Tokenized commodities beyond gold

Tokenized commodities are a $5.3B market sector, but the overwhelming majority of it is tokenized gold. This week's newsletter looks at the outliers: non-gold assets, the behavior emerging around them, and the addressable market they're growing into.

1) The state of tokenized commodities

• Tokenized commodities total $5.3B across 66 tracked assets, with gold dominating the sector. Tether's XAUT ($2.7B) and Paxos' PAXG ($2.3B) alone make up more than 90% of the market cap, with the remaining 64 tokenized commodities accounting for $293.1M.

• Gold was the natural starting point for tokenized commodities because of its historic role as the preeminent hedge against inflation. The asset's recent rally has reinforced that demand, with gold crossing $5,000 per ounce for the first time in January 2026 amid geopolitical and fiscal concerns.

• Everything beyond gold is where the next leg of growth could show up. The remainder of the category is small in absolute terms but spans silver, oil, copper, and other commodities that are structurally different bets.

2) The outliers beyond gold

• SLVon ($29.9M), USOon ($3.7M), and COPXon ($1.8M) are Ondo Finance's largest tokenized commodities with silver, oil, and copper exposure. SLVon tracks the iShares Silver Trust (SLV, backed by physical silver), USOon tracks the United States Oil Fund (USO, backed by oil futures), and COPXon tracks the Global X Copper Miners ETF (COPX, backed by copper mining stocks).

• Silver, oil, and copper each sit at the intersection of macro and geopolitical forces driving investors toward hard assets. Silver and copper have rallied alongside gold as investors rotate into precious and industrial metals, while oil has moved in response to the Strait of Hormuz crisis.

• The segment is still small but showing early momentum. The market cap of SLVon is up ~48% YTD, and all three tokens are less than a year old, having launched following the rollout of Ondo Global Markets in September 2025.

3) The behavior emerging around them

• USOon's weekly transfer volume spiked to over $100M during the beginning of the Strait of Hormuz crisis in March 2026. Volume started climbing when the U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran and peaked as oil prices approached $100 per barrel.

• When oil prices move on world events, people want a fast way to get exposure. During the Hormuz crisis, onchain investors could buy or sell oil exposure without access to traditional market infrastructure.

• Tokenized commodities could become a venue for macro and geopolitical hedging. USOon's activity during the Hormuz crisis is an early signal. Whether similar patterns emerge around other commodities and events will determine if this use case holds.

4) The addressable market

• At 1% of SLV's ~$35.7B AUM, SLVon alone would reach ~$357M, roughly 10x the current combined market cap of SLVon, USOon, and COPXon. SLVon sits at $29.9M today, and closing even a fraction of the gap to its reference ETF would represent a substantial step up in size.

• Applying the same 1% framing to the other reference ETFs yields similar results. COPXon would reach ~$67M (vs. $1.8M today) at 1% of COPX's ~$6.7B, and USOon would reach ~$26M (vs. $3.7M today) at 1% of USO's ~$2.6B.

• The reference ETFs give non-gold tokenized commodities a clear scale to grow against. These products appear to be aimed less at institutional investors who already have access to commodity markets and more at crypto users who want commodity exposure without leaving their wallet. The open question is how large that crypto-native audience can grow.

Explore the full dataset here.

Since Token Terminal's standardized metrics went live on Binance several months ago, the scope of our work has expanded from a data integration to in-depth quarterly (and monthly) reporting.

Raydium Q1 2026 Report

Silo Finance Q1 2026 Report

Both reports covers key financial and operational metrics alongside qualitative commentary from the respective core teams. Additional reports for Q1 2026 will be posted over the coming days.

If you're evaluating how to formalize your project's data and reporting strategy, get in touch.

CoinShares Hybrid Finance Q1 2026 Report

CoinShares (Nasdaq: CSHR), the leading European asset manager specializing in digital assets, published their Hybrid Finance Q1 2026 Report. The report covers the growth of tokenized assets and onchain businesses.

The research report was co-authored by CoinShares and Token Terminal Research. Read the original here.

Platform updates

• Listed Grove, a programmable capital allocator that draws stablecoins from Sky and deploys them into diversified yield-bearing positions across tokenized treasuries, private credit, and DeFi lending markets.

• Listed Steakhouse Financial, a risk curator that offers vault products across multiple DeFi lending protocols, managing risk parameters, collateral selection, and allocation for institutional and retail depositors.

• Listed iExec RLC, kpk, Neverland, Rabby Wallet, SoFi Technologies, and Trust Wallet with basic metrics.

• Added Asset APY as a new metric, available for 59 yield-bearing assets including BUIDL (BlackRock), sUSDS (Sky), and sUSDe (Ethena).

• Added two new agentic payment metrics tracking x402 protocol activity: Asset transfer volume (Agentic) and Asset transfer count (Agentic). These measure the volume and frequency of machine-to-machine and AI-agent-initiated commerce onchain. USDC leads with $1,130,769.1 in agentic transfer volume over the past 7 days across 1,729,992 transactions.

Interested in getting listed? Read more here.

Launching Token Terminal Research

While our platform gives users the tools to analyze onchain data, many of the institutions we work with are looking for answers, not tools.

Token Terminal Research is a dedicated service that extends our offering from providing data and analytics tools to delivering the full research workflow.

Teams come to us with specific research problems, and we translate these into structured analyses built on top of our underlying dataset. Outputs are delivered in final form as custom dashboards, structured reports, or ongoing analytical support.

Learn more at tokenterminal.com/products/research or reach out to [email protected].