PAX Gold

PAX Gold (PAXG) is a gold-backed token issued by Paxos Trust Company, a regulated financial institution based in New York. Each PAXG token represents one fine troy ounce of a London Good Delivery gold bar stored in professional vault facilities. Because the token is a direct claim on physical gold, its value tracks the real-time market price of gold rather than moving independently like most cryptocurrencies.

How it works

PAXG is an ERC-20 token on the Ethereum blockchain, so it has no mining, staking, or independent consensus mechanism of its own — it inherits Ethereum's security. What makes it distinctive is the redemption and audit structure behind it: holders have ownership rights to specific allocated gold held in custody by Paxos, and token holders can look up the serial number, value, and physical characteristics of the vaulted gold associated with their Ethereum address using Paxos's lookup tool. On the Paxos platform, tokens can be converted into allocated gold, unallocated gold, or fiat currency.

Supply and role in the ecosystem

PAXG has no fixed maximum supply. Tokens are minted when gold is deposited into custody and burned when holders redeem, so supply expands and contracts with demand for tokenized gold. Around 437,000 PAXG are currently outstanding, corresponding to roughly that many troy ounces of vaulted gold.

PAX Gold occupies a specific niche in crypto markets: it gives traders and long-term holders exposure to gold with the divisibility, transferability, and settlement speed of a digital asset. It allows fractional ownership of physical bars, something difficult to achieve in traditional gold markets, and it is used across exchanges, wallets, and lending platforms as a tokenized real-world asset. As one of the earliest regulated tokenized commodities, launched in 2019, it helped establish the template for the broader real-world-asset (RWA) category.