To trust BTC vs tokenized gold, who is worthy of the title of "digital gold"?

Nakamoto 2025-10-29 19:15 63719人围观 BTC

Gold craze and on-chain changes: BTC vs tokenized gold, who is the real "digital gold"? Recently, are more and more people discussing physical gold? As geopolitical risks intensify and global macroeconomic uncertainty rises, the total market value of gold

Gold fever and on-chain changes: BTC and tokenized gold, who is the real “digital gold”?

Recently, are more and more people discussing physical gold?

As geopolitical risks intensify and global macroeconomic uncertainty rises, the total market value of gold once exceeded US$30 trillion, firmly occupying the "top spot" among global assets. In the Crypto world, a discussion about "digital gold" is also heating up - in addition to the widely recognized Bitcoin (BTC), physical gold is accelerating its "on-chain". Tokenized gold, represented by Tether Gold (XAUT), has gained new capabilities of divisibility, programmability and even interest-earning through the wave of RWA (real world assets), directly challenging the "digital gold" narrative of Bitcoin's long-term monopoly.

1. BTC’s ten-year narrative: from “electronic cash” to “digital gold””

Is BTC a currency or an asset? Is the core function payment or value storage? This issue has persisted throughout its development since its inception in 2009.

In the white paper, Satoshi Nakamoto originally defined BTC as "Electronic Cash". However, as its volume has grown, its narrative has been reversed several times in the past decade, and community debates have continued: from an early "payment method" to a "store of value" and "alternative assets."

The official approval of spot ETFs in 2024 has become a key turning point. Since then, more and more people are no longer optimistic about BTC becoming a "global payment currency" and instead regard it as a "value storage target" with a consensus basis, that is, "digital gold." Core strengths underpinning this understanding include:

Scarcity similar to gold - fixed total amount and predictable output；
Digital attributes that far exceed gold - divisible (1 satoshi = 0.00000001 BTC), easy to carry (cross-border transfers in seconds), high liquidity (7×24 hours of uninterrupted trading).

Because of this, BTC has gradually become the third global storage option after the US dollar and gold in the macro monetary system.

2. Gold’s Market Value Crush: The Underlying Power of BTC’s “Digital Gold” Narrative

In terms of market capitalization, there is still a huge gap between BTC and physical gold.

According to companiesmarketcap data, among the current top 10 assets in the world, gold absolutely leads the way with a total market value of US$28.4 trillion, far exceeding the sum of the next nine assets (US$26 trillion). Even if the price of BTC exceeds US$100,000, its total market value is only about US$2 trillion, equivalent to 1/15 of the total market value of gold.

This gap is precisely the underlying motivation for the BTC community to insist on the "digital gold" narrative - aiming at gold, the "largest and oldest value storage target" in traditional finance, and trying to recreate its status in the digital world.

3. Under the wave of RWA: the sudden rise of tokenized gold”

Interestingly, as BTC strives to move closer to “digital gold”, physical gold itself is also accelerating its “digitization”.

The direct cause of this trend is that the price of physical gold has repeatedly hit new highs, coupled with the promotion of this year's RWA wave, the rapid rise of tokenized gold represented by XAUT and PAXG (PAX Gold). They are not a "new species" - XAUT has sprouted as early as the end of 2019, and the white paper will be officially released in January 2022 ； PAXG has also been operating for many years, but now it has gained new strategic significance and market attention.

Taking the current largest XAUT as an example, its core mechanism is "anchoring physical gold": for every XAUT issued, there is 1 ounce of physical gold as a reserve, and all gold is stored in a "first-class security" vault in Switzerland. As of the time of publication, the total issuance scale of XAUT has exceeded US$1.55 billion, corresponding to approximately 11,693.4 kilograms of physical gold (approximately 966 gold bars).

Compared with traditional gold and gold ETFs, the advantages of tokenized gold are very clear:

Compared with physical gold: it solves the problem of "difficulty to separate", lowers the investment threshold, and is easy to carry and transfer；
Compared with gold ETF: 7×24-hour trading is realized, no custody fees are required, and the efficiency of asset transfer is greatly improved.

More importantly, tokenization allows gold to be "fully integrated into the digital world" for the first time - it is no longer a simple "on-chain certificate", but an asset unit that can flow, combine and be calculated freely, truly possessing BTC-style digital attributes.

4. Core speculation: BTC and tokenized gold, competition or symbiosis?

When both gold and BTC become on-chain assets, is the relationship between them competition or symbiosis? The core of the answer lies in the essential difference between the "trust logic" and "value attributes" between the two.

1. Logic of trust: trust vs. trust again

The core of BTC is "trustlessness": its scarcity and value are derived from algorithmic consensus, there is no issuer or custodian, and there is no need to rely on third-party credit；
The core of tokenized gold is "re-trust": as Binance CEO CZ said, "Tokenized gold is not real gold on the chain, but is based on trust in the issuer's ability to fulfill its contract." Users need to trust that institutions such as Tether and Paxos will strictly abide by their reserve commitments. In extreme situations (such as management changes, wars), they still need to rely on the continuation of this trust system.

2. Value attributes: Digital scarcity consensus VS traditional hedging + digital empowerment

The value basis of BTC is the "scarcity consensus of the digital world", which is a digital stored value asset created from 0 to 1；
The value basis of tokenized gold is "the hedging and value-preserving properties of traditional gold + the digital empowerment of blockchain": it retains the core hedging value of gold, and at the same time gains programmability through tokenization - it can be used as DeFi collateral to lend stablecoins, it can be integrated into smart contracts to achieve "gold interest", and it can be circulated across chains to become a liquid asset in a multi-chain ecosystem.

This difference determines that the two are not a "substitutive relationship": at a time when liquidity is tightening and Alt assets are weak, the popularity of tokenized gold is essentially the market's demand for "a more robust and certain on-chain value fulcrum." It is not intended to replace BTC, but to supplement BTC’s “digital gold” narrative and become a new financial species that combines “digital asset liquidity” and “traditional gold certainty.”