Have you been hearing more and more people around you discussing "gold" lately?
Yes, I'm talking about physical gold. With the rise of geopolitical risks and global macroeconomic uncertainty, the total market capitalization of gold has (at one point) surpassed $30 trillion, firmly securing its position as the world's leading asset.
At the same time, something quite interesting is happening in the crypto world. Beyond Bitcoin, widely regarded as "digital gold," physical gold is rapidly moving on-chain: tokenized gold, represented by Tether Gold (XAUT), has gained new capabilities—divisibility, programmability, and even interest-bearing capabilities—through the RWA wave. It is challenging a narrative that has long been almost monopolized by Bitcoin: "Who is the real digital gold?" BTC: A decade of narrative evolution Is BTC a currency or an asset? Is its core function payment or a store of value? Or is it a risky asset similar to a tech stock? Since its birth in 2009, this question has run through almost the entire history of Bitcoin.
Although Satoshi Nakamoto clearly stated the "Electronic Cash" attribute of BTC in the white paper, with the evolution of its own scale, this has almost become a topic of narrative reversal and endless community debate at different times in the past 10 years - from an early means of payment to "value storage" and "alternative assets." In particular, the official approval of spot ETFs in 2024 marked a turning point in the narrative. More people are no longer optimistic about Bitcoin becoming a "global currency" for transactions and payments. Instead, more and more people are beginning to view Bitcoin as a consensus-based store of value, or "digital gold": Like gold, it has a scarce total supply, predictable and stable production, but at the same time, it possesses advantages that gold cannot match: greater divisibility (1 satoshi = 0.00000001 BTC), portability (cross-border transfers in seconds), and liquidity (24/7 market). For this reason, Bitcoin has gradually become the third global store of value logic in the macro-monetary system, following the US dollar and gold.
Source: companiesmarketcap.com
According to companiesmarketcap statistics, gold currently holds an absolute leading position among the world's top 10 assets, with its total market value (28.4 trillion) far exceeding the sum of the next 9 assets (26 trillion). It's important to note that even now, when BTC surpassed $100,000, its total market capitalization was only $2 trillion, equivalent to only about 1/15 of the total market capitalization of gold. This is precisely the underlying motivation behind the BTC community's continued emphasis on the "digital gold" narrative, targeting the largest and oldest store of value in the traditional financial world. Interestingly, while BTC strives to align itself with the "digital gold" narrative, gold itself is also being "digitalized." The most direct driver is the continuous record-breaking prices of real-world gold and the wave of RWAs this year, which has led to the rapid rise of tokenized gold, represented by Tether Gold (XAUT) and PAX Gold (PAXG). Because they are anchored to physical gold, each token issued is backed by an equivalent amount of physical gold reserves. Therefore, this batch of "digital gold" products is undoubtedly a new financial species in the fields of Crypto and TradFi. The "emerging" wave of gold RWAs In fact, the word "emerging" may not be very accurate for tokenized gold. Strictly speaking, neither XAUT, the currently largest, nor PAXG, a close second, are newly launched internet-famous products. Instead, the current RWA wave and macro market conditions have helped them gain new strategic significance and market attention. Taking XAUT as an example, its early development can be traced back to the end of 2019. At that time, Paolo Ardoino, then CTO of Bitfinex and Tether, revealed that Tether was planning to launch a gold-backed stablecoin, Tether Gold. The XAUT white paper was also released on January 28, 2022. The white paper explicitly states that each XAUT token represents ownership of one ounce of physical gold, and Tether guarantees that it has physical reserves of the corresponding amount of gold issued, all of which is stored in "first-class Swiss vaults." As of the time of writing, the total issuance of XAUT has exceeded US$1.55 billion, representing a physical reserve of approximately 966 gold bars (totaling 11,693.4 kilograms).
Source: Tether
In fact, in the white paper of Tether Gold, we can see its clear positioning of its own advantages:
Compared to physical gold, "gold stablecoin" can divide the difficult-to-divide precious metals into smaller denominations, which is more convenient to carry and transport, and greatly reduces the threshold for personal investment;
Compared to gold ETF, it realizes 7×24 asset management. 24/7 trading, with no custody fees, can significantly increase the speed and efficiency of asset transfers. Tether Gold believes it can help users own the gold backing it while also achieving extremely high liquidity and divisibility. In other words, tokenization imbues real gold with the unique "digital properties" of BTC, allowing it to be fully absorbed into the digital world for the first time, becoming an asset unit that can be freely circulated, combined, and calculated. It is this step that makes tokenized gold products like XAUT more than just "on-chain gold certificates" and opens up a vast new world of on-chain possibilities. Of course, this trend has also made the market rethink: when both gold and BTC become on-chain assets, is their relationship one of competition or symbiosis? Reflections on Tokenized Gold and Digital Gold Overall, if the core narrative of BTC is "scarcity consensus in the digital world," then the biggest difference of tokenized gold (XAUT/PAXG) is "introducing scarcity consensus into the digital world."
This is a subtle but essential difference, in which BTC creates trust completely from zero, while tokenized gold digitizes the traditional trust structure, just as CZ’s latest tweet bluntly said:
"Tokenized gold is not real on-chain gold, but is based on trust in the issuer's ability to perform. Even in extreme circumstances, such as management changes or war, users still need to rely on the continuation of this trust system."
This sentence points out the fundamental difference between tokenized gold and Bitcoin, that is,
The trust in Bitcoin is algorithmic consensus, without any issuer or custodian, but the trust in tokenized gold is institutional credit - you need to believe Tether or Paxos will strictly follow the reserve commitment. This also means that Bitcoin is a product of "trustlessness", while tokenized gold is an extension of "re-trust".
Of course, if we only look at the addition from the dimension of asset value, in the traditional financial system, the core value of gold lies in risk aversion and preservation of value, but in the context of blockchain, tokenized gold has programmability for the first time:
It can be used as collateral for DeFi protocols, lending stablecoins on platforms such as Aave and Compound for leverage or yield management;
It can be integrated into smart contract logic to become yield-bearing gold, with the potential to achieve yield-bearing gold;
It can also circulate freely between different networks through cross-chain bridges, becoming a stable liquid asset in a multi-chain ecosystem;
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