Gold tokenization market surges by 53%, surpassing a market cap of $6.1 billion

February 11 News, the tokenized commodities market has increased by 53% in less than six weeks, with a market capitalization surpassing $6.1 billion, making it the fastest-growing vertical in the real-world asset tokenization market. This surge is mainly driven by more gold being onboarded.

According to data from the crypto analytics platform Token Terminal, at the beginning of this year, the market capitalization of tokenized commodities was slightly above $4 billion, meaning an increase of about $2 billion in just over a month. The market is primarily composed of gold products, with Tether’s gold-backed token Tether Gold (XAUt) growing 51.6% over the past month to a market cap of $3.6 billion; Paxos’s PAX Gold (PAXG) increased 33.2% during the same period to a market cap of $2.3 billion.

The tokenized commodities market has grown 360% year-over-year, outpacing the tokenized stock market (42%) and the tokenized fund market (3.6%). Its scale is close to one-third of the $17.2 billion tokenized fund market and far exceeds the $538 million market cap of tokenized stocks.

On Thursday, Tether acquired a $150 million stake in the precious metals platform Gold.com, further expanding its tokenized gold strategy. The plan is to integrate the XAUt token into the Gold.com platform and explore options for allowing customers to purchase physical gold with USDT.

While the price of tokenized gold has risen, spot gold prices have increased over 80% in the past year, reaching a record high of $5,600 on January 29. Earlier this month, prices slightly retreated to around $4,700 but have since rebounded to $5,050 as of press time. In contrast, Bitcoin has been sluggish since October last year, falling 52.4% from its high of $126,080, dropping to about $60,000 last Friday, but then rebounding to $69,050.

Industry commentators note that although Bitcoin exhibits characteristics of a hard currency, its recent trend resembles a high-risk growth asset rather than a traditional safe haven. Jack Mallers, CEO of Strike, and Grayscale both believe that Bitcoin’s positioning as “digital gold” is being tested by the market.

Overall, the enthusiasm for tokenized gold highlights market preferences for safe-haven assets and reflects a trend among investors to rebalance their portfolios between traditional precious metals and crypto assets.