Wintermute sees tokenized gold market tripling to $15B in 2026 – Here’s why!

ambcryptoPublished on 2026-02-18Last updated on 2026-02-18

Wintermute, one of the top crypto market makers, has jumped on the tokenized gold trend and expects the market to grow threefold by the end of the year.

The firm unveiled support for tokenized gold trading, starting with Tether Gold and Paxos Gold, on its over-the-counter (OTC) desk for institutional players. This marks the first of its kind, signaling growing traction in the segment.

For Wintermute CEO Evgeny Gaevoy, the on-chain gold boom could follow the path of the foreign exchange market boom.

“We’re watching gold undergo the same infrastructure evolution that turned foreign exchange into the world’s largest market.”

He added,

“Gold is now following that playbook, and we expect the tokenized gold market to reach $15 billion in 2026 as institutional adoption accelerates.”

Will tokenized gold triple in 2026?

Currently, the overall market cap of the on-chain gold market is about $5 billion, according to Coingecko data. At $15 billion, that would imply a 3x market growth by the end of the year.

According to the market maker, the segment’s explosive traction is already evident. Wintermute believes that the tokenized gold market rivaled the top five traditional ETFs tracking physical gold in trading volume in Q4 2025.

The segment, led by Tether Gold [XAUT] and Paxos Gold [PAXG], hit $126 billion in trading volume in the last quarter, outpacing the top five traditional gold ETFs for the first time.

Will the momentum overshadow BTC?

However, the growth is now being questioned by some analysts. For the unfamiliar, tokenized gold is a token that allows one to gain exposure to physical gold with additional advantages. It is backed by physical gold and supports 24/7 liquidity, instant settlement, and one can buy even small amounts (divisible).

These features make it a welcome upgrade to the traditional bullion storage or ETF wrappers. According to a pseudonymous analyst, TXMC, the challenges of traditional gold are what makes BTC viable and attractive.

Hence, the question – Will the tokenized gold boom dent BTC’s traction?

He implored,

“For ages now, a main story has been that BTC beats gold on divisibility, transportability, and being digital rather than analog. What happens to those advantages if fully backed, tokenized gold products gain traction and are highly liquid?”

In fact, Gaevoy recently told CNBC that the current market weakness didn’t drive capital out of crypto. Instead, the money “repositioned to tokenized gold.”

It remains to be seen whether BTC will trade as a safe haven again or if tokenized gold will derail it.

Final Summary

Wintermute CEO projected that the on-chain gold market cap could grow 3x by the end of the year to $15 billion.
Tokenized gold hit $126 billion in Q4 2025, rivaling major traditional gold ETFs for the first time.

The Battle for the AI Payment Race: Traditional Card Networks Face Off Against Coinbase

With the rise of AI agents conducting transactions, a battle for the underlying payment infrastructure is underway. Two distinct and incompatible approaches have emerged for enabling autonomous AI payments. The first approach is championed by traditional card networks Visa and Mastercard. They leverage their existing tokenized card credential systems, extending them to allow verified AI agents to make purchases within user-defined limits. Services like Mastercard's Agent Pay and Visa's Intelligent Commerce integrate with major AI platforms (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic) and keep transactions within the established, decades-old card payment model. This system offers advantages for consumer retail, including robust fraud protection, chargeback mechanisms, and extensive merchant networks. The second approach, led by Coinbase, utilizes stablecoins on open internet protocols. Its x402 protocol reactivates the HTTP 402 status code for machine-to-machine micropayments, using USDC for settlement directly on-chain. This method eliminates the need for accounts or card fees, making it highly efficient for high-frequency, low-value, cross-border transactions between AI agents—such as paying for API calls, data streams, or computational resources—where traditional card fees and settlement times are impractical. While card networks excel in consumer-facing scenarios requiring dispute resolution, stablecoin protocols are tailored for machine economies. A key challenge for both is agent identity verification and transaction authorization. Notably, Visa and Mastercard are hedging their bets by also investing in stablecoins. Visa has rapidly grown its stablecoin settlement volume and is collaborating with Coinbase to bridge its network with the x402 protocol. Mastercard plans to acquire stablecoin platform BVNK. Their strategy is to become the fee-collecting gateway for all payment flows, regardless of the channel. Current applications reflect this division: consumer AI shopping tools (e.g., ChatGPT's checkout, Amazon's "Shop for Me") predominantly use card networks, while machine-focused services (e.g., Amazon Bedrock's core payments) adopt stablecoins via the x402 protocol. In the short term, a coexistence model is expected, with cards dominating retail and stablecoins powering machine transactions. The long-term outcome depends on whether AI-driven commerce evolves to resemble traditional retail or becomes a vast network of machine micropayments. By investing in both tracks, the incumbent card networks are positioning themselves to capture transaction fees regardless of which future prevails.

marsbit8m ago

The Battle for the AI Payment Race: Traditional Card Networks Face Off Against Coinbase

marsbit8m ago

AI Deceives with Perfection: How Can Crypto Users Defend Against New Scams?

AI has made crypto scams more sophisticated by generating flawless text and realistic interfaces, rendering traditional detection methods like spotting typos and grammar errors obsolete. Scammers now use AI for polished phishing emails, fake customer service chats, and convincing websites. Crypto users face unique risks as blockchain transactions are irreversible, and attackers can steal assets simply by tricking users into authorizing malicious transactions. To defend against these advanced threats, users must adopt rigorous verification habits: - Carefully check website URLs for subtle spoofing. - Use only official links and channels. - Scrutinize all wallet permissions and token approvals before signing. - Verify contract addresses directly from trusted sources, not token names. - Ignore unsolicited private messages posing as customer support. - Treat urgent requests with extreme skepticism. The core principle is that a professional appearance no longer equals safety. In the AI era, security hinges on proactive verification of every link, transaction, and communication, not on trusting surface-level credibility.

marsbit27m ago

AI Deceives with Perfection: How Can Crypto Users Defend Against New Scams?

marsbit27m ago

Turn Off AI Before the Interview: What Kind of People is Anthropic Looking For?

"Shut Off AI Before the Interview: What Kind of People Anthropic Is Screening For" Anthropic, now the world's most valuable AI startup, has an exceptionally competitive hiring process. A key and distinctive element is its mandatory "culture interview," conducted without AI assistance. This interview focuses not on technical skills, but on assessing a candidate's core values, worldview, and perspective on long-term AI risks. Questions delve deeply into personal ethics, "unusual beliefs," and the candidate's willingness to thoughtfully critique Anthropic's own mission. The goal is to evaluate whether someone's convictions are genuinely their own and if they can articulate and defend them under pressure. A poor score here can veto otherwise successful technical interviews. This approach starkly contrasts with companies like Google, which now encourages using AI in interviews to assess "AI fluency." Anthropic's philosophy suggests that in an era where AI makes execution cheap and the generation of opinions nearly free, true scarcity lies in original, deeply held thought. The company seeks individuals who possess substance "after turning off the AI"—those who haven't outsourced their core thinking. This focus on aligning fundamental values contributes to Anthropic's high employee retention rate in a fast-moving industry.

marsbit30m ago

Turn Off AI Before the Interview: What Kind of People is Anthropic Looking For?

marsbit30m ago

In the Last 2 Minutes Before SK Hynix Market Open, TradeXYZ Achieved Price Accuracy Within 0.13%

Traditionally, asset price discovery halts when markets close. However, decentralized exchanges like Hyperliquid, enabling 24/7 trading of Real-World Asset (RWA) perpetuals, are changing this. A case study involving SK Hynix stock on Hyperliquid's xyz:SKHX market demonstrates this shift during a weekend when the Korean Exchange (KRX) was closed. While the KRX closed at 2,070,000 KRW on June 5th, active trading continued on-chain. By 08:56 KST on Monday, June 8th, just before the KRX open, the chain price had fallen to 1200.0 USDC, implying a -10.21% drop. Three minutes later, the KRX opened at 1,856,000 KRW, an actual drop of -10.34%. The on-chain price had predicted the opening decline with remarkable accuracy, missing by only 0.13 percentage points. In the final two minutes before the open (08:58-08:59 KST), the on-chain market saw a significant volume spike and a +2.31% price rebound. This wasn't a prediction error but likely the market front-running the expected post-open bounce. Indeed, after opening at its low, the KRX price rebounded approximately +2.64% by 09:03 KST. This event illustrates how 24/7 on-chain markets can act as a leading price discovery venue, not only anticipating opening prices but also trading the immediate post-open dynamics before traditional markets even begin.

marsbit42m ago

In the Last 2 Minutes Before SK Hynix Market Open, TradeXYZ Achieved Price Accuracy Within 0.13%

marsbit42m ago

Farewell to Traditional Bulls and Bears: The Market Has Entered an Era of Rotating Bubbles

Farewell to traditional bull and bear markets; we have entered an era of rolling bubbles. This article uses a meteorological analogy to explain the modern market's shift from slow-moving, long-term trends to a chain of rapid, successive speculative frenzies. The old market resembled "stratiform" weather—slow, broad cycles lasting years. Today's market is like a "mesoscale convective system," where isolated storms (bubbles in sectors like AI, GLP-1 drugs, or crypto) form in sequence. Each is triggered by the outflow of capital and sentiment from the previous one, creating a self-perpetuating chain of booms and busts. This structural change is driven by eight permanent shifts: the democratization of speculation (zero-commission trading, retail options activity), perpetual buying from defined-contribution retirement plans, the dominance of passive investing (creating price-insensitive flows), the rise of multi-strategy funds and high-frequency trading (weakening price discovery), suppressed volatility that erupts violently, an index composition now dominated by long-duration, narrative-driven tech stocks, the elimination of information delays, and a permissive fiscal/monetary backdrop. These conditions ensure that rolling bubbles are the new normal. To navigate this environment, investors should either become deep-sector experts who understand the underlying technologies and business models or become adept observers of trends and capital flows. While chaotic from within each "storm," a higher-altitude view reveals a predictable pattern of serial booms. The key is to avoid being emotionally swept up in any single narrative and to recognize the market's new, permanent structure.

marsbit43m ago

Farewell to Traditional Bulls and Bears: The Market Has Entered an Era of Rotating Bubbles

marsbit43m ago

Trading

Spot

Futures

Hot Articles

What Is Superchain? Understanding How Superchain Governs and Works in One Article

OP Chain has become a catchy term recently. What is an OP Chain? And what is Superchain? How do Superchain and OP Chains relate? How does Superchain operate and manage?

3.2k Total ViewsPublished 2023.08.13Updated 2024.02.18

What Is Superchain? Understanding How Superchain Governs and Works in One Article

How to Buy ONE

Welcome to HTX.com! We've made purchasing Harmony (ONE) simple and convenient. Follow our step-by-step guide to embark on your crypto journey.Step 1: Create Your HTX AccountUse your email or phone number to sign up for a free account on HTX. Experience a hassle-free registration journey and unlock all features.Get My AccountStep 2: Go to Buy Crypto and Choose Your Payment MethodCredit/Debit Card: Use your Visa or Mastercard to buy Harmony (ONE) instantly.Balance: Use funds from your HTX account balance to trade seamlessly.Third Parties: We've added popular payment methods such as Google Pay and Apple Pay to enhance convenience.P2P: Trade directly with other users on HTX.Over-the-Counter (OTC): We offer tailor-made services and competitive exchange rates for traders.Step 3: Store Your Harmony (ONE)After purchasing your Harmony (ONE), store it in your HTX account. Alternatively, you can send it elsewhere via blockchain transfer or use it to trade other cryptocurrencies.Step 4: Trade Harmony (ONE)Easily trade Harmony (ONE) on HTX's spot market. Simply access your account, select your trading pair, execute your trades, and monitor in real-time. We offer a user-friendly experience for both beginners and seasoned traders.

3.8k Total ViewsPublished 2024.03.29Updated 2026.06.02

Understanding Bitcoin Halving in One Article

In this article, we'll delve into key concepts related to Bitcoin halving.

18.5k Total ViewsPublished 2024.04.16Updated 2024.04.16

Understanding Bitcoin Halving in One Article

Discussions

Welcome to the HTX Community. Here, you can stay informed about the latest platform developments and gain access to professional market insights. Users' opinions on the price of ONE (ONE) are presented below.