Is privacy-first the ONLY way? $3.5B gold suggests institutions think so

As investors chase yield and regulations become clearer, on-chain activity is gaining real traction. Tokenized assets, from gold to fiat currencies, are moving more value on blockchains.

What seemed experimental two years ago is now becoming a major driver of crypto demand. How big will this trend get?

Tokenized gold supplies grow by 3x

Around $3.5 billion worth of tokenized gold now lives onchain. The number is up from roughly $1.2 billion in January 2025, per Token Terminal data.

Source: X

Demand spans multiple networks, including Ethereum [ETH], BNB Chain [BNB], Base [BASE], XDC Network [XDC] and Polygon [MATIC], showing that this isn’t tied to a single ecosystem.

Most of the growth has come from steady accumulation rather than a one-off spike, so institutions and high-net-worth users are treating tokenized gold as a serious storage instrument.

It also means that value is shifting to private, permissioned or semi-permissioned rails, changing where real economic assets now settle.

It’s not just gold

The same shift is playing out in fiat. Token Terminal data showed that over $750 million worth of tokenized euros circulate onchain, up from just $100 million in early 2023.

Source: X

This growth came years before the ECB’s planned 2029 launch of the official digital euro, meaning startups and private issuers are already filling the gap. The distribution spans multiple chains.

Traditional currency flows are slowly being replicated on crypto rails, with private issuers effectively running a parallel euro monetization layer ahead of the ECB.

Privacy-first approach

This growth trend is also about where the tokens will settle.

Source: X

In an X post, analyst Miles Deutscher argued that asset tokenization “can ONLY happen on private blockchains,” because institutions prioritize privacy, security and compliance stacks over pure decentralization.

This changes the story. The rise in tokenized gold and euros is a change in the underlying infrastructure. As tokenized assets grow, the leading blockchains may not be the most open, but the ones that provide strong regulatory-grade privacy while keeping capital easy to move.