First published 6 May 2020. PAX Gold had been live since 5 September 2019. Expanded in October 2026 so a gold token is not described as the bar, and so it is not folded into Tether’s gold token. PAXG is an ERC-20. Paxos says each token is one fine troy ounce of a London Good Delivery bar, allocated to the holder and kept in London. At launch the vault named in the papers was Brink’s. The token is the claim. The bar stays where the custodian put it. Metal, or the dollars from a sale of metal, comes from redeeming with Paxos. Sending the token to an address is not that redemption.
What is Tether Gold (XAUt)? is a different company’s gold token, with its own bars and its own terms. What is PayPal USD (PYUSD)? is Paxos’s dollar token. A gold price is not a dollar peg. The tickers do not settle each other’s metal.
What the issuer says you own
New York’s financial regulator approved the launch. Paxos was a state-chartered trust company then. Paxos has since described itself as a national trust bank supervised by the OCC. A charter is a licence to be a trust company. It is not a bar on your desk, and it is not deposit insurance on the token in a wallet.
Paxos offers a lookup: an Ethereum address, and the serial of the bar it says that address is allocated. The lookup is the company’s page beside the chain. The chain records the token. The company records which metal it says stands behind the token. If the PAXG is still inside an exchange, that exchange’s database is the record you have. An exchange balance is an IOU, not a wallet.
Creating and redeeming with Paxos has fees. The company has marketed the product as having no separate storage bill. That is a price list, and price lists change. A London bar is hundreds of fine ounces, so taking the metal means a whole bar, identity checks, and their terms. One token is a fraction of a bar. Asking Paxos to sell and pay dollars is the other door. Both are company operations. A wallet transfer is neither of them.
A monthly attestation is an accountant’s snapshot of ounces the issuer says match the tokens. It is not your account. A gold fund is a fund. PAXG is a token. Holding either one is not the same fact as holding the bar.
The token still has a network
PAXG launched on Ethereum. A copy on another chain is someone else’s promise unless Paxos issued it there. The wrong network is still the wrong city. Match the contract a long-standing Ethereum explorer has shown since 2019, not a ticker in a chat. Nothing here is an instruction to buy, redeem, or hold PAXG.
