Tokenized Gold Controls the Commodity Market
Bitcoin (BTC) and broader cryptocurrency markets dipped roughly 2.8% on May 23, but a quieter data point drew attention in early trading. Gold accounts for 99.8% of the entire tokenized commodity market, according to a report from a16z Crypto.
Every other tokenized commodity, including silver, oil, and agricultural products, competes for the remaining 0.2% of a market that a16z puts at well under $1 billion in total value. The concentration is striking, and it raises a straightforward question about whether tokenized commodities were ever a sector at all or just a gold story told at scale.
Gold’s Grip on the Tokenized Commodity Market
The a16z Crypto report covers the broader state of real-world asset tokenization in 2026.
Real-world asset tokenization, or RWA tokenization, is the process of representing ownership of a physical asset, such as gold or a treasury bond, as a digital token on a blockchain. The token can then be traded, held, or transferred without requiring the buyer to physically possess the underlying asset.
Gold’s dominance within this category is not a recent development.
Tokenized gold products such as Tether Gold (XAUT) and PAX Gold (PAXG) have traded on public blockchains since 2019 and 2020. By the time most competing commodity token projects were launched, gold had already captured institutional attention, deep liquidity, and a track record.
Competing products never achieved the same combination.
The 99.8% figure is also a function of what has not happened. Tokenized oil projects faced custody and regulatory complexity that gold avoided.
Agricultural commodity tokens struggled to find retail demand. Silver tokens exist but trade thin volumes.
Gold’s combination of physical scarcity, global familiarity, and relatively simple custodianship gave it structural advantages that other commodities have not matched.
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How We Got Here
Tokenized gold entered the cryptocurrency market as a niche product aimed at investors who wanted gold exposure without physical storage costs. Adoption was modest through 2020 and 2021.
The 2022 crypto bear market paradoxically helped tokenized gold. As speculative tokens collapsed, gold’s reputation as a store of value attracted capital looking for something with tangible backing.
By 2024, total tokenized gold supply across major products had grown past $1 billion briefly before retreating.
In 2025, broader RWA tokenization accelerated, with tokenized U.S. Treasury products growing faster than tokenized commodities.
Treasury tokens pulled institutional capital that might otherwise have examined commodity tokenization. Gold held its position within the commodity segment regardless, because no alternative commodity token offered comparable liquidity.
The 2026 a16z data reflects a market that has been stable in its concentration for roughly three years.
Gold did not overtake the tokenized commodity market in a sudden shift. It simply occupied the space from the beginning and no challenger found the product-market fit needed to displace it.
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Why Other Commodities Have Not Broken Through
Silver is the most logical next candidate for tokenization at scale.
Silver trades on major commodity exchanges globally, shares gold’s familiarity among retail investors, and has lower per-unit prices that could theoretically make tokenization more accessible. Yet tokenized silver volumes remain negligible.
Liquidity begets liquidity, and gold’s head start has made tokenized silver unattractive to market makers.
Oil presents a different problem. A barrel of crude oil is not static.
It has grades, origins, storage requirements, and quality degradation over time. Creating a token that faithfully represents oil ownership without introducing substantial counterparty and custody risk has proven harder than creating one that represents an allocated gold bar sitting in a Swiss vault.
Projects have attempted it; none have reached meaningful scale.
Agricultural commodities face an additional layer of complexity. Wheat, corn, and coffee are seasonal, perishable, and priced through exchanges with existing warehouse receipt systems.
Blockchain-based tokenization adds cost without yet offering clear advantages over those established systems.
The RWA category as a whole is growing, with tokenized Treasuries and tokenized private credit drawing significant attention from institutional players in 2025 and 2026. That growth, however, has not spread evenly.
Commodities have been left behind while fixed-income products absorbed most of the new institutional capital flowing into on-chain real-world assets.
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What the Concentration Means for the Market
A market that is 99.8% one asset is not a sector in any meaningful competitive sense. It is a single product with a category label.
That matters for how builders, investors, and regulators think about tokenized commodities going forward.
For builders, the concentration suggests that launching a new commodity token requires solving a specific problem gold does not solve, rather than simply replicating gold’s model with a different underlying asset. For investors, the data reinforces gold’s on-chain position as the only commodity token with reliable secondary-market liquidity.
For regulators, a market this concentrated around one asset is simpler to analyze and potentially simpler to regulate than a fragmented landscape of competing products would be.
Existing gold-related financial regulation provides a foundation that regulators can apply to tokenized gold in ways they cannot yet apply to more novel commodity tokens.
The 0.2% outside gold is not zero. Tokenized silver, carbon credits, and other commodity experiments continue to develop.
But until one of those products clears the liquidity and institutional-recognition bar that tokenized gold cleared years ago, the 99.8% figure is unlikely to move in a meaningful direction.
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