The European Union created a regulatory bucket for gold-backed crypto under its Markets in Crypto-Assets framework, but two years after the regime took effect, no tokenized gold product has been approved. That has left a roughly $4.4 billion market led by Paxos Gold and Tether Gold operating outside the EU’s formal perimeter, even as European users continue to access the tokens through alternative channels.

MiCA’s gold token gap

Under MiCA, gold-backed tokens fall under the asset-referenced token, or ART, category, alongside tokens linked to baskets of assets and other commodities. The framework came into force in 2024 and set out authorization requirements, standardized disclosures, stricter reserve and governance rules, and the possibility that a token could be classified as a significant ART, which would bring additional capital and liquidity obligations.

Despite that structure, the number of approved ARTs remains at zero, according to the source article. In practice, that means the main tokenized gold products have not entered the EU rulebook through MiCA, even though the category designed to capture them already exists.

How Europeans access PAXG and XAUT

The market’s two largest products, PAXG and XAUT, have a combined value of about $4.4 billion. Yet Europeans can access them only through routes that sit outside the MiCA framework. The article says this has produced a patchwork of workarounds by issuers and trading venues rather than a unified, EU-native model.

Paxos has used Finland’s FIN-FSA and other licenses to support claims of MiCA compliance. At the same time, some exchanges have chosen to delist non-MiCA products for EU users. Tether Gold, meanwhile, restricts direct purchases by U.S. persons, and the source notes that this also limits issuer-level redemption for customers in Europe.

As a result, European users can still hold tokenized gold through offshore venues or in self-custody, but they do so without EU-backed redemption rights or the protections MiCA would mandate if such products were formally authorized.

Regulatory blind spots and review in Brussels

The absence of approvals has broader consequences than product availability alone. According to the source, the current situation leaves the market operating around Europe’s rules, producing fragmentation and reducing the EU’s visibility into reserves and transaction flows.

Brussels is now reviewing the ART framework and weighing whether to recalibrate it, remove it, or leave it unchanged. One possible outcome would be a more proportionate route for commodity-backed tokens, potentially allowing products such as PAXG and XAUT to enter a revised regulatory perimeter. Another is that the present arrangement remains in place, preserving the current gaps.

Different models in Europe and the US

The article contrasts the EU’s category-based approach with the system in the United States, where tokenized gold is overseen through issuer charters and other non-MiCA frameworks. It also points to Interactive Brokers listing tokenized gold as a sign that these products are crossing into more mainstream distribution channels.

That divergence reflects two different regulatory philosophies: Europe has built a stricter supervisory model around token categories, while the U.S. approach described in the article is more focused on the status and licensing of the issuer.

For now, the practical position for European holders is that protections depend on issuer licensing and the arrangements of the venue they use, not on MiCA authorization. Whether Brussels rewrites the ART rules, drops them, or keeps them intact will help determine if tokenized gold is eventually brought inside the EU framework or continues to sit in a legal workaround.

Source: crypto.news