Tether Gold vs Pax Gold: which gold token fits you

PAXG vs XAUT at a glance

Pax Gold (PAXG) and Tether Gold (XAUT) are the two largest gold tokens. Each one represents one fine troy ounce of physical gold, so their prices move together and usually sit very close to spot. The real differences are about who stands behind the token: the issuer’s regulator, where the bars are stored, how often someone checks them, what it costs to get out and where you can trade.

Our short take: PAXG wins on regulation and transparency, while XAUT wins on size and on breadth of offshore trading pairs. If you want the background on how a gold token works first, read what PAX Gold is. The sections below go point by point, and we flag every XAUT fact we could not confirm from Tether’s own pages.

Issuer and regulation

PAXG is issued directly by Paxos Trust Company, N.A. Paxos converted to a national trust charter on 12 December 2025 and has operated under the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) since then. Before that it held a New York State trust charter. A national trust bank takes no deposits and is not FDIC-insured, but it answers to a federal bank supervisor. That is the strongest regulatory wrapper any gold token has today.

XAUT is issued by TG Commodities, part of the Tether group. According to an Aave governance post summarising the issuer’s details, TG Commodities moved from the British Virgin Islands to El Salvador in January 2025 and is registered with El Salvador’s digital-asset regulator, the CNAD. That is a real registration, but it is a far lighter regime than US federal bank supervision, and El Salvador courts would matter most if anything went wrong.

Paxos has its own history to weigh. In August 2025 NYDFS announced a $48.5 million settlement with Paxos over due-diligence failures linked to its BUSD partnership with Binance, and in October 2025 Paxos mistakenly minted and then burned about $300 trillion of PYUSD. Neither involved PAXG, but PYUSD shares the same token code. Our PAXG safety guide covers these events in more depth.

Vault: London vs Switzerland

PAXG gold sits in LBMA vaults in London. Paxos’s terms say the bars are held on a segregated basis for the benefit of holders. Attestation data, as summarised by LlamaRisk in August 2026, names the custodians as Brink’s Global Services and ICBC Standard Bank. Each token maps to a specific London Good Delivery bar, and Paxos’s lookup tool shows the serial number, weight and vault for a self-custodied Ethereum or Solana address. Details are on our gold backing page.

XAUT gold is stored in Switzerland. Tether has not publicly named the custodian in the sources we checked. Some readers prefer a Swiss vault for jurisdictional reasons, and that is a fair preference. The trade-off is that you cannot cross-check a named vault operator the way you can with PAXG.

Attestations: monthly KPMG vs quarterly BDO

Paxos publishes a monthly attestation. Reports from 28 February 2025 onward come from KPMG LLP; earlier reports were by WithumSmith+Brown. The June 2026 report showed 452,355 PAXG outstanding against 452,355 fine troy ounces, with no surplus or deficit. The latest listed report on the Paxos transparency page was for August 2026.

XAUT reserves are attested quarterly by BDO Italia. Secondary reports from around July 2026 put Q2 2026 reserves at 707,747.139 ounces; we did not retrieve the primary PDF, so treat that figure as reported, not confirmed. Neither token gets a full financial audit of the issuer in these reports: an attestation checks that the gold exists at a point in time. Still, twelve checks a year by a Big Four firm beat four checks a year.

Fees

PAXG fees come from the official Paxos fee page (checked 12 October 2026). There is no storage fee and no on-chain transfer fee; you only pay network gas. Creation fees are waived until 1 January 2027. Redemption to US dollars costs 0.125% on the first $2 million of 30-day net redemptions, rising in bands to 0.50% above $20 million. Converting PAXG into allocated or unallocated gold costs 0.05%, and idle Paxos accounts pay $2 a month after 12 months with no activity. The full schedule is on our fees and redemption page.

For XAUT we could not confirm fees from a primary source, because the gold.tether.to site did not render for our checks on 12 October 2026. Data aggregators report a 0.25% fee to create and a 0.25% fee to redeem, and a zero transfer fee. Treat those as unconfirmed and check Tether’s site before you rely on them.

Redemption and minimums

Only verified Paxos customers can buy PAXG from or redeem it with Paxos; secondary-market holders sell on an exchange instead. Paxos does not publish a minimum creation size, and creations below 2 ounces carry a flat 0.02 PAXG fee once the waiver ends. Physical delivery needs a full London Good Delivery bar: 430 PAXG plus fees, delivered to a UK vault only, with logistics arranged by the customer. Paxos also says PAXG is currently unavailable in the EU for primary issuance.

For XAUT, secondary sources describe a 50 XAUT minimum for primary purchase plus a 150 USDT account verification deposit, and physical redemption of 430 XAUT delivered to an address in Switzerland. These come from secondary reports, not from Tether’s own pages. In practice, both tokens are built for selling on the market, not for taking a bar home, unless you hold a full bar, about $1.8 million of gold at October 2026 prices.

Blockchains and bridges

PAXG lives on Ethereum as an ERC-20 token at the contract 0x45804880De22913dAFE09f4980848ECE6EcbAf78. Since 25 June 2026 it also has an official Solana version on Token-2022. Paxos has not published the Solana mint address on its blog, so verify it on paxos.com before you receive tokens. There is no official Arbitrum or BSC deployment. See PAXG contract and networks.

XAUT’s canonical token is on Ethereum. Its multi-chain version, XAUt0, is an omnichain token run by Everdawn Labs, not Tether. It launched on TON on 2 June 2025 and has since reached Polygon, Hyperliquid, Arbitrum and Solana. That gives XAUT more chains, but it also adds a third party and a bridge between you and the gold. On any chain, sending to the wrong network is the most common way people lose either token.

Market cap and liquidity

On 12 October 2026 CoinGecko showed Tether Gold at about $3.37 billion, ranked #35, and PAX Gold at about $1.83 billion, ranked #57. In ounces, that is roughly 809,000 XAUT against 439,000 PAXG in circulation across chains. PAXG supply has also been shrinking: it peaked at about 514,000 tokens in April 2026 and has fallen since on net redemptions.

Bigger is not the same as deeper on your exchange. CoinGecko listed PAXG’s 24-hour volume at $136.3 million on the same day, and the largest single XAUT market in its ticker data was Binance XAUT/USDT at about $18.3 million. What matters for you is the order book on the venue you use. For live PAXG figures, see the PAXG price page.

Exchanges listing both PAXG and XAUT

Many traders want one account for both tokens, either to diversify issuers or to switch when one trades at a premium. The table combines our own PAXG pair checks from exchange APIs with XAUT pairs from CoinGecko’s ticker data, both from 12 October 2026. Listings change often, so confirm on the exchange before you deposit.

A few patterns stand out. Local-currency markets exist for both tokens in Turkey, Thailand, Korea, Indonesia and Poland, so residents there can compare them in lira, baht, won, rupiah or złoty; our country guides cover each market. CEX.IO, a US-licensed exchange in business since 2013, lists PAXG against USDT, USD, EUR and USDC and XAUT against USD, USDT and USDC, though real PAXG liquidity there is in PAXG/USDT. On Ethereum, Curve, Fluid and Uniswap run direct PAXG/XAUT pools. The full PAXG venue list is on our exchanges page.

DeFi use

PAXG has the deeper DeFi track record. It is reported live as collateral on Aave V4’s Global Dollar Hub on Ethereum, where it can back loans in USDG, although the final risk parameters were not confirmed in our checks. In August 2026 about $31.9 million of PAXG liquidity sat across 20 on-chain pools, led by Uniswap V2 PAXG/WETH. Our staking and yield guide explains why PAXG itself pays nothing and what lending adds in risk.

XAUT has a growing DeFi footprint too: Uniswap V3 and V4 pools against USDT, USDC and WBTC, the shared Curve and Fluid pools with PAXG, and XAUt0 on Hyperliquid and other chains. An Aave governance temp check discussed adding XAUT to Aave v3; we did not confirm a live listing. If you plan to use either token as collateral, remember that gold oracles such as Chainlink’s XAU/USD feed update slowly at weekends.

Freeze and upgrade powers

Both are centralised tokens. Paxos’s terms give it the right to freeze and upgrade all PAXG tokens, to freeze at its sole discretion, and to seize only under a binding legal directive. On-chain roles let Paxos freeze and wipe balances and pause all transfers, and 285 frozen addresses have been reported on Ethereum mainnet. Frozen tokens can become permanently unrecoverable under the terms.

We did not review Tether Gold’s terms on freezing in primary form for this comparison. Assume any issuer-controlled gold token can block addresses, and read the issuer’s terms before holding large amounts. For most law-abiding holders this is a remote risk; for anyone using mixers or sanctioned services, it is a real one.

Verdict by user type

Long-term saver in a regulated country: PAXG. The OCC-supervised issuer, monthly KPMG attestations, named London custodians and per-bar lookup are exactly what you want for money you plan to leave alone for years.

Active trader on offshore exchanges: either works, and XAUT often has more pairs. Check the order book on your venue rather than global market cap. Holding a bit of both spreads issuer risk.

DeFi user: PAXG for Ethereum lending markets; XAUt0 if you live on TON, Hyperliquid or another chain where PAXG is absent. Remember that XAUt0 adds Everdawn Labs and a bridge to the chain of trust.

EU resident: Paxos says PAXG is unavailable in the EU for primary issuance, although some EU venues still trade it on the secondary market. Read the Germany guide before you choose.