What PAX Gold is and how the token works

The short answer

PAX Gold, ticker PAXG, is a digital token that stands for real gold. One PAXG represents one fine troy ounce of a London Good Delivery gold bar. The bars sit in professional vaults in London, and the token lives on public blockchains, so you can hold it in a wallet, send it to anyone and trade it at any hour of any day.

Think of it as a warehouse receipt that moves like a cryptocurrency. You do not need to buy a whole ounce: PAXG is divisible to 18 decimal places, so 0.01 PAXG is a perfectly normal purchase. Its value follows the price of gold, which you can follow on our live PAX Gold price page. This guide explains who stands behind the token, how new tokens are made, why the price stays close to spot gold and who the product actually suits.

Who issues PAXG

PAXG is issued directly by Paxos Trust Company, N.A., a US company that also issues dollar stablecoins. Since 12 December 2025 Paxos has operated as a national trust bank under the supervision of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Before that conversion it held a limited-purpose trust charter from the New York State Department of Financial Services, which is why older articles call PAXG “NYDFS-regulated”. That description is out of date.

A national trust bank is not a high-street bank. Paxos takes no deposits and is not FDIC-insured, and the gold is not a bank deposit either. What the charter gives you is a federal supervisor that examines the issuer. Whether that is enough for you is a separate question, and we cover the full risk picture, including Paxos’s past regulatory issues, in is PAX Gold safe.

One point matters for European readers. Paxos states that “PAXG is currently unavailable in the EU”. That refers to buying directly from Paxos. Some exchanges still offer secondary-market trading in euros, but that is a different thing, and our Germany page explains the distinction.

One token, one ounce

The backing promise is simple: each PAXG equals one fine troy ounce of London Good Delivery gold. A fine troy ounce is about 31.1 grams of pure gold. London Good Delivery is the wholesale standard set by the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA). These are large bars of roughly 350 to 430 ounces each, the same bars that banks and central banks trade.

Because one bar holds hundreds of ounces, your tokens give you a claim on part of a specific bar. Paxos runs a Gold Allocation Look-up that shows the serial number, weight and vault of the bar linked to a self-custodied wallet. We explain how to use it, and what the monthly KPMG LLP attestations actually prove, in our guide to how PAXG is backed by gold.

How creation and redemption work

New PAXG does not come from mining or from a fixed launch allocation. It is created on demand. A verified customer with a Paxos account sends US dollars. Paxos promptly converts those dollars into an equivalent amount of London Good Delivery gold, records the gold as held for token holders, and mints the matching number of tokens on the blockchain.

Redemption runs the other way. A customer returns PAXG to Paxos, the tokens are burned, and the customer receives US dollars at the current gold market price. Large holders can instead take allocated gold or, with at least 430 PAXG, a whole physical bar delivered in London. Fees apply to these conversions; the current schedule is on our PAXG redemption and fees page.

Most people never touch this machinery. They buy PAXG from someone who already holds it, on an exchange. That trade does not change the total supply at all; it just moves tokens from seller to buyer. Only creations and redemptions at Paxos change how many tokens exist.

Why the price tracks gold

The creation and redemption window is what keeps PAXG close to the spot price of gold. If PAXG traded well above an ounce of gold on exchanges, a Paxos customer could create new tokens at the gold price and sell them for a profit. If it traded well below, a customer could buy cheap tokens and redeem them for dollars at the gold price. Both trades push the market back toward spot.

The record shows this works well, though not perfectly. An independent risk review published on the Aave governance forum on 19 August 2026 looked at 470 observations and found a median gap of +0.08% to spot, with 97.7% of days within plus or minus 1%. The extremes were −1.05% and +2.00%. Small premiums tend to show up at weekends, when the spot gold market is closed but crypto markets are not. Our PAXG vs physical gold comparison looks at that gap in more detail.

Ethereum and Solana

PAXG started life as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, and Ethereum is still its canonical home. The official contract is 0x45804880De22913dAFE09f4980848ECE6EcbAf78, with 18 decimals. Any Ethereum wallet that handles ERC-20 tokens can hold it.

On 25 June 2026 Paxos made Solana an official second network, using Solana’s Token-2022 standard. Paxos has not published the Solana mint address in its announcement, and several look-alike tokens use the PAXG symbol there, so always confirm the address on paxos.com before you receive Solana PAXG. There is no official Paxos deployment on Arbitrum or BNB Chain; tokens you see there are bridged or legacy copies. Addresses, decimals and wallet tips are collected on our PAXG networks page.

One more practical point: Paxos keeps admin powers over the token. The terms give it the right to freeze and upgrade PAXG, and the contract can pause transfers. That is normal for regulated tokens, but it makes PAXG very different from bitcoin.

Is PAXG a stablecoin?

People often call PAXG a “gold stablecoin”, and the label causes confusion. A dollar stablecoin aims to stay at $1. PAXG makes no such promise. It aims to stay equal to one ounce of gold, and the dollar price of an ounce moves every day. In 2026 alone, gold set a record above $5,500 per ounce in late January and then fell roughly 27% to below $4,000 by early July, according to secondary reports citing LBMA prices.

So PAXG is stable against gold and volatile against the dollar. The more accurate terms are gold-backed token or tokenized commodity. If you want a cash-like coin for paying bills, PAXG is the wrong tool. If you want gold exposure with crypto-style transfers, it is the right category. Its closest rival is Tether Gold, which we compare in PAXG vs XAUT.

Tokenomics and supply

PAXG tokenomics are refreshingly dull, and that is the point. There is no founders’ allocation, no pre-sale, no staking rewards and no fixed maximum supply. Every token in circulation should match an ounce in the vault, so supply simply follows demand. When investors create, supply rises; when they redeem, it falls.

Here is a dated snapshot. On 12 October 2026 the Ethereum contract’s total supply was about 436,421 PAXG, read directly from the chain. CoinGecko showed a circulating supply of about 439,436 across chains and a market cap of about $1.83 billion. Etherscan listed 88,522 holder addresses. The most recent attestation figures we could confirm, for 30 June 2026, showed 452,355 PAXG outstanding against 452,355 fine troy ounces of gold, with no shortfall.

Supply peaked at about 514,000 PAXG in April 2026, after gold’s record run, and has fallen since on net redemptions. That is the system working as designed: holders who took profits handed tokens back and the matching gold left the reserve. A shrinking supply is not a warning sign by itself. A gap between tokens and gold would be.

A short history

1. Sep 2019PAXG launches on Ethereum

   Paxos introduces a token backed by London Good Delivery gold.

2. Feb 2025KPMG LLP takes over attestations

   Reports posted from 28 Feb 2025 come from KPMG; earlier ones from Withum.

3. 12 Dec 2025OCC national trust charter

   Paxos completes its conversion and operates under OCC supervision.

4. Apr 2026Supply peaks near 514,000

   Demand follows gold’s record highs early in the year.

5. 25 Jun 2026Official Solana launch

   PAXG goes live on Solana as a Token-2022 asset.

6. 1 Sep 2026New redemption fee model

   Fees now depend on 30-day net redemptions, from 0.125%.

Two quieter changes also shaped today’s PAXG. The original on-chain transfer fee of about 0.02% is gone; the current contract has no fee logic at all, although we could not find the exact date it was removed. And Paxos has extended its promotional waiver on creation fees until 1 January 2027.

Who PAXG suits

PAXG makes the most sense for people who already use crypto and want part of their holdings in gold. You can move from USDT into PAXG on an exchange in seconds, hold it in the same hardware wallet as your other coins, and sell it on a Sunday night. Fractional ownership also helps: buying 0.05 PAXG gives you about 1.55 grams of gold exposure, far below the size of any coin a dealer would sell.

It suits people in countries where buying and storing physical gold is awkward or expensive, as long as a decent local or global exchange lists PAXG. Our country guides cover local pairs and rules, and our step-by-step buying guide walks through a first purchase. For a deeper look at whether gold itself is a good bet, see our PAXG price prediction page.

It suits fewer people who want gold they can touch. Retail holders in practice redeem for dollars, not metal, because physical delivery starts at a 430-ounce bar collected in London. It is also a poor fit if you distrust any single company: PAXG depends on Paxos, its vault custodians and its admin keys.

If you decide to hold it, keep it simple. Buy on a liquid market, move it to a wallet you control if you plan to hold for a long time, and check the contract address before every first transfer. Our PAXG wallet guide lists wallets that support the token. For the official product details, read the Paxos PAX Gold page and the current attestation reports.