While reserve-backed crypto assets and stablecoin market valuations increased a great deal during the last year, gold-backed cryptocurrencies have also seen their market caps swell. Between the tokens tether gold and pax gold, the market valuations of these two gold cryptos are nearing a billion dollars in value with $742 million today.
Tether Gold’s market cap increases by more than 19,000% in less than 2 years, while Pax Gold has increased by more than 15,000%
On February 21, 2020, the market valuation of tether gold (XAUT) was $2.1 million and 23 months later the valuation increased by 19,423% to reach $410 million. Since March 24, 2020, i.e. 672 days ago, pax gold (PAXG) saw its market capitalization increase from $2.2 million to $332.7 million today. The increase in gold-backed crypto token PAXG over the past 22 months was around 15,022%.
Both projects claim to be backed by one ounce of .999 fine gold which means XAUT’s vaults should hold 223,921 ounces of fine gold. PAXG’s reserves should be around 181,321 ounces of the precious metal.
According to PAXG specifications, the token is backed by a fine troy ounce of a London Good Delivery gold bar. While both gold-backed tokens have seen significant increases in market capitalization over the past two years, trading volume is light. XAUT’s trading volume on January 25 is $1.5 million while PAXG has $16.1 million in 24-hour trades.
Tether gold only has three major trading pairs which include tether (USDT) with 66.92% of all trades today, USD with 26.69%, and BTC with 6.39% of today’s XAUT swaps. Data shows that Bitfinex and FTX are the most active XAUT exchanges.
Pax Gold has many more trading pairs with USDT capturing most PAXG swaps with 46.70% of PAXG trades today. This is followed by BTC (20.27%), USD (12.52%), WETH (8.13%), EUR (7.19%) and ETH (3.22%). Binance is the most active exchange on PAXG followed by Kucoin and Crypto.com.
PMGT and DGX Market Valuations Are Much Smaller Than Competitors
In addition to XAUT and PAXG, the gold-backed tokens perth mint gold token (PMGT) and digix gold (DGX) both have market caps above $1 million each. PMGT has a $1.7 million market capitalization and DGX has $1.1 million today. 100% of PMGT trades are settled in AUD via the Independent Reserve, while a large portion of DGX swaps are settled in the Indonesian rupiah (IDR) via the exchange Indodax.
While PMGT is also backed by a fine troy ounce of physical gold like XAUT and PAXG, DGX tokens are backed by a gram of LBMA (London Bullion Market Association) gold. According to the Digixdao team, the assets are stored in a secure house located in Singapore.
PMGT and DGX have not seen the growth XAUT and PAXG have seen. On March 12, 2020, PMGT had a market valuation of $177,205 and since then it’s increased 859%. DGX had a market valuation of $1.2 million in May 2018, and today the valuation is roughly the same.
