How Tokenization Is Transforming Commodities — and Why NatGold Is the Next-Gen Gold Play

Picture this: You open your wallet app one morning and sitting next to your usual cash, stocks, and stablecoins is something that used to be reserved for geologists, mining CEOs, and central banks…

A slice of a gold deposit buried a mile under the earth.

Not an ETF. Not a futures contract. Actual, proven ounces in the ground, digitized into a token you can buy, sell, or borrow against 24/7.

That’s not sci-fi anymore.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I’m calling this next chapter of tokenization a game-changer.

When the Rules Change, the Valuations Change

A recent Forbes piece titled “How Tokenization Is Changing Commodity Valuation Models” laid out the core idea: When the market mechanics of commodities change, the way we price and value them changes, too.

Today, I’ll show how NatGold fits in the commodities tokenization model laid out in the Forbes article. But understand this isn’t the only way forward for NatGold.

For the past century, commodity valuation has been built on a few assumptions:

• Trades clear on bankers' hours.
• Settlement is slow and paperwork-heavy.
• Real access is limited to big players and specialized intermediaries.
• Most people are stuck with derivatives or ETFs at best.

Tokenization blows straight through those assumptions.

By turning real-world assets into blockchain-based tokens, you get:

• Instant settlement: Ownership updates in seconds, not days.
• 24/7 markets: No “market closed” sign on your phone.
• Fractional access: You don’t need millions to play in the big sandbox.
• Global reach: Anyone, anywhere with a phone and an internet connection can participate.

Forbes’ core point is simple but profound: As commodities migrate to this new infrastructure, legacy valuation models — built for slow, opaque, illiquid systems — start to break down.

When the pipes change, the price changes.

The Quiet Stampede Into Tokenized Real-World Assets

This isn’t a theory on a whiteboard. The money is already moving.

Over the last three years, the real-world asset (RWA) tokenization market has jumped from around $5 billion in 2022 to roughly $24 billion in 2025 — a 380% surge.

And we’re still in the early innings.

• One major market study pegs the broader asset tokenization market at about $2.08 trillion in 2025, on track for $13.55 trillion by 2030 — a compound annual growth rate north of 45%.
• Legal and regulatory analyses are now floating an upper bound of $30 trillion in tokenized RWAs by 2030 if adoption keeps accelerating.

This is the same type of growth curve we saw when the internet turned from dial-up curiosity into the plumbing of global commerce.

Tokenization is becoming the default way to represent anything of value — Treasurys, private equity, real estate, and now commodities.

And in that commodity subset, one asset is suddenly sprinting ahead of the pack: Gold!

Gold Is the First Commodity Through the Portal

Gold has always been weird in the best possible way:

• It’s a monetary metal and an industrial input.
• It has 5,000 years of trust behind it.
• Central banks hoard it. Investors hedge with it. Civilization has anchored currencies to it. Humans decorate their fingers, wrists and necks with it.

Now gold is getting a second life — on-chain.

As of late 2025, tokenized gold has grown into roughly a $3.9 billion market, making it one of the fastest-growing segments in the entire tokenization universe.

A few key tells:

• Trading volumes have exploded; in some recent windows, tokenized gold has done close to $1 billion in daily volume, rivaling major stablecoins on a volume-to-market-cap basis.
• Major players — Tether, PAXOS, big refiners — are in the mix. Central banks are even lurking at the edges with gold-backed stablecoins.

So what’s actually being tokenized today?

Mostly vaulted, already-mined bullion: bars sitting in secure vaults, wrapped in a digital skin so you can trade “one-for-one” claims on that metal without shipping it around.

That’s phase one.

The market is just starting to wake up to phase two — and this is where NatGold, and this chapter, become a very big deal.

Phase Two: Tokenizing the Future — Gold Still in the Ground

Vault-backed tokens are nice. They make gold more liquid, more divisible, more portable.

But they’re still chained to a simple equation:

One token = one unit of existing gold.

No more, no less.

NatGold is built for the next step…

Tokenizing unmined, proven gold reserves — gold that is real, documented, and economically viable, but still sitting in the rock.

Think about what that means:

• You’re not just tracking the spot price of gold.
• You’re tapping into the option value of future production.
• You’re bringing what used to be an off-limits asset class — “mine in the ground” value — directly into the hands of everyday investors.

It’s the difference between buying fish at the market… and owning a share of the best fishing “honey holes” on Earth.

How Do You Tokenize a Gold Deposit? (Step by Step)

Let’s walk through this in plain English.

1. Prove the Gold Is Really There

You start with proven or probable reserves, not fairy dust.

That means:

• Professional geological work: drilling, core samples, assay results.
• Formal technical reports under standards like NI 43-101 (Canada) or S-K 1300 (U.S.) that quantify how many ounces are in the ground, at what grade, and with what confidence.
• Independent experts sign off on the math and the geology.

This is the “trust anchor.” Without it, you’re just tokenizing a story, not an asset.

2. Lock Down the Legal Rights

Next, you need the rights to that gold: mineral leases, claims, concessions, or ownership of the company that holds them.

That gets dropped into a clean legal wrapper — typically a special-purpose vehicle (SPV) or similar structure — so it’s very clear:

• This entity controls these specific reserves.
• Token holders have defined economic rights tied to those reserves (e.g., claim on future production value, revenue share, royalty, or reserve-backed guarantee).

No fuzziness. No “trust us, bro.”

3. Design the Token Economics

Now you translate those ounces into tokens.

For example (illustrative only):

• Let’s say the SPV controls 1 million ounces of proven gold.
• You decide that 1 NatGold Token will correspond to 0.01 ounce of economically recoverable gold.
• That implies a maximum of 100 million tokens tied to that reserve base.

You then build in:

• How tokens relate to future events: production milestones, revenue streams, or reserve upgrades.
• How much margin is reserved for development, operating costs, and environmental compliance.
• Whether there are claw-backs, buybacks, or redemption mechanics.

In other words: You’re building a digital twin of the deposit with clear, programmable rules.

4. Put It on Chain — With Guardrails

The NatGold token itself lives on a blockchain via a secure smart contract.

This contract encodes:

• Total supply and minting rules (no sneaky inflation).
• Transfer logic, compliance hooks, and any restrictions needed for securities law.
• Event hooks for upgrades (e.g., reserves increase after additional drilling).

Here’s where tokenization shines…

Once this is live, settlement and transfer are instant. No couriers. No warehouse receipts. No T+2 nonsense.

Forbes’ thesis — that commodity valuation models change when you strip out settlement lag and unlock 24/7 liquidity — plays out in real time here.

5. Build the Proof Layer: Audits and Oracles

For a reserves-backed token, it’s not enough to say “trust the PDF.”

You need:

• Third-party audits of the geological reports, legal rights, and corporate structure.
• Periodic updates as drilling refines the reserve.
• On-chain oracles that attest to the status of the underlying asset: Does the SPV still own the deposit? Have reserves changed? Has production started?

This creates an evolving, data-rich valuation surface that markets can actually price — day by day, as information updates.

6. Open It to the World

Finally, you list the token on compliant platforms, integrate with wallets and exchanges, and allow:

• Fractional purchases (someone can own $50 worth of a multi-billion-dollar deposit).
• 24/7 trading and price discovery.
• Use as collateral in lending or DeFi protocols, if/when allowed.

At that moment, something radical has happens…

A once illiquid, inaccessible gold deposit — the kind of thing that used to sit on a major’s balance sheet for decades — is now instantly accessible, globally tradeable, and continuously valued.

That is the world NatGold is designed for.

The New Valuation Curve: Why NatGold Isn’t “Just Another Gold Token”

Let’s sketch the three main ways the market could price gold going forward:

1. Physical bullion
   
   
• Pros: Tangible, nobody else’s liability.
• Cons: Storage, insurance, transport, and illiquidity.
  
  
2. Vault-backed tokenized bullion
   
   
• Pros: Easy to trade, fractional, 24/7, tightly tracks spot price.
• Cons: Little or no upside beyond spot; you’re renting the price, not the future.
  
  
3. Reserve-backed tokens (NatGold’s lane)
   
   
• Pros:
  
• Exposure to spot gold plus the option value of future production.
• Participation in a resource that’s historically off-limits.
• Early-entry leverage as markets wake up to the value of “digital reserves.”
  
  
• Cons:
  
• More moving parts: geology, permitting, development risk.
• More complex valuations.

The Forbes article warns that as tokenization spreads, traditional commodity models — built for slow, opaque, institutional markets — become less relevant. The new models center on liquidity, access, and programmability.

NatGold lives exactly at that intersection:

• Liquidity: Tradeable worldwide, around the clock.
• Access: Let the little guy own a slice of a world-class deposit.
• Programmability: Encode royalty streams, production milestones, and upgrades into the token itself.

That’s not a gold ETF. That’s a new species.

The Numbers Under the Hood: Why This Could Be a MoneyQuake

Now zoom out and look at the backdrop again:

• RWA tokenization has already jumped to around $24 billion and is growing nearly five-fold in three years.
• Multiple serious analyses project multi-trillion-dollar tokenized asset markets by 2030 — $13.5 trillion, $16 trillion, even $30 trillion-plus, depending on the methodology.
• Tokenized gold alone has already pushed to roughly $3.9 billion in market cap in late 2025, and is one of the fastest-growing RWA segments on chain.

If we simply project forward on current momentum, a $200 billion–$300 billion tokenized gold market by 2030 is not some wild fantasy. It’s a logical waypoint on the curve if gold continues to be:

• A macro hedge,
• A central bank reserve asset
• Now, a deeply liquid, programmable on-chain instrument.

Here’s my prediction:

By the end of this decade, the most explosive returns in the gold space won’t come from bars or even miners. They’ll come from well-structured, reserves-backed tokens like NatGold that sit at the crossroads of tight physical supply and exploding digital demand.

You’re essentially front-running two converging tides:

1. The tokenization supercycle.
2. The peak-gold reality — declining discoveries, rising extraction costs, and growing geopolitical demand.

When those waves smash into each other, you want to be holding the asset that benefits from both.

That’s NatGold’s lane.

The Road Ahead: 2025–2030 as a Five-Act Play

Let me sketch this as a story arc — because that’s how this next chapter is going to feel if you’re watching it unfold in real time.

Act I (Now–2026): The Plumbing Snaps Into Place

• RWAs blast past $24 billion and keep climbing.
• Regulators move from “What is this?” to “How do we supervise it?”
• Tokenized Treasurys, money market funds, and vaulted gold get the early flows.
• NatGold finalizes its legal structures, technical standards, and reserve reporting — and steps onto the stage with a clear proposition: tokens tied to real, proven ounces in the ground.

Act II (2027): Liquidity and Legitimacy

• More compliant platforms list RWA tokens; liquidity spreads across jurisdictions.
• Tokenized gold becomes a standard allocation in many portfolios; vault-backed tokens feel as normal as a gold ETF.
• NatGold begins to attract early adopters who want more than spot exposure — they want the reserve upside.

Act III (2028): The Squeeze

• Physical gold supply gets tight: New giant discoveries are rare, permitting is slower, ESG pressure is relentless.
• Central bank and institutional buying keeps the price elevated.
• The market starts to ask, “Where is the future gold going to come from?”
• Reserve-backed tokens like NatGold move from curiosity to necessity, as capital looks for structured ways to finance new production and capture that upside.

Act IV (2029): Convergence

• Tokenized gold is no longer “alt.” It’s core infrastructure in DeFi, collateral systems, and institutional trading stacks.
• ETFs, miners, and tokens coexist — but the tokens increasingly act as the plumbing between them: financing, hedging, and capital formation.
• NatGold, if it executes — audits tight, rights solid, storytelling clear — could be one of the flagship reserve-backed gold instruments on the planet.

Act V (2030): The New Normal

• Trillions of dollars of RWAs live on-chain. Tokenized gold runs into the hundreds of billions in market cap.
• The average investor doesn’t think twice about owning a digital slice of a mine, just like they don’t think twice about owning a fractional share of Apple today.
• The old question — “Do you own any gold?” — splits into two new ones:
• “Do you own any tokenized gold?”
• “Do you own any future gold?”

NatGold is precisely aimed at that second question.

Why This Chapter Is a Game-Changer

For years, I’ve argued that we were sprinting toward a world where:

• Analog finance gives way to on-chain finance.
• Commodities stop being dusty line items and become liquid, programmable assets.
• Gold, in particular, gets a second life as the hard-asset core of the digital system.

The Forbes article about tokenization changing commodity valuation models is one of those mainstream markers: The big outlets are now catching up to what has been building under the surface.

But NatGold? NatGold is where that theory becomes a weapon.

It takes everything tokenization promises — speed, access, transparency, fractional ownership, global liquidity — and applies it not just to bars in a vault… but to real, verifiable gold that hasn’t even been mined yet.

That’s not just a new product.

That’s a new way to think about what “owning commodities” means.

This is the chapter where:

• Gold leaves the vault.
• The mine comes onto your phone.
• And everyday investors finally get a seat at a table that used to be reserved for majors, bankers, and billion-dollar funds.

You don’t have to agree with my prediction.

But if even half of this plays out, the people who understood NatGold early are going to look back at this chapter as the moment the story turned.

And they’ll say what I’ve been saying for years: The market didn’t just misprice a stock. It mispriced an entire structure — and we saw it coming.

In my next installment, I’ll show you how this would unleash the massive gold deposit sitting in the ground at the Pebble Creek Project in Alaska.

Get to the good, green grass first…

The Prophet of Profit,