Commodities

Market state

RWA.xyz recorded $4.59bn of distributed value and $3.19bn of represented value in tokenised commodities on 25 July 2026, across 92 assets held by 249,270 addresses. Distributed value was almost unchanged over 30 days at plus 0.09%, while monthly transfer volume fell 47.34% to $3.38bn and monthly active addresses rose 44.74% to 51,519 - more accounts, less turnover per account.

Gold accounts for the large majority of tradable value: Tether Gold at $2.46bn and Paxos Gold at $1.80bn on 25 July 2026. Justoken's JMWH on the XRP Ledger was recorded at $2.23bn, with the same platform's soybean oil and soybean tokens on Polygon at $470m and $164m; Ctrl Alt's first diamond collection on the XRP Ledger stood at $105m.

A separate figure is frequently conflated with this market and should not be: Tether Holdings disclosed $20bn of physical gold in group reserves as of 31 March 2026 in its BDO attestation. That gold backs the wider reserve pool, and only the Tether Gold token itself - $2.46bn - is a tokenised commodity claim.

Experimental exposures remain small. Uranium.io's xU3O8 token, built with Tezos, Archax and Curzon Uranium and trading on Etherlink, had a market capitalisation of $8.5m across 1.6m tokens when CoinGecko was accessed in June 2026.

Market structure

The gold tokens are the only part of this market with continuous two-sided liquidity. Each token represents allocated metal held by a custodian - Paxos Gold under Paxos Trust Company, Tether Gold under Tether's custody arrangements - and both offer physical redemption above minimum bar-size thresholds, which anchors the token price to spot with a spread reflecting custody, insurance and redemption friction. Trading happens on centralised exchanges and, for the Ethereum-native tokens, on automated market makers.

Agricultural and warehouse-receipt tokens work differently. Value derives from documented inventory at a named facility, transfer is restricted to onboarded participants, and there is no retail redemption. These are financing and provenance instruments rather than trading vehicles, which is consistent with high recorded value and low turnover.

Diamonds and uranium sit at the illiquid end: single collections or vaulted lots, appraisal-based or index-referenced pricing, and a handful of venues.

The divergence between rising active addresses and falling transfer volume in the 30 days to 25 July 2026 is the structural signal worth tracking: the holder base is broadening while the market's use is shifting from turnover toward holding.

Risks

Every token in this class collapses to a custody question. The holder's protection is the custodian's segregation, the auditor's inventory verification and the enforceability of the redemption right - not the blockchain. Attestation scope and frequency vary materially between issuers, and warehouse-receipt products depend on physical inspection regimes that are not publicly verifiable.

Redemption is a practical constraint rather than a right for most holders: minimum sizes for physical gold delivery exceed typical position sizes, so small holders rely on secondary-market exit.

Liquidity risk is severe outside gold. A 47.34% fall in monthly transfer volume in the 30 days to 25 July 2026 shows how quickly turnover can thin.

Other exposures: basis risk between token price and spot, widening in stress; concentration of gold-token supply in two issuers; jurisdictional risk where custody and issuer sit in different regimes; and, for agricultural tokens, commodity-specific spoilage, grading and delivery disputes.

Regulatory treatment

Gold tokens have generally been treated as commodity interests rather than securities in the United States, leaving the CFTC's anti-fraud and anti-manipulation authority as the main federal hook and state trust-company supervision as the substantive one. Paxos Gold is issued by Paxos Trust Company under New York State Department of Financial Services supervision, which imposes custody, segregation and reporting requirements on the issuer.

The European Union is the binding constraint for this class. A token referencing the value of a commodity is an asset-referenced token under MiCA, and as of 12 March 2026 no asset-referenced tokens had been authorised anywhere in the EU, nearly two years after the regime took effect - against 29 authorised e-money tokens across 19 issuers. Commodity-backed tokens therefore have no cleared route to EU distribution, which is a structural cap on the market's addressable base rather than a temporary delay.

The CFTC's tokenized collateral and stablecoins initiative and its digital assets pilot programme for tokenized collateral in derivatives markets could give gold tokens a margin use case, which would be the first regulated institutional demand channel for the class.

Warehouse-receipt and agricultural tokens are governed primarily by commercial law on documents of title in the facility's jurisdiction, not by financial regulation, which is why disclosure standards in that sub-segment are the weakest in tokenised markets.