Crypto traders catch the gold bug again: Gold futures peak in trading, whales accumulate

The gold trade emerged among leading positions, as crypto natives still kept an eye out for tokenized gold. The recent price volatility also boosted on-chain trading. 

Gold is the second most active position in perpetual futures on Hyperliquid as of September 24. The contract holds $299.55M in open interest and has outperformed equities in terms of daily trading volumes. Open interest on gold is second only to the S&P 500 perpetual futures contract.

On HIP-3, gold surpassed the activity of equity indexes and top equities like SK Hynix. Gold perpetual futures also traded more actively compared to oil. 

Gold is no longer an opposition to crypto. The recent rush to tokenize real-world assets makes gold a part of general liquidity flows in the crypto space. In total, tokenized gold and commodities are valued at nearly $5B, of which Tether’s XAUT and Paxos Gold make up over 90% of all value.

As Cryptopolitan reported earlier, gold emerged as a speculative position in December, leading to both derivative trading and token accumulation. Recent data shows exchanges like Gate show a revival of commodities trading, making up 54.2% of traditional asset trading, moving ahead of equities. 

Gold expects more dramatic price moves

Gold, long considered a store of value and a conservative asset, recently increased its volatility. The 90-day gold volatility is at 27%, relatively close to the volatility of BTC. The shift from precious metals to BTC follows a relatively slow period for gold, with a strong recovery for BTC. 

BTC currently stands at around 18 gold ounces, while spot gold is at $4,435.18. Despite gold’s relative weakness, traders still seek directional bets, where volatility can be useful. 

On Hyperliquid, around 39 whales have set up positions on gold perpetual futures, with 16 short positions. The largest position is valued at $40.83%, going long with an unrealized loss of $1.25M. 

Instead of a store of value, gold is traded as a relatively volatile position, reacting quickly to developments of the war in Iran. The latest communication from Iran on not intending to surrender erased value from all asset classes, leading to the need for more hedging through HIP-3. 

Tokenized gold still shows increased demand

Another driver for the price of gold is demand for tokens to combine with new meme assets. For now, the predominant pairing of reference meme tokens is with equities. 

New memes are now appearing in a pairing with XAUT, the most widely used form of tokenized gold. One of the new memes includes Runescape Gold, paired with the GLDX tokenized gold asset. On BNB Chain, Zhao Cai Mao is another meme paired with Tether’s XAUT.

For now, gold-backed memes are still rare, and there is no single standard on the exact type of gold that is backing the asset. One of the earliest tokens uses direct XAUT rewards to its holders, so far distributing around 3 ounces of gold to meme buyers. 

Additionally, the Antalpha AI agent has accumulated nearly $70M in XAUT, with the latest purchase happening three weeks ago. 

XAUT trading on its own remains robust, with most of the activity concentrated on Binance and Bitget.

The biggest advantage of XAUT and perpetual futures is the 24/7 trading available from anywhere in the world. This allows tokenized gold and contracts to react immediately to any news and geopolitical shifts, while traditional gold contracts wait for opening hours.