DBS, Singapore's largest bank by assets, said on June 11 it will offer tokenised physical gold to retail customers through its digibank app in the second half of 2026. The product, DBS Physical Gold Tokens, would be the first in Singapore to let retail users access, hold, and trade tokenised physical gold on a single platform, according to a Reuters report carrying the bank's announcement.
Each token is backed by one gram of physical gold held by DBS in a dedicated vault in Singapore. Holders can redeem tokens for the underlying bullion, and the bank is exploring a listing of the token on DBS Digital Exchange for accredited investors and institutional partners. Until now, DBS had kept its tokenised gold inside that institutional venue. Pushing it into a mass-market banking app is the change.
A regulated bank doing what crypto issuers pioneered
Tokenised gold is not new. PAX Gold and Tether Gold have circulated for years as on-chain claims on vaulted bullion, and the broader real-world asset category has grown into one of crypto's few sectors with steady demand through the current downturn. DBS bringing the same model into a retail banking app matters because of who is doing it. This is a systemically important lender, regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, putting a tokenised hard asset in front of ordinary depositors rather than a niche of crypto-native traders.
The mechanics mirror what stablecoin and card issuers already run. A reserve of a real asset sits in custody, a digital token represents a fractional claim on it, and redemption ties the token back to the thing it stands for. The same vault-and-claim plumbing underpins fiat-backed stablecoins and the balances behind many crypto payment products. DBS is applying it to one gram of gold per token instead of one dollar per coin.
Demand DBS can already see on its books
The bank framed the launch around existing client behavior, not speculation. Physical gold holdings among DBS wealth clients have more than doubled over the past three years, the bank said, which is the demand signal it is responding to. Gold sat near record highs through much of the past year as investors looked for ballast, and a one-gram entry point lowers the barrier well below a standard bullion bar or a full ounce.
Fractionalisation is the practical hook. A single gram of gold trades for a small fraction of an ounce, so tokenisation lets a retail customer buy a precise dollar amount rather than rounding up to a whole bar. Settlement and custody also move onto the bank's rails, removing the storage and insurance friction that keeps many retail buyers out of physical metal entirely.
Singapore keeps building the tokenisation stack
The launch fits a longer pattern in Singapore, where the central bank has run tokenisation pilots under Project Guardian and pushed regulated institutions toward on-chain settlement. A retail tokenised-gold product from the country's biggest bank moves that work out of the pilot stage and into a consumer app used by millions.
For now the gold token is a store-of-value and trading instrument, not a payment one. It is held and traded inside digibank, with redemption for metal as the exit. There is no card swipe or merchant rail attached on day one. The longer-term read is what regulated tokenised assets could plug into later. A token that represents a precise, redeemable claim on a vaulted asset is the kind of building block that on-chain payment and settlement systems are designed to move, and it sits closer to the rails that crypto cards run on than a paper gold certificate ever did.
One distinction worth keeping straight: a DBS gold token is a custodial claim. The metal sits in the bank's vault and the bank controls redemption, which is the opposite of a self-custody arrangement where the holder controls the asset directly. For retail buyers that trade-off is usually acceptable, since custody, insurance, and a regulated counterparty are the point. It is still the relevant question to ask of any tokenised asset: who holds the thing the token claims to represent.
Overview
DBS will let retail customers in Singapore buy, hold, and trade tokenised physical gold through its digibank app in the second half of 2026, with each token backed by one gram of vaulted bullion and redeemable for the metal. It is the first such retail product in Singapore and an example of a major regulated bank adopting the reserve-and-claim model that crypto issuers built. Physical gold holdings among DBS wealth clients have more than doubled in three years, the demand the bank is moving to capture. The product is a store-of-value tool today, with a possible institutional listing on DBS Digital Exchange to follow.
