Parts 1 through 3 of this series walked through the legal wrapper that makes RWAs work, the tokenised Treasury market led by BUIDL, USDY, OUSG and FOBXX, and the private-credit protocols Centrifuge, Maple and Goldfinch. Treasuries and private credit are the quiet, institutional end of RWA. Equities and commodities are the loud end. They are where retail wants in, where regulators are most nervous, and where the messiest legal questions still sit.
This part covers two related markets: tokenised gold, which is mature and boring in the good sense, and tokenised stocks, which are growing fast and breaking things on the way.
Tokenised Gold Is the Oldest RWA That Actually Works
Gold-backed tokens have been around since 2019. By early 2026, the category sits above $6 billion in market capitalisation, and two issuers — Tether Gold (XAUT) and Paxos Gold (PAXG) — control roughly 96.7% of it between them.
Tether Gold sits near $3.3 billion in market cap in Q1 2026, backed by about 707,741 ounces of physical gold held in Swiss vaults. Tether publishes ISAE 3000R attestations on a quarterly basis. Each XAUT represents one fine troy ounce of a specific London Good Delivery bar, and holders can in principle redeem for physical metal, though the practical minimum and Swiss logistics put that out of reach for most retail users.
PAXG is the more institutionally palatable version. It is issued by Paxos Trust Company, a New York Department of Financial Services-regulated trust. The gold itself sits in LBMA-accredited Brink's vaults in London, and KPMG publishes monthly attestations. NYDFS oversight is the structural difference: PAXG holders have a direct legal claim on segregated trust assets under New York law, which is a stronger position than most stablecoin or commodity-token holders enjoy.
Newer entrants are filling regional niches. Comtech Gold (CGO) on the XDC Network is Sharia-compliant and VARA-licensed in Dubai, aimed at Middle Eastern allocators who cannot touch interest-bearing instruments. The category is no longer experimental. It is plumbing.
Why Tokenised Gold Matters Inside DeFi
Gold itself is not interesting to a DeFi protocol. What is interesting is having a non-correlated, dollar-priced, redeemable collateral asset that does not depend on the US Treasury or a stablecoin issuer's banking relationships. PAXG and XAUT show up as collateral in lending markets, as a quote asset in DEX pools, and increasingly as a hedge sleeve inside structured-product vaults.
The structural risk is the same as every other RWA in this series: the token is only as good as the custody chain behind it. A gold bar in a Brink's vault that has been hypothecated, lent, or double-pledged off-chain does not stop being a problem just because there is a token on Ethereum pointing at it. Attestations help. They do not eliminate the trust assumption.
Backed Finance and the xStocks Wave
The equity side moves faster. Backed Finance AG is a Swiss issuer operating under the Swiss DLT Act, with FinSA and FinIA authorisation. Backed issues tracker certificates — bSTOCK products like bAAPL, bTSLA, bMSFT, bGOOGL, bGME and bMSTR — that economically track a single underlying share. They are not the share itself. They are a structured-product wrapper that pays out the same cash flows.
The xStocks brand launched on Solana on 30 June 2025. By January 2026 it had crossed $3 billion in onchain volume on Solana alone, and the combined volume across all chains had passed $10 billion by December 2025. That growth is what triggered Kraken's acquisition of Backed on 2 December 2025 — the exchange wanted the issuer, not just the listing.
xStocks now live on Ethereum, Solana, Base, BNB Chain, Polygon, Arbitrum, Avalanche and Gnosis, with TON, Tron and Mantle in the pipeline. The multi-chain footprint matters because xStocks are designed to be DeFi-native from day one, not bridged in later.
What xStocks Actually Plug Into
This is where tokenised equities start to look different from their TradFi equivalents. Kamino, the largest Solana lending market, became the first major money market to accept tokenised equities as collateral in July 2025. Jupiter Lend and Raydium's AMM together cleared roughly $517 million in DEX volume by January 2026, with around 57,000 holders across the ecosystem. Drift lets traders hedge spot xStocks against perpetual stock futures inside the same account.
None of that exists for the underlying shares. You cannot post Apple stock as collateral against a USDC loan at 3am on a Sunday in TradFi. You can with bAAPL on Kamino. That is the actual product, and it is also where the composability and systemic-risk concerns from earlier in the series start to bite hardest, because a Backed certificate is now embedded in liquidation logic that was not designed for off-chain settlement delays.
Dinari, Ondo Global Markets, and the US Onshore Path
Backed is offshore by design. The US onshore path looks different. Dinari became the first tokenised-equity issuer to receive a US transfer-agent license in May 2025, and now offers more than 150 dShares — actual registered securities, not derivative wrappers — live on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Blast and Kinto. The Dinari Financial Network is launching on Avalanche in 2026 with LayerZero OFT support for cross-chain transfers.
Ondo's Global Markets launches in early 2026 with more than 100 tokenised US stocks and ETFs, building on the same infrastructure that runs OUSG. Both Dinari and Ondo are deliberately conservative: KYC-gated, jurisdictionally fenced, and structured so the on-chain token is the security, not a synthetic claim on one.
That distinction is what the SEC cares about.
Robinhood, OpenAI, and the SEC's January Line
Robinhood opened the retail floodgates on 30 June 2025 by offering more than 200 tokenised US stocks and ETFs to EU users. On 10 February 2026 it launched Robinhood Chain on Arbitrum testnet and saw 4 million transactions in week one. The product works. The legal question is whether the tokens are what Robinhood says they are.
The controversy was the so-called "OpenAI tokens" Robinhood briefly offered to EU users. They were derivative wrappers giving holders price exposure to OpenAI's private valuation, with no shareholder rights, no voting, and no claim on the underlying company. OpenAI publicly disowned them within hours. Robinhood's defence — that they never claimed otherwise in the small print — did not land well, and it became the cleanest possible example of why "tokenised" can mean two completely different things.
On 28 January 2026 the SEC issued a joint statement that put the question to bed for US purposes: tokenisation does not change a security's legal status. If the underlying is a security, the token is a security, and every securities-law obligation applies — registration, broker-dealer rules, custody, the lot. Two days later, on 30 January 2026, Nasdaq filed a proposed rule change to allow tokenised securities trading on its exchange. The two events together draw the line clearly. Tokenised equities are welcome in the US, but only inside the existing regulatory perimeter.
Real Estate and the Long Tail
Gold and equities are the headline categories. Real estate is the long-tail one. Lofty on Algorand has roughly $37.6 million in total value locked across more than 150 individual properties in 40 US markets. Each property is wrapped in its own LLC, and token holders receive pro-rata rental income. It is small relative to gold or stocks, and it surfaces every problem covered in Part 1 — title custody, jurisdiction, redemption mechanics — at the property level rather than the portfolio level. Real estate tokenisation is real, but it is a slow grind, not a flywheel.
Where This Leaves Us
Tokenised gold is the cleanest RWA story: regulated issuers, monthly attestations, real redemption. Tokenised equities are the most exciting and the most legally fraught: $10 billion in xStocks volume, a major exchange acquisition, a US transfer-agent licensee, and a Robinhood scandal that hardened regulatory positions on three continents inside a single quarter.
What we have not done yet is be honest about what can go wrong. Custody failures, oracle manipulation, off-hours liquidations on a 24/7 chain against an asset that trades 6.5 hours a day, regulatory clawbacks, sanctioned addresses holding regulated securities — every one of these is a live failure mode in 2026, not a theoretical one. Part 5 walks through the risk surface in detail.
