participants; conversion terms set by the framework |
The fourth is the newest and is being built in the wholesale market rather than the retail one. The World Gold Council’s Pooled Gold Interests concept, developed with a legal framework drafted by Linklaters, is designed as a third settlement route alongside allocated and unallocated gold, with beneficial ownership of the underlying bars vesting in the participants. It was set for trial with London banks and trading firms in the first quarter of 2026. Its existence matters to the reader of this entry for one reason: the market’s own answer to the weakness of a bare issuer claim is a co-ownership structure, not a better token.
The size and shape of the category
Tokenised gold is a small market growing quickly, concentrated in very few issuers. Trackers put the category’s market capitalisation at roughly $6 billion in early March 2026, after growth through 2025 from about $1.6 billion to $4.4 billion. Spot trading volume reached $90.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026 on CoinGecko’s count — more in ninety days than the $84.6 billion it recorded for the whole of 2025. Two issuers account for the large majority of supply, which is the practical form the issuer-claim question takes: exposure to the category is exposure to a very short list of balance sheets.
Volume figures are not comparable between providers. Against CoinGecko’s $84.6 billion for 2025, Tiger Research published $178 billion for the same period; the difference reflects which venues each counts, and neither has reconciled it publicly. Any figure quoted for this market should carry the name of the tracker it came from.
How a token is issued, transferred and converted back
- Issuance. The issuer, or a party contracted to it, takes metal into a vault holding in its own name and mints tokens against it at a stated weight per token. The holder of the token is not a party to the vault arrangement.
- Distribution. Tokens reach holders through venues and distributors. The buyer’s counterparty is the venue, not the issuer, and the price paid is the venue’s price.
- Transfer. A transfer is a ledger entry between addresses, settled in minutes and irreversible once final. Where the transfer passes between regulated service providers, originator and beneficiary information must accompany it under the Travel Rule.
- Redemption. The holder applies to the issuer, passes identity and screening checks, and presents at least the minimum quantity the issuer’s policy sets. The issuer burns the tokens and releases metal — in the formats and at the locations its policy allows — or pays cash equivalent to the market value, depending on the arrangement.
- What does not happen at any step. No entry is made in a vault register in the holder’s name, and no bar is taken out of the issuer’s holding and assigned to the holder, until redemption completes. The process by which the tokens themselves come into existence is set out under gold tokenization.
What it costs and what sets the timing
No verified fee schedule is held for any issuer, and none is estimated here. The components are structural and appear in every arrangement:
- The dealing spread. The token has its own price on each venue. The difference between that price and the spot reference at the moment of dealing is borne by the holder, and it widens in thin conditions.
- The holding fee. Charged either as a periodic deduction from the metal each token represents, so that the weight behind a token falls over time, or as a fee levied at issuance and redemption. Which mechanism applies changes what a multi-year holding is worth and is stated in the token’s own documentation.
- The network fee. Paid in the chain’s unit on every transfer, independent of the size of the holding.
- Redemption and delivery. The issuer’s redemption charge, then freight, insurance and import formalities, which fall on the holder.
- The minimum. The redemption threshold, expressed in whole units of a bar format, decides whether conversion into metal is available to a given holding at all.
Timing is set by three things and not by the chain: the issuer’s redemption policy, the vault’s release schedule, and the compliance review of the redeeming party. Under the EU regime an issuer must state its thresholds, mechanisms, valuation basis and settlement conditions in advance rather than determining them at the point of request.
What the holder receives as evidence
The on-chain record proves an address held a stated number of tokens at a stated block, and nothing beyond that. Alongside it, an issuer typically publishes a periodic reserve report and, in some arrangements, a list of the bars in the reserve. That list identifies the reserve; it does not identify the holder’s share of it. Such reports are usually attestations — a third party’s account of what it observed at a point in time — which is a narrower instrument than an audit opinion on financial statements, and the two are commonly cited as if interchangeable.
What the structure does not produce is the document set an auditor, insurer or lending counterparty is already equipped to read: an entry naming the holder in a vault operator’s register, an allocation record listing each bar by serial number, weight, fineness, producer and location against that name, and an insurance interest attaching to the named holder. Where those documents are required, they have to be created by redeeming, which returns the holder to the minimums, fees and timing above.
Where the structure fails
The issuer fails. This is the case the rest of the arrangement exists to answer. Where the reserve is legally separated from the issuer’s estate, the holder’s position differs from that of an unsecured creditor; where it is not, the holder queues. The EU framework requires segregation from the issuer’s estate and an advance plan for orderly redemption if the issuer cannot meet its obligations. Outside that framework, the answer comes from the governing law of the arrangement, not from the product page — and it is the one question on which a legal opinion, rather than a disclosure document, is the appropriate instrument.
The minimum exceeds the holding. A holder below the redemption threshold has no route into metal and can only sell into a venue at the venue’s price. The exit exists, but it is a cash exit.
The contract can immobilise the position. Where the token contract includes freeze or blacklist functions, the issuer can stop a holding from moving. The same function permits a stolen holding to be frozen; both consequences follow from one design choice, and a holder should know which functions the contract carries before size is committed.
The key is lost. In self-custody, control ends with the key, and no register elsewhere names the holder as owner of anything to reconstruct from.
The price disconnects. The token trades against its own order book. In stressed or illiquid conditions its price and the spot reference separate, and the holder realises the token’s price, not the metal’s.
The legal chain crosses borders. Issuance, custody and redemption frequently sit in three jurisdictions. The rights have to be enforceable in each of them, which is why prudential rules on this asset class test legal enforceability in every jurisdiction where the asset is issued and redeemed as a threshold condition rather than a detail.
How the category is regulated
There is no single regime. In the European Union, a token referencing a commodity such as gold is an asset-referenced token under the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, not an e-money token — that category is reserved for tokens referencing a single official currency. The consequences are specific: the issuer must be authorised and publish a white paper approved by its home competent authority; it must hold own funds subject to a floor of €350,000 and a requirement scaling at 2% of the average reserve amount; the reserve must be maintained and segregated from the issuer’s estate; holders have a permanent right of redemption at any time, satisfied either in funds equal to the market value of the referenced assets or by delivery of the assets themselves; marketing material must state that this right exists; the issuer may not pay interest on the tokens; and a redemption plan must be prepared in advance for the case where the issuer fails to meet its obligations.
Two consequences follow for a reader outside the EU. First, statutory redemption rights of that kind are a feature of a particular regime and are not a property of tokenised gold as such. Second, regimes written for currency-referenced stablecoins do not automatically capture commodity-referenced tokens, so the presence of a stablecoin law in a jurisdiction says nothing about whether a gold token is covered by it.
The wrapper decides what an institution can do with the metal
The wrapper, not the metal, determines what a regulated institution may do with the position, and the rule that decides it changed on 1 January 2026.
On that date the Basel Committee’s cryptoasset standard, SCO60, took effect as the prudential treatment of banks’ cryptoasset exposures. It sets classification conditions that a gold-referenced token must meet in full to receive the preferential Group 1b treatment. Among them: for a token not pegged to a currency, the reserve must consist of the reference asset itself, apart from a de minimis cash or deposit portion needed to run the arrangement; the issuer must be supervised and regulated by a supervisor that applies prudential capital and liquidity requirements to it; all rights must be clearly defined and legally enforceable in every jurisdiction where the token is issued and redeemed, with settlement finality in primary and secondary markets; and the arrangement must publicly document who may redeem, the redeemer’s obligation, the timeframe for redemption, the assets to be exchanged and how the redemption value is determined.
Failing any one of those conditions places the exposure in Group 2, where the most conservative treatment is a 1250% risk weight, total Group 2 exposure is limited to 1% of Tier 1 capital, and a breach beyond 2% pulls the entire Group 2 book into that treatment. Collateral is treated separately and more bluntly: only Group 1a tokenised versions of instruments already on the eligible financial collateral list are recognised, and Group 1b and Group 2 cryptoassets receive no recognition at all when taken as collateral.
Set that against the metal itself. Gold bullion is eligible financial collateral, accepted against uncleared derivatives margin in the EU and UK subject to a 15% haircut and by clearing houses at a 20% haircut. Under the standardised approach to credit risk, national authorities may permit bullion held in a bank’s own vaults or on an allocated basis, to the extent backed by bullion liabilities, to be treated as cash and carry a 0% risk weight. The treatment is not uniformly favourable — gold sits outside the high-quality liquid asset list and attracts an 85% required stable funding factor under the net stable funding ratio, a funding penalty the LBMA and the World Gold Council have contested for years. But the asymmetry is the point: the same ounce carries one prudential identity as allocated bullion and a materially different one inside a token wrapper, and the difference is created by the wrapper, not by the metal.
The market is behaving accordingly. UK authorities have been working with major banks on standards for tokenised gold covering eligibility, legal ownership, custody and risk, following a tokenisation consultation by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England that closed on 3 July 2026 — work that exists precisely because tokenised gold is not yet a routine source of collateral in wholesale markets. On the industry side, the World Gold Council and Boston Consulting Group published Digital Gold: The Case for a Shared Infrastructure on 19 March 2026, proposing a shared platform to standardise custody coordination, reconciliation, compliance and redemption across digital gold products. Both efforts address the same gap, and the Council’s own framing of it is direct: claiming that a digital asset is backed is not the same as proving it.
For a holder that is not a bank, the question takes a different form but has the same shape. The test is not a risk weight; it is whether an auditor, an insurer or a lending counterparty already has a procedure for the evidence the structure produces. Serial-level allocation records and a vault register entry in the holder’s name are read by those functions as a matter of routine. A token balance and a periodic reserve attestation are not, and the work of translating one into the other falls on the holder, at the moment the holder is least able to choose the timing.
The structure this entry contrasts with — title to specific bars, allocated by serial number and named to the counterparty in the vault register, with storage contracted through Brink’s — is set out at Gold Storage; the route from digital-asset proceeds into that structure is described at Buy Physical Gold with Crypto.