DBS will offer tokenized physical gold to retail customers through its digibank app in the second half of 2026. The product, called DBS Physical Gold Tokens, will represent ownership of 1 gram of physical gold held in a dedicated Singapore vault, issued and managed entirely in-house by the bank, according to an announcement on Thursday.
DBS is also evaluating whether to list the tokens on its DBS Digital Exchange (DDEx), which currently serves accredited investors and institutional clients.
The product is an expansion of DBS's existing physical gold business, which has served wealth clients since 2013 and has grown in recent years. Physical gold holdings among DBS's affluent client base have more than doubled over the past three years, the bank said, attributing this partly to heightened awareness of store-of-value assets following periods of inflation and equity market volatility.
"While our retail investors have been able to buy gold funds, access to physical gold has been largely available to only institutional and accredited investors," said James Tan, head of investment products and advisory at DBS. "We are now leveraging tokenisation to broaden access, enabling more retail customers to invest in gold in a safe and meaningful way."
Gold's structural moment
The launch comes as gold trades near historically elevated levels, having established an intra-year floor around $4,170 per ounce in 2026 after a sustained run that included a record peak in late January. Central banks have remained consistent buyers — resuming net purchases of 17 tonnes in April after a rare net selling month in March, with Poland and China among the most active buyers. Full-year central bank demand is projected at 750–850 tonnes according to the World Gold Council, maintaining the three-year streak above 1,000 tonnes annually — a historically exceptional run that has provided a structural floor to prices.
For retail investors, gold has historically been accessible only through funds, ETFs, or minimum bar sizes that carry significant upfront costs. Tokenization changes the unit economics — owning 1 gram rather than 1 troy ounce lowers the entry threshold substantially. The trade-off is that tokenized gold holders need clarity on custody arrangements, auditability, and whether physical redemption is available or whether the product is purely a financial exposure instrument. DBS has not yet disclosed the specific blockchain infrastructure underpinning the tokens or the full redemption mechanics.
Singapore's tokenized gold race
DBS is entering a market that has already become competitive at home. OCBC launched GOLDX — a tokenized physical gold fund — in April 2026, deploying on both Ethereum and Solana. OCBC's product targets institutional clients and high-net-worth individuals through its private banking subsidiary, Bank of Singapore, with allocated gold bars held in Singapore vaults. UOB also offers physical gold and silver trading to investors, making Singapore arguably the most active market in Asia for tokenized bullion from regulated banks.
The competitive dynamic matters: each bank is trying to capture a younger investor cohort that has shown strong interest in gold but has historically been priced out of direct ownership. Tokenization solves the minimum investment problem and, in principle, offers better liquidity than holding physical bars in a vault.
DBS's move is the latest evidence that major banks are treating tokenization as a product development priority rather than an experiment. The bank has progressively expanded its digital asset footprint — from the DBS Digital Exchange in 2021, to tokenized structured notes on Ethereum in 2025, to listings of Franklin Templeton's tokenized money market fund and Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin on DDEx. Tokenized gold fits that trajectory and adds a store-of-value product to a platform that already offers exposure to tokenized money market funds and stablecoins.
For the broader industry, the Singapore pattern — where major banks are building overlapping tokenized asset stacks with limited cross-bank interoperability — raises structural questions about whether the city-state is developing toward a shared infrastructure standard or toward a set of competing proprietary ecosystems. That tension will shape how quickly tokenized assets can achieve the liquidity and scale that their proponents are promising.
