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Aileen Chuang

This Lunar New Year, Hongkongers can gift friends and family digital gold tokens, a new way of blending the city’s tradition of giving gold for good wishes with the convenience of blockchain technology.
HSBC added this new transfer feature earlier this month to its retail gold token, which represents fractional ownership of physical gold stored in a secure vault and is the only retail-focused gold token approved by Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission.
The bank’s enhancement to its gold token, which has racked up over US$1 billion in trading volume in the two years since launch, highlights a rising appetite for tokenised real-world assets as Hong Kong doubles down on digital finance.
Banks are not the only institutions rolling out tokenised gold. Asset managers, fintech firms and cryptocurrency companies are coming up with innovative products for investors to gain exposure to gold with the added transparency of blockchain.
Tokenised gold was giving investors a new way to hold the metal, easing pain points around access, custody, transfer and trading, according to experts. The growth comes amid record gold prices, a hunt for diversification and the rise of stablecoins and digital money, which could make it easier to move in and out of digital assets.

Hong Kong aims to approve its first batch of stablecoin issuers by March, as part of a wider regulatory drive to develop its digital-asset market. The city has also stepped up efforts to build a broader gold ecosystem, from trading and clearing to storage.
“I see demand for tokenised gold increasing while global political uncertainty remains,” said Mike Foy, chief financial officer of Amina Bank. The Swiss lender’s five-year-old gold token saw record subscriptions in the last six months of last year.
He expected tokenised gold to be a key part of investors’ portfolios in the mid to long term as “it often costs less than traditional ETFs [exchange-traded funds], has greater transparency due to the blockchain and the transaction friction is significantly less”.
“Tokenised gold is unlikely to replace physical bullion, but it can become a dominant digital interface for trading and portfolio management, much like [how] ETFs became the main vehicle for price exposure without displacing physical gold,” said Daniel Rabetti, an assistant professor for accounting and finance at the National University of Singapore Business School.
In 2025, daily turnover in PAXG, one of the largest bullion-backed tokens issued by New York-based Paxos, was several times higher than GLD, the world’s biggest gold ETF run by State Street Global Advisors, even though PAXG was backed by only about US$2 billion of gold, compared with more than US$170 billion in GLD holdings as of early February.
“People have used gold for 8,000 years, and it always costs you something to own gold – for storage, for transport,” said Iggy Ioppe, chief investment officer at Theo, a crypto trading infrastructure start-up. “Putting things on chain and tokenising real-world assets unlocks a whole world of decentralised finance [DeFi].”
Theo marks a more leveraged push to turn tokenised gold into a yield-bearing product designed for DeFi venues.
Last month, the firm launched tokenised gold built on FundBridge Capital’s on-chain gold fund and supported by Standard Chartered’s tokenisation platform, Libeara. The fund lends money to gold retailers against their inventory, so investors still track the gold price but earn interest on these loans, subject to counterparty, collateral and market risks.
Ioppe said he saw DeFi as having a “Lego blocks” structure as it was permissionless, required no minimum investment or unnecessary paperwork and was truly global, making it easy to stack and build new financial services.
Tokenised gold in DeFi could be put to work rather than being just held, using it as collateral or combining it with stablecoins in yield‑generating strategies, according to Rabetti.
However, many existing regulations on stablecoins focus on physical backing, anti-money-laundering and investor protection, limiting applications in the DeFi space.
How tokenised gold would take shape in DeFi remained unclear, as success would hinge on transparent proof of reserves, said Amina Bank’s Foy.
“The key distinction is not ‘DeFi versus traditional finance’, but whether tokenisation allows gold to be used more flexibly across markets and platforms, while still anchored to trusted custody and legal structures,” said David Chan, managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group.
This is where Hong Kong had the edge, with progress in overall tokenisation enabled by three forces: regulatory clarity, government support and market innovation, he added.
“Hong Kong has a sophisticated gold investor base and a strong physical and financial gold ecosystem,” Chan said. “Adoption [of tokenised gold] will ultimately depend on tangible investor benefits rather than the novelty of structure.”


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Tokenised gold is giving investors a new way to hold the metal, easing pain points around access, custody, transfer and trading. Photo: Shutterstock

HSBC’s retail gold token has racked up over US$1 billion in trading volume in the two years since launch. Photo: Handout

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Beyond banks, asset managers, fintechs and crypto firms are racing to launch innovative tokenised gold products for investors


Beyond banks, asset managers, fintechs and crypto firms are racing to launch innovative tokenised gold products for investors.


What is tokenised gold and why are financial institutions and investors looking at it?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Beyond banks, asset managers, fintechs and crypto firms are racing to launch innovative tokenised gold products for investors

Beyond banks, asset managers, fintechs and crypto firms are racing to launch innovative tokenised gold products for investors