BTCC Tokenized Gold Trading Explodes 809% to $5.7B as Market Hits Record Growth
Gold's digital twin just went supernova.
Forget the old safe-haven play. The latest surge in tokenized gold trading isn't your grandpa's bullion market—it's a full-scale digital asset invasion into traditional finance's most sacred vault. Volumes aren't just up; they're in the stratosphere, rewriting the rules of what a 'commodity' can be on-chain.
From Vault to Virtual
The mechanism is brutally efficient. Each digital token gets pegged to a physical gram of gold sitting in a high-security vault. But here's the kicker: the token trades 24/7 on global crypto exchanges. No bank holidays, no broker delays, no settling for paper certificates. It cuts out the traditional custodial middlemen and their fat fees, offering instant settlement and fractional ownership to anyone with a wallet.
The Liquidity Tsunami
This isn't a niche experiment anymore. The volume figures tell a story of mass migration. When traditional markets wobble, capital isn't just fleeing to physical gold—it's pouring into its more agile, programmable counterpart. The growth percentage isn't a typo; it's a signal flare. Institutional players and retail investors alike are voting with their wallets, choosing the path of least friction and maximum utility.
A New Gold Standard?
The implications are tectonic. This fusion of millennia-old value storage with blockchain's transparency and efficiency creates a hybrid asset class. It bypasses the entire legacy system of gold ETFs and futures contracts, offering direct exposure without the usual Wall Street baggage. It turns gold from a static, physical hedge into a dynamic, yield-generating financial primitive within DeFi ecosystems.
Sure, the old-guard finance crowd might scoff—they're probably too busy collecting management fees on underperforming funds to notice the vault door swinging open. But while they debate the 'intrinsic value' of digital assets, smart money is busy tokenizing everything of intrinsic value. Gold was just the first domino to fall. The record growth isn't an anomaly; it's a preview.
How did tokenized gold perform in 2025?
Tokenized gold had a year for the record books in 2025, with its market capitalization increasing by 177%. It ROSE from $1.6 billion to $4.4 billion, according to data from CEX.IO.
The growth of tokenized gold also accounted for about 25% of the net growth in real-world assets (RWAs).
Trading volume reached $178 billion in 2025 for the year, with fourth-quarter activity peaking above $126 billion. More than 115,000 new wallet addresses entered the category, which was fourteen times what it saw in 2024.
It may come as a surprise to some, but tokenized gold performed better than the actual gold, with its market growing in size by over 2.6 times.
A reason for the rise in tokenized gold trading activities lies in the fact that it is being done on crypto platforms like BTCC, where there are features like 24-hour trading without the restrictions found on traditional platforms. Transactions are also relatively faster.
By trading volume, tokenized gold WOULD rank as the second-largest gold investment product globally, trailing only SPDR Gold Shares.
Central banks buying gold kept the markets busy, with another 755 tonnes expected to be taken off the market in 2026, according to market forecasts. JP Morgan has projected gold prices moving towards $5,000 per ounce by the end of 2026. Gold currently trades at over $4,611 per ounce as of the time of writing.
“The 809% surge from Q1 to Q4 reflects gold’s rally driven by geopolitical tensions and policy uncertainty,” said Marcus Chen, Product Manager at BTCC Exchange.
Chen also stated that BTCC’s tokenized products give its users direct access to trade with cryptocurrency while gold continues to hit record highs.
Tether, Paxos Gold were in demand
BTCC currently offers three tokenized gold perpetual futures products, each serving distinct trader needs.
GOLDUSDT tracks spot gold prices for direct exposure and hedging strategies. PAXGUSDT which is PAX Gold, is an Ethereum-based token launched by Paxos under New York Department of Financial Services regulation (NYDFS), with each token backed by one troy ounce of physical gold.
XAUTUSDT is issued by Tether for cryptocurrency market circulation and is also backed by physical gold with on-chain transferability for decentralized finance integration.
The $5.72 billion in annual tokenized gold trading represents about 10.7% of BTCC’s total tokenized futures volume of $53.1 billion for 2025, as reported in the exchange’s fourth-quarter growth report.
BTCC will expand tokenized product offerings
BTCC exchange has positioned itself at the intersection of crypto trading and tokenized real-world assets as more institutional adoption of blockchain-based financial products continues to be on the rise.
“Gold is just the beginning,” Chen said, speaking about how it plans to meet the projected demand for tokenized assets in 2026, before adding: “We’re actively working on expanding into other commodities and traditional finance products. With what we’ve built here, BTCC is ready to bring tokenization to a much wider range of assets and make them accessible to traders everywhere.”
