Digital (actual) gold

Blockchain investors don't need to leave the decentralized web to invest in the only truly hot commodity these days: actual gold, because gold has long been tokenized, basically just like the dollar has been.

Why it matters: Gold has proven to be the real safe haven in the current economic turmoil, hitting another all-time high price yesterday.

• Tokenized gold gives digital-asset investors an easy path to retreat from the crypto markets without moving their portfolio off blockchains.

How it works: Much like stablecoins, issuers of tokenized precious metals find a way to custody physical supply. They then create tokens that correspond to a fixed amount of those assets.

• The two biggest are Paxos' pax gold (PAXG) and XAUT from Tether.
• Tether issues the world's largest stablecoin, while Paxos is a stablecoin support company best known for running PayPal's PYUSD.

The big picture: Gold broke $3,000 in March amid tariff uncertainty, and it has continued to trend up.

• It broke through $3,400 yesterday

By the numbers: The supply of XAUT has been flat at 246,524 tokens since 2022.

• PAXG has been increasing in supply lately, up 15% since the end of last year, based on its transparency reports. But it's well down from the 318,060 tokens we reported the last time we touched on this topic, in 2022.
• (PAXG's market cap is higher now than it was then, because the value of the underlying gold is up so much. Its market cap is $791 million.)

💭 Brady's thought bubble: Tokenized gold hits Bitcoin in the feelings.