Yield tied to thUSD and thGOLD comes from a long-established financing market in physical gold, not from crypto traders reaching for risk, according to a TechFlowPost-translated article by Theo.
Mustafa Centre sells gold at scale without taking a price bet
The article uses Singapore’s Mustafa Centre as its central example. A single store there sells about 1,100 pounds of gold jewelry a month, and the retailer says it keeps inventory close to one ton at any given time. At current prices, that stock is worth more than $100 million.
What stands out is not only the sales volume but the way inventory is managed. The store treats its gold holdings as a constant. If it sells 110 pounds of jewelry in a day, it buys back 110 pounds of gold the same day. If sales rise the next day, it buys more. That means the company earns from retail margins on each sale rather than from moves in the gold price.
As the article puts it, a retailer that leaves inventory exposed to market swings effectively turns itself into a leveraged bet on gold, whether it intends to or not. Long-running jewelry businesses usually avoid that model because jewelry retail and commodity speculation call for different balance sheets and different investors.
Why gold leasing exists
Holding one ton of gold requires one ton of capital. At current prices, that leaves a nine-figure asset sitting inside a retail business, tying up money that could otherwise go to stores and working capital. For that reason, retailers, refiners, processors and mints have long relied on a different approach: borrowing gold and paying a fee to use it.
That is the demand side of the gold leasing market. Lenders with access to physical inventory supply the metal. Borrowers pay a lease rate and post inventory and forward orders as collateral. In return, they get usable gold without deploying as much capital and without directly taking price risk, while the lender earns income on an asset that would otherwise stay idle.
The article stresses that this demand is not speculative. It comes from operating businesses with real order books, and it exists across market conditions because people keep buying jewelry whether gold is expensive or cheap.
A large market with limited public visibility
The report also notes that the gold leasing market is opaque. The London Bullion Market Association, or LBMA, stopped publishing the Gold Forward Offered Rate, or GOFO, on Jan. 30, 2015. GOFO had been published daily since 1989 and served as a benchmark for pricing gold swaps, forwards and leases. Without it, forward and lease rates can no longer be derived publicly in the same way they were for the prior two decades.
The World Gold Council excludes gold used as collateral, deposits and swaps when compiling official gold reserve series, but it does not disclose the amount removed. The article says there is no public dataset that shows the market’s aggregate leasing balance.
There are, however, indicators of the surrounding market’s scale. World Gold Council data showed average daily gold trading across OTC venues, exchanges and ETFs at about $373 billion in June 2026. In London’s settlement system, more than 20 million ounces of gold are net settled each day between four market-making banks. Based on LBMA settlement data, those transfers were worth about $87 billion a day in February this year. The article adds that even this figure understates real activity because the data are net figures and, by London Precious Metals Clearing Limited’s own description, leave out several categories of transfers.
Above-ground gold stocks are put at about 219,900 tonnes, with roughly 36,500 tonnes held by central banks. The article says anyone claiming to know the precise size of the leasing market is making an estimate.
The institutions bringing this market on-chain
Every lease has two sides. Retailers want gold without carrying price risk. On the other side, someone must own gold and be willing to lend it. Historically, the article says, that role has belonged to gold banks and a small number of funds with vault relationships, credit teams and the ability to assess companies in the physical trade.
Theo’s team accessed this market through Libeara, a tokenization platform incubated by SC Ventures, the venture arm of Standard Chartered, and developed together with FundBridge Capital on the “MG 999 On-Chain Gold Fund.”
According to the article, MG 999 is a structured collateralized private credit fund that tracks spot gold performance while lending against physical inventory. Mustafa Gold was listed as its first borrower when the fund launched in December 2025. Libeara was also the first to connect Theo’s team with Mustafa’s team.
The structure matters because counterparty due diligence, fund governance and regulatory packaging are handled by institutions that specialize in that work. That, the article argues, is what allows this income stream to be recognized outside commodity trading desks.
What this means for thUSD and thGOLD
The article says thUSD and thGOLD are built on top of this market. Their counterparties are businesses such as Mustafa, with real order books, standard credit underwriting and demand that does not depend on crypto risk appetite.
Its bottom line is straightforward: gold leasing has financed the physical gold trade for more than a century. Retailers borrow gold and pay lease rates. Lenders earn a return on otherwise idle metal. thUSD and thGOLD are designed to route that leasing income to token holders, and the real constraint has not been the existence of yield but access to the market.