Historical record. Archived 2026-09-23: Superseded when the XAUT and XAUt0 eligibility files were written. The memo said no issuer document confirmed a Swiss vault, but the reserves report as of 30 June 2026 says the gold is vaulted in Switzerland and owned by XAU₮ holders, not the company. It did not describe the on-chain power of the XAUT owner, a 3-of-6 multisig that also owns USDT on Ethereum, to block an address and burn its balance, mint, and upgrade the contract. It treated XAUt0 as XAUT on seven more chains, though XAUt0 is a separate token run by the USDT0 Network and minted on fourteen networks, and Tether Gold’s terms say wrapped or bridged versions are not Gold Tokens. It gave a 430-token physical minimum, but omitted the 50-token purchase minimum, the 150 USDt verification fee, and the bar on U.S. persons who are not accepted Eligible Contract Participants.. This keeps the last issued verdict and does not count toward current coverage.

Tokenized commodities

Tether Gold (XAUT)

Rejected The evidence weighs against it

Issued

2026-08-17

Last confirmed

2026-09-26

Next check due

2027-09-27

Research basis

Individual research

Chains

Ethereum · No freeze key, Monad · Governed, no freeze, Plasma · Issuer can freeze, Avalanche · Governed, no freeze, Ink · Mixed control, Arbitrum One · Mixed control, Polygon PoS · Mixed control

Symbols

XAUT

Eligibility file

What the holder owns and who may hold it

REJECTED ON CUSTODY OPACITY AND A LIGHT-TOUCH JURISDICTION, NOT A GOLD-BACKING FAILURE. XAUT genuinely shows greater than 1:1 coverage in its own quarterly BDO Italia attestation, but the custodian holding that gold is never named: the Terms of Service refer to it only as ”the Custodian,” disclosed as ”a related party to Tether Gold,” with the related-party risk stated in the issuer’s own document. The issuer, TG Commodities S.A. de C.V., redomiciled from the BVI to El Salvador on 2025-01-27 and is regulated only by El Salvador’s National Commission of Digital Assets — a materially lighter regime than the OCC national trust charter Paxos now holds (see the paxos-gold memo) or any US or EU securities regulator. Redemption for physical gold or cash is open only to Tether-verified customers at Tether Gold’s sole discretion, under a contract clause that also reserves a unilateral freeze and seizure right matching Tether’s group-wide USDT freeze practice. An advisor client’s real exit is secondary-market liquidity, not redemption. That structure, layered on top of the parent group’s 2021 NYAG settlement for misrepresenting USDT reserves and an unresolved 2024 DOJ sanctions/AML probe, is disqualifying.

Review triggers: events that reopen the verdict

The custodian’s identity, jurisdiction, and an independent custody-control audit are disclosed and verified
A direct, non-discretionary client redemption path opens instead of one gated to Tether-verified accounts only
Reserve attestation moves to full-audit standard or to the cadence and independence of the strongest peer in this class
Any confirmed sanctions or AML enforcement action lands against Tether or TG Commodities specifically tied to XAUT
Any published attestation shows reserve coverage falling below 1:1

Reaffirmed 2026-09-26: 0 days quiet across 2 files, no open item. Holds to 2027-09-27 while the watch stays quiet.

The research file

Mechanism and custody

Each XAUT reflects an undivided interest in one fine troy ounce of gold held as specific, serial-numbered London Good Delivery bars. Tether Gold may reallocate the specific bar backing a token ”from time to time and without notice,” and holders pre-consent to this by holding the token. As of the latest reserves report, 707,747.139 fine troy oz were held against 707,747.090000 XAUT outstanding — coverage just over 1:1 by a small margin, of which only 612,823.66 tokens have actually been sold to customers. The custodian itself is never named in the primary Terms of Service; it is described only as ”the Custodian,” a disclosed related party. Secondary sources claim a Swiss vault, but that could not be confirmed against any issuer document.

Issuer and jurisdiction

TG Commodities S.A. de C.V. (formerly TG Commodities Limited, BVI) redomiciled to the Republic of El Salvador on 2025-01-27 and now operates under authorization from El Salvador’s National Commission of Digital Assets as a Stablecoin Issuer and Digital Assets Service Provider. All purchase and redemption transactions are contractually deemed to occur within El Salvador. The Terms of Service reserve a broad, sole-discretion right to suspend access, freeze any held tokens, blacklist any address, or seize and recover against tokens ”as required by applicable Law” or whenever Tether Gold judges it prudent — the same freeze infrastructure Tether uses on USDT, applied here to a commodity-backed token.

Redemption terms

Only a ”verified customer of Tether Gold” may redeem — the Terms of Service state ”no exceptions will be made to this provision.” Physical delivery requires a minimum of 430 tokens (one bar equivalent) and delivery is available only to an address in Switzerland; smaller holders can instead request a broker-arranged cash sale. Fees run 0.25% on purchase and 0.25% plus applicable fees on redemption. Tether Gold may delay redemption at its own discretion if it judges the Gold Reserves illiquid, unavailable, or lost, or if a government demands it. None of this is available to a client who has not completed Tether’s own KYC verification, which functions as a gate independent of holding the token on-chain.

Reserve attestation

BDO Italia performs a quarterly limited-assurance (ISAE-3000-style) attestation of the Gold Reserves report — a lower bar than a full audit, and explicitly disclaimed by Tether as ”not financial statements… prepared by Tether management.” That is a weaker cadence and independence profile than Paxos’s monthly reserve attestations. Separately, in August 2026 Tether completed its first full consolidated company audit, performed by KPMG with an unqualified opinion — a real step forward for the group, but a whole-company audit, not an XAUT-specific one, and it does not change the quarterly limited-assurance cadence applied to the gold reserves themselves.

Incident record and parent-company track record

No XAUT-specific depeg or freeze incident was found. But the issuer group carries a material history: the New York Attorney General settled with Tether/Bitfinex on 2021-02-17 for $18.5M after finding Tether ”sometimes held no reserves” backing USDT and misled the market about an $850M Bitfinex funds loss; both entities were barred from operating in New York and required to file quarterly transparency reports. Reporting in October 2024 described a federal DOJ probe into Tether over possible sanctions and AML violations tied to USDT; Tether disputed knowledge of an active investigation, and no public resolution has been confirmed. Separately, Tether routinely freezes USDT addresses at law-enforcement or OFAC request (roughly $344M across Iran/IRGC-linked addresses, reported April 2026) — the same contractual freeze power XAUT holders are subject to.

Chain risk and comparison

Ethereum holds over 99% of XAUT value; the other seven chains carry XAUt0, a LayerZero Omnichain Fungible Token variant backed by native XAUT locked in an OFT Adapter contract on Ethereum. That avoids a separate custodial wrapped-asset bridge, but adds LayerZero messaging-layer trust assumptions — a real risk this registry has already priced into a rejection for LayerZero V2 itself. Against Paxos Gold, XAUT is weaker on every disclosed axis: an undisclosed related-party custodian versus a named third-party vault operator, quarterly versus monthly attestation, and a light-touch El Salvador regulator versus a US federal OCC trust charter. Against a physical gold ETF, both gold tokens share the same freeze-risk axis a regulated ETF custodied at a bank does not carry.

Sources

The claims above trace to these. Where a number could not be independently verified, the thesis says so.

Tether Gold — Terms of Sale and Service · primary · accessed 2026-08-17
Supports: issuer identity, El Salvador redomicile, freeze and blacklist clause, redemption eligibility, fees
Tether Gold — Reserves Reports · primary · accessed 2026-08-17
Supports: reserve coverage, BDO Italia attestation cadence, circulating vs sold supply
New York Attorney General — Tether/Bitfinex settlement · primary · accessed 2026-08-17
Supports: 2021 NYAG settlement, reserve misrepresentation, New York operating ban
DefiLlama — Tether Gold chain breakdown · secondary · accessed 2026-08-17
Supports: Ethereum dominance, per-chain TVL
USDT0/LayerZero docs — XAUt0 canonical reserve model · primary · accessed 2026-08-17
Supports: OFT adapter lock-and-mint design, cross-chain messaging dependency
Fortune — report of DOJ probe into Tether · secondary · accessed 2026-08-17
Supports: 2024 DOJ sanctions and AML probe, unresolved status

Inherited controls

The research above describes the protocol layer. Every position also inherits the asset it holds and the chain it settles on. The layer with the most administrative power sets the position’s effective control; that describes control, not quality or suitability.

Chain	Verdict	Control	Control constraint
Ethereum	Approved	No freeze key	No sequencer, no upgrade key, no operator who can be compelled. Rule changes require social consensus.
Monad	Approved with limits	Governed, no freeze	the L1 has a public validator path, but its short production record, single initial client lineage, and Foundation-directed delegation keep stake and operations concentrated.
Plasma	Rejected	Issuer can freeze	the production validator committee is permissioned and the public docs still describe decentralization as a phased future rollout with no fixed access timeline.
Avalanche	Approved with limits	Governed, no freeze	no party can freeze or seize C-Chain funds, but one vendor writes the only production client and Messari measured over a third of stake hosted on AWS.
Ink	Rejected	Mixed control	forced inclusion and fault proofs constrain the sequencer, but co-signers can still execute an immediate upgrade before a client exits.
Arbitrum One	Approved with limits	Mixed control	a single sequencer orders >99% of transactions and admin keys can upgrade bridge contracts on a ~7-day timelock.
Polygon PoS	Rejected	Mixed control	a public validator set orders transactions, but a 5-of-9 multisig can instantly upgrade staking and canonical bridge contracts, while a 5-of-8 controls custom child tokens.

Asset	Control	Who can freeze it
XAUT	Issuer can freeze	Tether Gold. A claim on vaulted bullion: Tether holds the metal and controls the token.

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