“A token isn’t gold; the structure behind it is—and that’s where the real competition in tokenized metals is happening.” Yogi Nelson
Tokenization is no longer theoretical. By 2026, it has become a defining theme across finance—from equities and bonds to commodities. When it comes to precious metals, however, how tokenization is implemented matters far more than the token itself.
A token is not gold. The structure behind the token is the asset.
That means custody, audits, redemption rights, regulatory posture, and market integration matter far more than marketing claims.
In reviewing the leading tokenized gold issuers operating today, one thing becomes clear: there is no single “winner.” Instead, each issuer is running a different race—toward a different vision of what tokenized metals should be.
Here’s how the field lines up:
CACHE Gold → transparency and auditability
Comtech Gold → trade and settlement infrastructure
Kinesis → re-monetizing gold and silver as money
Paxos (PAXG) → institutional compliance and regulatory clarity
T-Gold (SchiffGold) → sound-money preservation
Tether Gold (XAUT) → liquidity and global reach
Tokenization is not a template. It’s a toolkit.
Some issuers optimize for institutions. Others for velocity, trade finance, or individual ownership. The common thread is this: tokenization is shifting precious metals from static holdings toward programmable financial infrastructure.
That is the real story—and why issuer design now matters more than the token symbol itself.
“A token isn’t gold; the structure behind it is—and that’s where the real competition in tokenized metals is happening”. Yogi Nelson
Coinbase CEO, Brian Armstrong, and Larry Fink, Blackrock CEO, both agree–tokenization of assets is the theme for 2026. Both understand tokenization has moved from theory to practice. Tokenization of gold is at the forefront of this tsunami. Yet regulatory posture, and market integration matter far more than marketing claims.
This article provides a clear, structured comparison of the leading tokenized precious metal issuers operating in 2026. The goal is not to rank them by hype or price performance, but to evaluate them by structure, credibility, and long-term viability.
Why Issuer Structure Matters More Than the Token Itself
Tokenized precious metals are often discussed as if the token is the asset. It is not. The real asset is the legal and custodial framework behind the token. Please remember this!
Considering a tokenized purchase? Here are a few questions to ask when conducting your due diligence:
Who holds the metal, and where?
Is the metal fully allocated and segregated?
Who audits the reserves, and how often?
What legal rights does a token holder actually have?
Can the token be redeemed for physical metal?
Is the issuer regulated — and in which jurisdictions?
In 2026, the strongest issuers are those that treat tokenization as financial infrastructure, not merely as a crypto product. I can’t emphasize this point enough. With that as background, let’s examine the best-known gold token issuers. They are listed in alphabetical order, not from “best” to “worse”.
CACHE Gold approaches tokenization from a simple but demanding premise: trust must be visible. Rather than leading with liquidity or ideological framing, CACHE positions transparency and auditability as its core value proposition.
Each CGT token represents allocated physical gold stored in professional vaults across multiple jurisdictions. CACHE publishes detailed bar lists and emphasizes independent third-party audits, reinforcing the principle that token holders should be able to verify backing without relying on institutional reputation alone. Trust but verify!
Tokenization here functions as a disclosure mechanism. The blockchain is not used to create financial complexity, but to make existing bullion practices more observable and accountable. This appeals to users who are less interested in DeFi composability and more concerned with proof-of-reserves discipline. Smart idea.
The tradeoff is scale. CACHE operates within a smaller ecosystem, with lower secondary-market liquidity and fewer exchange integrations than the largest issuers. Its design prioritizes clarity over velocity.
Best suited for: investors who value strong transparency, auditability, and vault diversification over liquidity or speculative activity.
Comtech Gold (CGO): Tokenization Built for Trade and Settlement
Comtech Gold represents a distinctly utilitarian vision of tokenized metals. Rather than framing gold as an investment product, Comtech positions tokenized gold as commercial infrastructure—designed to support commodity trade, collateralization, and settlement in regulated environments. They found a nice niche.
CGO tokens are issued within commodity-exchange and trade-finance frameworks, particularly in emerging and trade-focused jurisdictions. Gold is held with approved custodians, and token issuance aligns closely with existing regulatory regimes governing physical commodities.
Tokenization here improves settlement efficiency, traceability, and operational speed without attempting to disrupt the logic of trade markets. Comtech does not pursue broad retail adoption or DeFi composability; its focus is narrow by design.
This specialization limits visibility among Western retail investors and reduces global liquidity. But within its intended domain, Comtech’s approach is structurally coherent.
Best suited for: trade finance, commodity settlement, and emerging-market use cases where regulatory alignment and real-economy integration matter most.
Kinesis (KAU, KAG): Tokenized Metals as a Monetary System
Kinesis treats tokenization not as a feature, but as monetary architecture. Its gold (KAU) and silver (KAG) tokens are designed to circulate, settle, and function as money rather than static investment instruments.
Each token is backed by allocated physical metal stored in professional vaults across multiple jurisdictions. What distinguishes Kinesis is its yield-sharing model, which redistributes transaction fees to users who hold and actively use the metals. This design emphasizes velocity—a deliberate attempt to restore monetary function to precious metals. Back to the future?
Tokenization in Kinesis is therefore systemic. The blockchain coordinates ownership, settlement, and incentive distribution, creating an ecosystem where metals are meant to move.
This ambition introduces complexity. Users must understand system mechanics, fee flows, and governance. Institutional adoption has been slower than for simpler, custody-centric issuers.
Best suited for: users who believe precious metals should function as money, not merely as stores of value–an uphill climb.
Paxos remains one of the most institutionally credible issuers in the tokenized metals space, largely because it separates bullion standards from financial regulation with precision.
Each PAXG token represents ownership of one fine troy ounce of allocated physical gold. The gold conforms to London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) Good Delivery standards, ensuring bullion quality and refinery credibility. Importantly, LBMA sets market standards; it does not regulate issuers.
Regulatory oversight applies instead to Paxos itself, which operates under supervision by the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). This dual structure—LBMA-standard bullion combined with NYDFS-regulated issuance—has made PAXG particularly attractive to institutions requiring legal clarity and compliance discipline.
PAXG emphasizes traceability, auditability, and redemption integrity. Each token can be linked to a specific gold bar, and attestations confirm full backing.
The tradeoff is flexibility. PAXG is gold-only, closely tied to U.S. regulatory jurisdiction, and less optimized for crypto-native experimentation.
Best suited for: institutions and regulated investors prioritizing legal certainty and bullion-market credibility.
T-Gold (SchiffGold): Sound-Money Tokenization with a Preservation Bias
Schiff Gold’s T-Gold reflects a philosophy-driven approach to tokenization. Rather than treating gold as a financial primitive to be re-engineered, T-Gold positions tokenization as a modern wrapper around traditional bullion ownership.
T-Gold represents allocated physical gold held with professional custodians, integrated into SchiffGold’s broader bullion ecosystem. The emphasis is preservation, ownership, and monetary discipline rather than yield or liquidity engineering.
Tokenization here improves portability and auditability without altering gold’s role as sound money. This clarity appeals strongly to investors already aligned with macro-oriented or anti-debasement narrative–a growing segment of the market.
Liquidity and secondary-market integration remain more limited than with larger issuers, and institutional settlement use cases are not the primary focus.
Best suited for: investors who prioritize sound-money principles and long-term wealth preservation.
Tether Gold (XAUT): Liquidity-First Tokenization at Global Scale
Tether’s XAUT represents a liquidity-first approach to tokenized gold. Each token corresponds to one fine troy ounce of allocated gold held in Swiss vaults, with redemption mechanisms available for larger holders.
What distinguishes XAUT is distribution and market depth. It is widely integrated across exchanges, wallets, and crypto-native platforms, often exhibiting greater secondary-market liquidity than competing gold tokens.
XAUT operates largely outside U.S. regulatory frameworks, offering flexibility and global reach but less formal oversight. Tokenization here is pragmatic: gold is treated as a stable, functional asset that can move at internet speed.
Best suited for: globally distributed, crypto-native users who value liquidity and accessibility over regulatory conservatism.
Key Comparison Themes
Across issuers, several patterns emerge:
Custody quality is table stakes; allocation and segregation are non-negotiable.
Redemption rights distinguish true tokenization from synthetic exposure.
Regulatory posture shapes who can use a token—and how.
Narrative coherence matters; the strongest issuers know why they tokenize.
Conclusion: Tokenization Is a Toolkit, not a Template
There is no single “best” tokenized precious metal issuer in 2026. Instead, there are clear leaders within distinct philosophies:
CACHE → transparency and auditability
Comtech Gold → trade and settlement
Kinesis → monetary re-engineering
Paxos → institutional compliance
T-Gold → sound-money preservation
Tether Gold → liquidity and reach
Tokenization is no longer about digitizing metal for novelty. It is about how metal-backed trust is structured, verified, and deployed in a programmable financial world.
That is the real story—and why issuer design now matters more than the token itself.
Dating back thousands of years, well before the ancient Roman Empire, gold has maintained its role as a store of value. That’s impressive. That begs the question: what properties does gold have that allow it to endure while paper money always fails? The answer is—gold combines scarcity, durability, and universal recognition.
In 2026, and beyond, gold’s properties won’t change—of that I am sure. Nevertheless, major change is afoot—of that I am sure also. Am I contradicting myself? Not at all. The evolution of gold in 2026, and beyond, will be the manner and infrastructure used to own, transfer, and verify it—of that I am confident also.
As discussed in Week One, tokenization does not alter the nature of an asset—it changes how ownership is represented and transferred. It’s an update, not a revolution. In other words, tokenized gold applies all the same properties to fully backed physical gold, allowing it to function within modern digital financial systems without losing its physical foundation.
Tokenized Gold in Practice: T-Gold
Tokenized gold is no longer theoretical. Platforms such as T-Gold (by Peter Schiff) illustrate how this model works in practice. T-Gold uses blockchain technology (Ethereum) to digitally represent ownership of fully allocated physical gold.
On T-Gold, a client can purchase tokenized gold through the digital platform. Each token represents a defined quantity of physical, investment-grade gold held in professional, insured vaults. The gold remains stationary; ownership changes are recorded digitally. This distinction mirrors a core theme from Week One: custody and ownership do not need to move together. The token is not a derivative or a paper promise. It represents ownership of allocated gold, expressed through a digital record.
In practical terms, T-Gold allows clients to:
Acquire physical gold without handling or transport
Hold gold in divisible digital units
Transfer ownership efficiently
Retain the option of physical redemption, subject to platform terms
The result is gold ownership that combines physical backing with digital efficiency. Point on the scoreboard!
A Second Reference Point: Paxos Gold (PAXG)
Paxos Gold (PAXG) provides a second, widely recognized example of institutional-grade tokenized gold. Paxos decided to go with the most used layer one blockchain—Ethereum.
Each PAXG token represents one fine troy ounce of gold, allocated to specific London Good Delivery bars stored in LBMA-approved vaults. Token holders can verify the serial numbers of the bars backing their tokens and, under defined conditions, redeem tokens for physical metal. Trust and verify!
As outlined in Week One, transparency and auditability are non-negotiable requirements for credible real-world asset tokenization. PAXG demonstrates how those requirements are implemented in practice through allocation, reporting, and regulated custody.
Why Traditional Gold Ownership Is Operationally Limited
Physical gold ownership is risky. With physical ownership, a multitude of weak points are introduced. For example, you could have disasters in storage, insurance, security, and transport. That’s why I can’t imagine storing gold at home.
Paper gold products, on the other hand, reduce some frictions—but at what costs? With paper you have counterparty risk, opacity, and a lack of direct claims on specific bars.
Is there a solution to the dilemma? Yes, tokenization.
Why Blockchain Fits Gold
Tokenization, as framed in Week One, separates physical custody from ownership transfer. Gold remains physical; ownership becomes digital. This separation reduces friction without weakening asset integrity. A perfect solution. Moreover, blockchain systems provide verifiable ownership records, fine-grained divisibility, near-instant settlement, and cross-border transferability. These characteristics align closely with the functional goals described in Week One for modernizing hard assets without financial abstraction.
Applied to gold, blockchain improves how ownership is recorded and transferred—nothing more, and nothing less, at a reasonable price. Winner!
Why Gold Leads Tokenized Hard Assets
Gold is emerging as the lead tokenized hard asset. It’s not hard to understand why if you consider what I explained in Week One—gold has global acceptance, deep liquidity, high value density, mature custody infrastructure, and established legal treatment. T-Gold and Paxos Gold demonstrate the broader principle: blockchain can enhance hard assets without turning them into abstractions.
Could others follow? Sure. Over the course of 2026, I will cover the other possible candidates, including silver, copper, or farmland. Gold, rightly, is the pioneer—but others will most likely trail not far behind.
Is Big Money Open to Tokenization
BlackRock Asset Management and Franklin Templeton are tokenizing financial assets in record volume. In fact, BlackRock CEO, Larry Fink, has spoken openly about the tokenization of all assets. Therefore, why doubt that tokenization of gold is not inevitable? Already, we see tokenized gold is increasingly used within institutional and regulated environments, including digital custody platforms, on-chain settlement systems, collateral frameworks, and portfolio allocation tools. Basically, tokenization is evolving as infrastructure, not disruption. Tokenized gold improves efficiency while remaining compatible with existing financial systems. Great combo!
Due Diligence Never Goes Out of Style
Tokenization does not eliminate risk. Custodian quality, vault jurisdiction, audit transparency, legal enforceability of redemption rights, and blockchain governance all remain critical considerations. These risks align with the asset-layer framework introduced in Week One: weaknesses in the physical, legal, or digital layer undermine the entire structure.
Conclusion
As this series continues, the same framework introduced in Week One, and reinforced here in Week Two, will be applied to silver, copper, and other metals. However, I started with gold as it remains the benchmark—the asset that shows how traditional value can function in a digital system. Gold remains unchanged. What changes is how ownership is recorded and transferred. Technology enhances asset clarity, a necessity in today’s world!
Until next time,
Yogi Nelson
Selected Sources
This article is part of an ongoing weekly series examining the tokenization of precious metals—covering custody, standards, regulation, issuer structure, settlement infrastructure, and market design. The series is published on BlockchainAIForum and LinkedIn and is among the few sustained, multi-metal editorial projects focused on tokenized metals as financial infrastructure rather than product promotion.
Los mercados de materias primas están entrando en una transición estructural. El oro, la plata, el cobre, el litio, el níquel, el cobalto e incluso los elementos de tierras raras están comenzando a migrar hacia la infraestructura de cadena de bloques. Esto no es un eslogan publicitario; es un rediseño lento pero real de cómo funcionan la propiedad, la liquidación y el uso de activos como colateral.
En 2026, lanzar é una serie de 52 semanas en BlockchainAIForum dedicada exclusivamente a los metales tokenizados—donde los activos duros se encuentran con los rieles digitales.
Por Qué Esto Importa Ahora
El oro tokenizado ha superado los $1,000 millones en circulación.
La plata tokenizada se acerca a los $200 millones.
Los metales industriales están en la fila siguiente.
La IA está transformando la exploración, la planificación minera y la visibilidad de las cadenas de suministro.
Los reguladores avanzan hacia marcos más claros para los activos digitales.
Para inversionistas, tesoreros y estrategas, los metales tokenizados combinan:
Respaldo físico verificable
Transparencia y auditabilidad en cadena
Liquidación global más rápida
Interoperabilidad con sistemas TradFi y DeFi
Lo Que Cubrirá Esta Serie
Metales preciosos en cadena (oro, plata, platino, paladio, rodio)
There is a massive battle among nation states, central bankers, industrialists, and institutional investors to secure strategic metals supplies. They have driven up the price of precious metals over the last two years, not retail demand. That is well documented. What is new, and under reported, is the advent of a novel manner to demonstrate precious metals ownership–tokenization! That’s why beginning this January, I’ll be publishing the 2026 Tokenized Metal Series. Let me tell you what to expect.
Be prepared to read a one-year weekly series dedicated to the tokenization transformation—of gold, silver, copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, and metals powering the global economy. A full year of insights on how commodities, AI, mining, and digital finance are converging. Very cool! These assets are now stepping onto blockchain rails, gaining faster settlement, greater transparency, and global portability. The implications are enormous—for investors, miners, manufacturers, and policymakers. The future isn’t just digital currency—it’s digital metals. Who else is offering this? No one other than Yogi Nelson. The costs? Free. What’s not to like.
Why This Series Matters
If you care about global markets, technology, energy systems, geopolitics, or investing, these changes will affect you. Listen, three major shifts are happening simultaneously:
1. Tokenization is moving into real utility.
Real assets—not meme coins—are being digitized on public ledgers. Forget stupid Pepe and his coins or a dog face token worth nothing; I’m talking about tokenized gold!
2. AI is revolutionizing mining.
Exploration, extraction, mapping, and mineral intelligence are evolving faster than most headlines suggest. A lot less drill and hope; a lot more boring and discover.
3. Institutions and regulators are preparing for digital commodities.
Compliance frameworks, custody solutions, and market infrastructure are aligning for the first time.
What You’ll See Each Week in 2026
Each installment of the series will explore one theme, including:
Tokenized precious metals
Industrial and energy metals on-chain
AI-driven mining and robotics
Digital twins of mines
Satellite-based mineral intelligence
Tokenized metals as collateral
Commodity-backed stablecoins
Regulatory developments
Institutional adoption trends
Some essays will be deep dives; others will be quick, engaging reads. All will be grounded in real-world developments.
Who This Series Is For
This series is for those who enjoy big ideas, clarity, and an occasional bad dad joke:
Investors
Financial advisors
Miners and engineers
Metals analysts
Crypto newcomers
Skeptics
Students of markets
Anyone exploring the intersection of technology and real-world assets
January: The Digital Metals Era Begins
Metals built our civilization. Now they’re about to move onto digital rails. Tokenization isn’t replacing commodities—it’s modernizing them. And 2026 will be the year the world finally notices.
Blockchain & AI Forum 