Tether gold token XAUt goes live on BNB Chain as RWA race accelerates

Tether has launched its gold‑backed XAUt token on BNB Chain, pairing tokenized bullion with USDT on a network that already hosts roughly $3.2 billion in real‑world assets.

Tether has deployed its tokenized gold asset Tether Gold (XAUt) on BNB Chain, bringing physical bullion deeper into the on-chain financial system with faster settlement and broader user access. XAUt tracks the price of gold by representing ownership of specific bars stored in secure Swiss vaults, with each token pegged 1:1 to one troy ounce, giving holders exposure to gold without traditional custody or logistics. Tether says the vaults currently hold roughly 1,800 bars backing the product, amounting to more than 22,100 kilograms of gold, while its existing dollar stablecoin tether links users to on‑chain cash via USDT’s large market.

In announcing the launch, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino framed XAUt’s expansion as part of a broader effort to merge hard assets with digital rails and near‑instant transfer. He described the initiative as “integrating gold into the digital financial system with instant settlement,” arguing that tokenized metals can act both as a store of value and as collateral in decentralized finance or institutional workflows. The BNB Chain deployment builds on XAUt’s presence across multiple networks and extends its reach to more than a dozen chains via Tether’s USDt0 transport layer, while bitcoin continues to anchor crypto’s risk spectrum, with its price tracked on the bitcoin page.

For BNB Chain, hosting XAUt is another step in its strategy to become a core venue for real‑world assets. The network now ranks as the second‑largest RWA blockchain globally, with around $3.2 billion in tokenized assets issued and more than 41,000 on‑chain holders, putting it behind only ethereum in raw RWA scale while offering lower transaction costs. Those metrics strengthen BNB Chain’s pitch as a home for tokenized commodities, treasuries and credit products that can settle more quickly and cheaply than in legacy systems. In a previous crypto.news story on tokenization, issuers highlighted how RWAs can compress settlement cycles and reduce intermediaries for global investors.

The Tether XAUt integration arrives as tokenization has become a central narrative for both crypto‑native projects and traditional finance giants experimenting with on‑chain funds and bonds. Large asset managers are piloting tokenized securities, while stablecoin issuers are branching into non‑fiat instruments to diversify revenues and deepen their role in the market. Another crypto.news story on RWAs noted that on‑chain credit and treasury products increasingly sit alongside ethereum‑based DeFi, blurring the line between TradFi and crypto liquidity.

XAUt now sits next to USDT on BNB Chain, creating a two‑asset stack of digital cash and digital gold that can be deployed in trading pairs, DeFi collateral pools or hedging strategies that mirror the traditional “dollar plus bullion” allocation. For traders and treasurers, a token mapping directly to a troy ounce of gold backed by specific bars offers a familiar risk profile, but with the added flexibility of on‑chain transfers, programmable settlement and composability with lending and derivatives protocols.

From a competitive standpoint, the launch underlines how aggressively large stablecoin issuers are moving into the RWA segment, not only to capture fee income but to lock in network effects across chains. As more institutional and retail users gain access to tokenized metals and treasuries via BNB Chain and similar networks, the divide between traditional commodities markets and crypto‑native liquidity pools is likely to narrow further. In a recent crypto.news story on stablecoins, analysts stressed that products like USDT and tokenized gold could become core building blocks for “Finance 2.0,” with price discovery for assets such as tether, bitcoin and ethereum increasingly happening on‑chain rather than in legacy venues.