Gold is in its strongest rally since 1979, and this time the main buyers are central banks rather than retail traders, according to an article by Ledn co-founder Mauricio Di Bartolomeo, translated and published by Foresight News through MarsBit.
The article says gold briefly touched a record high of nearly $5,600 per ounce in January. It adds that global central banks made net purchases of 863 metric tons in 2025 and are expected to add about 850 tons more in 2026, close to twice the average annual pace seen before 2022. In the latest World Gold Council survey of 76 reserve managers, 89% said they expect global official gold holdings to keep rising over the next 12 months, while a record 45% said they plan to increase their own national reserves.
Three ways to hold gold
The article says investors have had several ways to gain exposure to gold for centuries, but each comes with trade-offs.
Physical gold, including coins and bars, is difficult to store, transport, and trade. Holders either rely on third-party custody or keep it themselves, and both choices carry risk. Gold exchange-traded funds such as GLD offer price exposure more conveniently, but the article says they are effectively available only to investors who can open brokerage accounts with access to tradable international markets. They cannot be spent, transferred, or sent directly like cash, cannot be redeemed for physical gold by retail investors, and charge an annual management fee of 0.40%.
The article presents tokenized gold as a third option. One digital token representing one ounce of gold corresponds to a physical bar stored in professional vaults in Zurich or London. It can be transferred globally in seconds, received by anyone with a mobile phone, and redeemed for physical bullion, the article says.
Stablecoins as the model
To explain the possible impact of tokenized gold, the article looks first at what happened after the dollar was tokenized. Dollar stablecoins are described as digital tokens backed by an equivalent amount of dollar reserves. They move across the internet via blockchains and can be used and spent like dollars. Anyone with a digital wallet on a phone can send and receive them without a bank account. Cross-border transfers cost only a few cents, settle in seconds, run around the clock, and can be exchanged into U.S. dollars or local fiat currencies at any time.
After the pandemic, demand surged for digital dollar rails that operate all day, settle within minutes, and cost very little. The article cites DefiLlama data showing stablecoin supply grew from about $27 billion at the end of 2020 to more than $300 billion now, an increase of more than 10 times over a little more than five years.
Transaction activity expanded as well. Based on CEX.IO data cited in the article, stablecoin volume hit a record $28 trillion in the first quarter of 2026. The piece notes that much of that activity came from automated trading, but says filtered data from a16z that excludes bots still showed $4.5 trillion for the quarter, a level close to what major card networks process in a full year.
The article also points to regulation. After the GENIUS Act was signed in July 2025, the United States established a federal regulatory framework for dollar tokens that requires 1:1 reserves in cash and short-term U.S. Treasuries. In the author’s view, stablecoins have moved from novelty to regulated settlement infrastructure.
The problem is the wrapper, not the metal
The article argues that gold’s issue has never been the asset itself, but the form in which people hold it.
Physical gold is hard to verify, costly to store and insure, heavily dependent on location for liquidity and liquidation, almost impossible to divide cleanly, and difficult to move across borders in large amounts. ETFs solve part of that problem, but ETF shares remain indirect claims and can only be traded during market hours. Retail investors cannot redeem them for physical metal, self-custody them, transfer them directly to another person, or easily use them as collateral outside brokerage systems.
The article highlights a divergence in investor behavior. In March 2026, U.S.-listed gold ETFs recorded a monthly outflow of $13 billion, the largest on record. During the same period, demand for physical bars and coins rose 42% year over year, and purchases of gold bars by U.S. retail investors increased as well. The author’s reading is that investors still want gold, but are growing less satisfied with the current packaging.
Tokenized gold is accelerating
The article names Tether Gold (XAUt) and Pax Gold (PAXG) as examples of tokens that represent ownership claims on specific allocated gold bars. It says those tokens are backed by real gold, can be verified, and can be redeemed for physical metal. Unlike a full bar, they can be divided into fractions of an ounce, transferred across the world within minutes, traded 24/7, and used as collateral to obtain dollar liquidity without selling the underlying gold.
The author compares the adoption curve to dollar tokens around 2020 and says the pattern is already starting to show. Tokenized gold trading volume reached $90.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026, surpassing the full-year 2025 total of $84.6 billion. Market capitalization rose above $6 billion in February. In the first quarter, growth was 5.5 times faster than the increase in physical gold holdings, and more than 44,500 holder wallets were added.
That remains small relative to gold’s roughly $30 trillion total market value, the article says. But it makes the same point with stablecoins in 2019, when their share of the broader money supply was also tiny. New forms start small, then compete on usability.
Counterparty risk remains the key objection
The article says the most common criticism of tokenized assets is counterparty risk: if you do not hold it in your hand, you do not truly own it. The author says that concern is valid, and notes that some people are willing to take full responsibility for their savings and absorb the cost that comes with doing so.
At the same time, he argues that most gold investors already accept intermediaries through ETFs, custodians, or unallocated gold accounts. The article describes unallocated gold accounts as paper claims in which the holder owns a bank IOU rather than a specific bar. By contrast, a well-structured gold token is described as a 1:1 claim on a specific allocated bar that can be redeemed for physical metal.
The article says the two main issuers both provide quarterly reserve attestation reports, and that Tether has just completed an audit by KPMG. The author presents that as a clearer and more transparent rights structure.
A new rail for a 5,000-year-old asset
In the final section, Di Bartolomeo places Bitcoin, stablecoins, and tokenized gold on the same timeline of financial infrastructure. He writes that Bitcoin rose because it created digital value that can move and settle over the internet at any time, without intermediaries, and be reached by anyone globally. Stablecoins rose because they put the dollar on the same online rails, though through intermediary issuers.
Now, the same intermediaries that tokenized the dollar are tokenizing gold, and they already have large distribution networks, the article says. More importantly, the author argues, tokenized gold addresses an access problem for large populations around the world by turning gold into a more practical format.
He also refers to what he saw in Venezuela as people first discovered Bitcoin and later stablecoins. 「It solved our problems, so we adopted it.」 He says that experience is one reason he devoted his career to the sector. In his view, technology may not change whether people want to own gold, but it has created a new way for billions of people to hold an asset that has existed for 5,000 years.