Why did gold get tokenized first, rather than crude oil or industrial metals — commodities that are traded more frequently?
The key lies in how standardized the asset itself is. Gold's storage and quality grading already have long-established international standards through bodies like the LBMA, and a gold bar's purity, weight, and provenance can be clearly verified — letting a token issuer relatively straightforwardly promise "this token corresponds to this specific batch of gold in the vault." Crude oil, by contrast, has to deal with storage and shipping, quality grading (oil from different fields has different quality), and delivery-location complexities; industrial metals face similar issues. This extra complexity makes tokenization design far harder than for gold, and it's the core reason these categories' tokenization scale remains far smaller than gold's today.
What does it specifically mean that a tokenized soybean oil product has "only mint and burn records, no substantive trading"?
It means this token currently only has onchain records at two points — "the issuer creates the token" and "an investor redeems it back for the physical asset or cash" — with no genuine buying and selling of the token happening between investors, or between investors and other counterparties, in between. This is entirely different from an asset with a deep secondary market (like a gold token being actively bought and sold across multiple exchanges) — no secondary-market activity means this token currently looks more like "a certificate you can take back to the issuer for cash" than a freely circulating asset with a live, publicly discoverable price you can buy or sell anytime. That's a critical distinction for assessing liquidity risk.
Is the market analysis calling industrial metals "undervalued" a reasonable judgment, and how should an ordinary investor treat it?
The logic behind this judgment — that demand for metals like copper and lithium from EVs, solar panels, and data centers keeps growing — is genuinely backed by industry-level data, and is a reasonable long-term trend observation. But that observation is about "demand for the physical industrial metal will grow," which isn't the same as "products that tokenize these metals will automatically grow along with it." In between sit the storage-and-shipping complexity, degree of quality-grading standardization, and whether issuers are willing to invest resources into solving those problems mentioned earlier. An ordinary investor can treat this view as an industry trend worth tracking, but shouldn't treat it as an "invest right now" signal — the number of tokenized products and market depth in this category remain very limited today.
If I want diversified tokenized exposure across multiple commodities rather than betting purely on gold, is that actually feasible right now?
Feasible in theory, but you'll run into the constraints mentioned above in practice: beyond silver, the other tokenized commodity products you can find are few in number, small in scale, and some have extremely low secondary-market activity. If the goal is risk diversification, worthwhile alternatives to weigh include: first, accepting the current reality of limited diversified choices and putting the vast majority of exposure into gold and silver, the two relatively mature categories; second, if you genuinely want industrial metals or agricultural exposure, confirm the specific product's actual onchain trading record first, rather than just checking a marketing page's "supported commodities" list; third, keep in mind this space is still changing quickly — over the next year or two, as more issuers enter, market depth for industrial metals and agricultural tokenization may improve substantially, worth continuing to track rather than forcing together a diversified portfolio now.
When people hear "tokenized commodities," the image that comes to mind is almost always gold — products like PAXG and XAUT genuinely are the most mature and largest-scale tokenized commodities on the market today. But "commodities" as a term covers far more than gold: silver, copper, lithium, crude oil, wheat, and soybeans are all core members of the commodities market too. Getting clear on where these "beyond gold" tokenized commodities actually stand today can keep you from applying your mental picture of the whole tokenized commodities market to an asset class that might only be a rounding error next to gold.
According to industry tracking data from early 2026, the tokenized commodities market has grown to roughly $7.1–7.4 billion total (up more than 3x from $1.9 billion in early 2025), but that growth is almost entirely gold's doing — of 39 tokenized commodity products tracked, 15 are gold-linked, and those 15 alone account for roughly 73% of total market cap; looking at CoinGecko's Q1 growth data alone, PAXG and XAUT contributed 89.1% of the entire sector's expansion. By contrast, tokenized silver sits at just over $300 million, the fastest-growing adjacent category, but still far smaller in absolute scale than gold; industrial metals like copper, lithium, nickel, and aluminum combined hold only about $75 million in tokenized value; energy (mainly crude oil) sits around $500 million; agricultural products (wheat, corn, soybeans) combine for only about $150 million. In other words, when a headline says "tokenized commodities market triples," what actually tripled is largely a blockchain-wrapped gold ETF with 24-hour trading, not the tokenization of the broader commodities economy.
Gold is naturally suited to tokenization: storage is standardized (bars, ingots), quality grading is clear-cut, and mature certification bodies like the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) already exist — no need to deal with shelf life, quality degradation, or cross-border shipping complexities. Industrial metals and agricultural products are entirely different — physical delivery of industrial metals like copper or lithium involves complex supply-chain logistics, and industrial buyers' requirements around exactly where and when a given batch is delivered are far more demanding than an investor simply holding a gold certificate. Agricultural products are trickier still — wheat and soybeans carry shelf-life and quality-degradation issues, and a 2026 industry report notes directly that some tokenized soybean oil products, despite being designed as "1 token equals 1 ton of soybean oil," only show mint and burn records onchain, with no genuine trading activity — meaning the tokenization wrapper exists, but no genuinely active market has actually formed beneath it. Energy-linked tokenized commodities show a similar pattern: some tokenized electricity products (denominated in megawatt-hours) aren't listed on any centralized or decentralized exchange, leaving actual trading volume extremely thin.
Worth noting: some industry analysis considers tokenizing industrial metals like copper and lithium the genuinely undervalued opportunity — the reasoning being that these metals are indispensable inputs for electric vehicles, solar panels, data centers, and circuit boards, with a clear demand growth trajectory, yet current tokenization scale combined is under $100 million, nearly negligible against gold's over $5 billion. The logic behind this kind of analysis is that gold has already validated the "tokenized commodity" model itself is viable, and the theoretical growth room going forward sits in categories like industrial metals and agricultural products that connect more deeply to the physical economy but have barely been touched by tokenization yet. But this remains a hypothesis not yet validated by market data — as of now, capital and trading activity being heavily concentrated in gold is an established fact, not a forecast.
If you're considering exposure to "beyond gold" tokenized commodities, the first thing to confirm is the product's actual onchain trading activity, not just whether the token exists in the first place — the soybean oil and electricity tokenization examples mentioned above illustrate that a commodity "having been tokenized" and "having a genuinely functioning market after tokenization" are two different things. Only mint-and-burn records, no substantive trading, means that even if you buy in, you could face serious liquidity problems when trying to sell later. Second, these asset categories are all still small in scale, meaning fewer issuers and shallower market depth — the impact of a single issuer or product running into trouble is far higher than investing in the gold tokenization market, which already exceeds $5 billion and has multiple mature issuers competing with each other. Third, if your interest is "participating in the broader tokenization trend of the commodities economy," the options actually purchasable with meaningful liquidity right now remain heavily concentrated in the precious-metals category — that doesn't mean other commodity categories have no future, but it does mean that at this stage, "tokenized commodities" is largely synonymous with "tokenized precious metals."