Commodity-backed cryptocurrencies, which are dominated by gold-backed tokens, person seen a historical surge successful issuance this week, with minting volumes hitting their highest constituent successful astatine slightest 5 years.
The leap comes aft golden futures traded supra a $3,500 all-time precocious this week, aft the Swiss Precious Metals Association warned that the U.S.’s 39% tariffs connected Switzerland could person “negative impact" connected the planetary travel of carnal gold. Both golden spot and futures fell aft the archetypal surge, erstwhile a White House authoritative told Bloomberg that the President would present a argumentation clarifying that imports of golden bars should not beryllium taxable to tariffs.
That didn't halt gold-backed tokens from being minted, however.
The informing besides saw gold-based cryptocurrencies, including Tether Gold (XAUT) and Paxos Gold (PAXG), concisely apical $3,390 earlier receding. Minting volumes, per RWA.xyz data, reached $439 cardinal implicit the week, much than doubling the erstwhile $195 cardinal grounds seen successful 2021.

These tokens, which are backed by carnal reserves held successful vaults, let investors to summation vulnerability to the precious metallic and tin beryllium transferred instantly on-chain without crossing borders.
Switzerland, which refines a ample stock of the world’s golden contempt having nary mines of its own, exported much than $61 billion worthy of the metallic to the U.S. implicit the past year.
The determination has triggered a governmental backlash successful Switzerland, with immoderate lawmakers calling for the golden assemblage to enarthrosis portion of the economical fallout. The precious metallic makes up implicit a 4th of Switzerland’s exports, per Swiss National Bank data.