Stablecoin Giant Tether Expands Leading Gold-Backed Token to BNB Chain

Tether said Thursday that it has launched its gold-backed token XAUT on BNB Chain, expanding access to the dominant tokenized gold product after the precious metal soared to new price heights in recent months.

The listing connects BNB Chain's ecosystem to XAUT, which is the largest gold-backed token on the market with a nearly $2.5 billion market cap, as of this writing. That’s nearly half the total tokenized gold market, which currently sits at $5.3 billion, per data from CoinGecko. Paxos’ PAX Gold isn’t far behind XAUT with a market cap around $2.3 billion.

Originally launched on Ethereum, each XAUT token represents one fine troy ounce of physical gold held in Swiss vaults as London Good Delivery bars, with 1:1 backing confirmed by independent attestations. Per Tether’s latest attestation report, the firm held over 520,000 troy ounces of gold as of the end of 2025.

Leading crypto exchange Binance—which launched the BNB token and BNB Chain network—has opened spot trading for XAUT pairs including USDT, Bitcoin, FDUSD, USDC, and TRY.

“People understand gold. They trust it because it has held value for millennia,” said Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, in a statement. “With XAUT, we are not changing what gold is; we are making it usable in a modern financial system. You still have direct exposure to physical gold, but now it can move instantly, settle globally, and integrate seamlessly with digital markets.

“Listing on BNB Chain expands that access to hundreds of millions of users,” he added, “bringing gold into a system where it can actually be used, not just held.”

The price of gold peaked above $5,500 in late January and was still above the $5,000 level earlier this month, but has since ticked down to a recent price of $4,442, falling nearly 15% in the last month. Users on prediction market Myriad—which is operated by Decrypt's parent company, Dastan—remain bullish on the asset, giving a 64% chance that it will next rise to $4,900 rather than fall to $3,700.

Tether is the firm behind USDT, the leading dollar-pegged stablecoin with an $184 billion market cap and recent daily trading volume above $64 billion. Earlier this week, the company said that it has secured a “Big Four” accounting firm for the first time to perform a full independent audit on USDT reserves, but has yet to identify the firm in question.

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