Tokenized Commodities Beyond Gold: Silver, Oil, and Agriculture

Gold still dominates tokenized commodities by a wide margin, but issuers are testing tokenization on silver, oil, and agricultural products too. The problem is that gold's model — allocated bars in a vault, monthly attestations, a simple redemption path — does not transfer cleanly to other commodities. Silver is bulkier and cheaper per unit, oil is a flow asset that is expensive to store and hard to deliver physically, and agricultural products degrade and vary in quality. Each of these creates a custody or settlement problem gold tokens mostly avoid. Trackers such as rwa.xyz and DeFiLlama still show gold as the overwhelming majority of tokenized commodity value; the rest is a collection of smaller, less standardized pilots (figures are snapshots — check the tracker for the current as-of date).

Why Gold's Model Does Not Transfer Cleanly

Gold tokenization worked first because gold is dense, chemically stable, and has a globally standardized delivery format. A London Good Delivery bar is defined by weight and purity standards set by bodies such as the LBMA, so a vault operator can hold identical bars and issue a token against them with a simple attestation: this many bars, this purity, this vault. Redemption is straightforward because the bars do not change over time and one bar is interchangeable with another of the same standard.

That template — standardized physical unit, stable over time, single global reference price — is exactly what silver, oil, and agricultural products lack in different ways.

Silver: Similar Metal, Different Economics

Silver is chemically closer to gold than any other commodity on this list, and some issuers already tokenize it using a comparable allocated-bar model. But the economics change the custody math. Silver trades at a fraction of gold's price per ounce, so a given dollar value of tokenized silver takes up roughly 80 to 90 times more physical space and weight than the same value in gold, based on typical gold-to-silver price ratios. Vaulting, insuring, and transporting that bulk costs more relative to the value being secured, which is one reason silver tokenization has lagged gold even though the underlying custody model is similar.

Oil: A Flow Asset, Not a Stored One

Oil breaks the gold template completely. Physical crude is not something most holders want delivered — it requires pipelines, tankers, or storage tanks, and quality varies by grade (West Texas Intermediate, Brent, and others trade at different prices for a reason). Benchmarks like those tracked by CME Group settle through futures contracts and physical delivery mechanisms built for commercial players, not retail token holders. Because of this, most "tokenized oil" exposure today is synthetic: a token or structured product that references an oil price feed rather than a claim on barrels in a tank. That is a fundamentally different risk from a gold-backed token — it depends on an issuer or protocol honoring a price relationship, not on a vault holding metal. See what commodity-backed RWA actually means for how this backed-versus-synthetic distinction plays out across commodities generally.

Agriculture: Quality Grading and Perishability

Agricultural commodities add a layer gold and oil do not have: the physical asset itself degrades or varies. A bushel of wheat is not interchangeable with another bushel the way a gold bar is — moisture content, grade, and storage conditions all affect value, and the underlying stock can spoil or lose quality over the holding period. Warehouse-receipt-style tokenization pilots exist in trade finance, mostly for institutional buyers financing grain or other crop inventories against a receipt, but this is a narrower and more operationally intensive model than a simple redeemable gold token. Standardized, retail-facing agricultural tokens comparable in scale to gold tokens do not yet exist.

What This Means for Users

The table below summarizes the custody and settlement gap between gold and the other three:

The main takeaway is that "tokenized commodity" does not mean one type of risk. A silver token backed by allocated bars carries custody and audit risk similar to gold, just with different economics. A synthetic oil token carries issuer and price-feed risk on top of ordinary oil market volatility, with no physical redemption right at all. An agricultural product token, where it exists, usually reflects an institutional receivable structure rather than something you would compare directly to a gold token. Before treating any non-gold commodity token as a straightforward substitute for owning the physical asset, check whether it is backed by an actual custodied stock or is only tracking a price, and read the RWA market map for how commodities sit next to other RWA categories. For a closer look at what already exists on the market today, see gold and commodity token products on the market. Commodities are not the only physical-asset category running into similar custody and standardization questions — tokenized art and collectibles face a comparable authentication and custody problem for a very different underlying.

You can see how BiFu organizes commodity-linked RWA information on the BiFu RWA page.

FAQ

Can you buy tokenized oil the way you buy tokenized gold?

Not in the same way. Most tokenized oil exposure today is a synthetic instrument tracking an oil price feed rather than a redeemable claim on physical barrels, because retail-scale physical delivery of crude oil is not practical. Check any specific product's documentation to see whether it offers physical redemption or only price exposure.

Is silver tokenization the same model as gold tokenization?

The custody model is similar — allocated bars held by a named vault with periodic attestations — but the economics differ because silver's lower price per ounce means more physical bulk and storage cost per dollar of value tokenized. That is one reason silver tokenization has grown more slowly than gold.

Why hasn't agricultural commodity tokenization scaled like gold?

Agricultural products are perishable and vary in quality, so they cannot be pooled and redeemed the way identical gold bars can. Most agricultural tokenization today exists as institutional warehouse-receipt financing rather than a standardized, retail-facing token.

Does tokenizing a commodity remove its price risk?

No. Tokenization changes how an asset is accessed, recorded, and transferred, not the underlying commodity's price behavior. A tokenized commodity still carries the same market volatility as the physical commodity, plus custody or issuer risk depending on how the token is structured.

Related Reading

• Gold and commodity token products on the market today.
• What commodity-backed RWA actually means.
• See where commodities fit in the RWA market map.