# Pax Gold (PAXG): D-Score 34/100 — Centralized Leaning

**BlockIndex D-Score: 34/100 (Centralized Leaning).** Pax Gold (PAXG) is a Layer 2 cryptocurrency using Other consensus. Pax Gold (PAXG): Regulated ERC-20 tokenized gold providing fractional ownership of LBMA London Good Delivery bars with on‑chain liquidity.

_Source: https://blockindex.ai/coin/paxg · Data by BlockIndex.AI · Updated 2026-06-19_

## D-Score breakdown (0-100, higher means more decentralized)
| Component | Score |
| --- | --- |
| Overall D-Score | 34 |
| Node distribution | 0 |
| Initial distribution | 0 |
| Governance | 21 |
| Age and history | 13 |
| Autonomy | 0 |

## Key facts
- Layer: Layer 2
- Consensus: Other (N/A)
- Launch: Other (2019)
- Founder: Charles Cascarilla, Rich Teo, Emil Woods
- VC funded: No
- Max supply: N/A
- Circulating: 454,419

## Market data (as of 2026-06-19)
- Price: $4,134.01
- Market cap: $1.88B
- 24h volume: $134.07M
- 24h change: -3.79% · 7d change: -0.81%

## About
Pax Gold (PAXG) is a regulated, ERC-20 token that represents fractional ownership of allocated LBMA London Good Delivery gold bars held in insured custody. Launched by Paxos Trust Company with New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) authorization on September 5, 2019, PAXG links on‑chain token balances to off‑chain bullion holdings and monthly redemption attestations. The product is intended to provide investors with the price exposure of physical gold while leveraging Ethereum’s settlement rails and the broader DeFi/trading ecosystem. Paxos publishes regular redemption assets reports to demonstrate that custody holdings meet or exceed tokens outstanding; these attestations and Paxos’s charter and custody arrangements (Brink’s referenced in source material) are core credibility mechanisms for the asset.

Technically, PAXG is a standard ERC-20 token contract (contract verified on Etherscan) that employs a proxy/implementation pattern to enable administrative upgradeability by the issuer. The smart contract and associated metadata are published and verifiable on public explorers; compiler metadata and MIT license references appear in the provided material. Because PAXG is not a standalone blockchain, it inherits Ethereum’s consensus and operational characteristics. Token minting and burning operations are used to reflect deposits of allocated bullion and redemptions; there is no native block-reward, staking mechanism, or token economic model like on a protocol blockchain. As such, many chain-level statistics (blocks, block reward, block timing) are not applicable to the token itself and are governed by the host chain’s properties.

PAXG’s primary use cases are custody‑backed gold exposure, fractionalized ownership of physical bullion, on‑chain settlement and transferability for market participants, and integration into trading and institutional custody workflows. The token is listed and traded on numerous centralized exchanges and appears across major market-data and analytics platforms, providing liquidity and institutional access. Paxos’s operational model — regulated trust, monthly attestations, and custody by established vault operators — addresses the principal counterparty and custody risks, while the main residual risks remain regulatory shifts and fluctuations in the price of gold. The issuer-centric model means holders rely on Paxos’ operational transparency rather than decentralized governance for macro-level trust.

From a tokenomics perspective, supply is elastic to the extent that minting follows gold deposits and burning follows redemptions; snapshot data across sources show circulating supply in the mid‑hundreds of thousands of PAXG tokens (examples: ~350,902.823 PAXG in Etherscan/CoinMarketCap snapshots). There is no documented premine percentage or public ICO distribution for PAXG — issuance is performed by Paxos per custody flows. Governance is centralized and off‑chain: Paxos, as a regulated trust company, manages issuance, custody and redemption processes; token holders do not possess on‑chain governance powers over issuance, nor is PAXG governed by a DAO. Future development activity cited in the provided materials centers on operational/regulatory posture (charter conversion efforts and continued redemptions/attestations) rather than protocol-level upgrades to the token contract itself.

## Links
- Website: https://www.paxos.com/paxgold/
- Whitepaper: https://www.paxos.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/PAX-Gold-Whitepaper.pdf
- GitHub: N/A

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About the D-Score: BlockIndex.AI rates decentralization from 0 to 100 across node distribution, initial distribution, governance, age and history, and autonomy. Methodology: https://blockindex.ai/dscore