From xU3O8 to xCo and xNi: Why We're Providing Liquidity for Metals.io's New Metals, and What It Means for Commodity RWAs

For years, "tokenized commodities" has meant one thing to most of the market: gold. Wrap a bar in a smart contract, mint a token, let it move 24/7. Silver never even got that — silver exposure on-chain has stayed almost entirely synthetic, a perpetual future on Binance or Hyperliquid, settled in stablecoin, with no metal ever changing hands. Beyond precious metals, it's the same story: if you wanted commodity exposure, a perp was the only door open to you.

We think that's the gap worth closing. Alongside metals.io, we've been building the liquidity for xU3O8, the tokenized physical uranium product, since it launched — and we're now doing the same for two new tokens metals.io has issued: xCo (cobalt) and xNi (nickel). This isn't a footnote. It's the arrival of genuine spot markets for industrial commodities that, until now, only existed as derivatives or didn't exist for non-industrial buyers at all — and we intend to be the desk standing behind them.

The market everyone forgot to build

Ask any trader what "tokenized RWA" means today and the answer clusters around a handful of categories: tokenized money market funds, FX pairs, and increasingly, equities. Commodities got left behind, and gold was the exception that proved the rule — liquid, well understood, easy to warehouse, so it became the obvious first mover.

Even gold, though, is a more settled market than the headlines suggest. Tether Gold (XAUT) and Paxos Gold (PAXG) have been the two dominant tokenized gold products for years, and despite a steady stream of niche protocols trying to spawn competing gold-backed tokens, none of them have meaningfully dislodged the incumbents — XAUT in particular remains the clear leader by volume and liquidity. Gold tokenization is a solved problem. Silver never got a real spot market at all; it stayed a perps-only trade. The disruption we're interested in isn't a better gold token — it's building the spot markets that never existed in the first place.

Look past bullion and the picture changes fast. Cobalt and nickel are foundational to batteries, EVs, and stainless steel, and uranium underpins the entire nuclear fuel cycle — yet none of them have ever had a retail-accessible, direct spot product. What existed instead were derivatives: perpetual swaps referencing a price feed, futures on the LME sized for industrial buyers, or mining equities that carry balance-sheet and operational risk layered on top of the commodity itself. If you wanted to actually hold the metal, your options were a $50,000+ OTC lot size, a warehouse receipt, and a financing arrangement — not a market open to a portfolio manager who wants a clean, fractional, spot position.

That's the piece we're now filling in, together with metals.io.

What we're actually doing

metals.io tokenizes physical metal held in regulated custody — Archax acts as custodian, and each token is a beneficial-ownership claim on metal sitting in an audited facility, not a synthetic reference price. Uranium (xU3O8) was first, launched in mid-2025 and built on the same rails as the earlier uranium.io project, with physical U3O8 stored at a Cameco-operated facility. In June 2026, metals.io extended that model to industrial metals for the first time, tokenizing physical cobalt and nickel and issuing xCo and xNi — the first spot-backed tokens for either metal ever made available to non-industrial buyers.

Our role is to make sure these niche tokens can be traded. A physically-backed token is only as useful as the market around it, and we're managing markets for xCo and xNi, just as we already do for xU3O8.

Why this matters more than the tickers suggest

The obvious use case is direct exposure — a fund that wants cobalt or nickel in a portfolio without buying mining equities or navigating a one-tonne OTC minimum can now do it in fractional size, settled 24/7. That alone is a meaningful unlock. But the more interesting consequence is what it does to the structure of commodity trading on-chain.

Basis trading becomes possible. Commodity perps on Hyperliquid or Binance have always referenced a price, but until now there was no clean spot leg behind cobalt, nickel, or uranium specifically to trade against. If and when perps on these metals develop, xCo, xNi, and xU3O8 give traders real spot to pair them with: long spot metal, short the perp (or vice versa), capturing funding and dislocation the way basis traders already do in gold and majors.

QIS and systematic strategies get a new sleeve. Quant strategies running commodity carry, momentum, or cross-asset relative-value books have historically had to proxy industrial metals through futures curves or equity baskets. A liquid, fractional spot instrument is a cleaner building block — easier to size, rebalance, and combine with derivatives overlays for genuinely delta-precise exposure.

Portfolio construction gets more granular. A single portfolio holding crypto, precious metals, and industrial commodities, all on spot, side by side, in the same wallet, is now a reality. Instead of a single "commodities" bucket expressed through a broad futures index or a mining-equity ETF, allocators can hold discrete, physically-backed positions in the specific metals a thesis is actually about — battery metals demand, nuclear buildout, EV supply chains — without picking up equity beta or index-level noise along the way.

Composability is the part people underrate

There's a piece of this that goes beyond spot access and basis trades: these tokens are standard, EVM-compatible tokens on Etherlink, Tezos's EVM layer — which means they behave like any other ERC-20 the moment they hit a wallet. A gold bar in a vault or a cobalt lot on a warehouse floor can't be plugged into anything; a token that represents the same underlying can.

xCo, xNi, and xU3O8 can be posted as collateral in lending markets, used to borrow stablecoins against a physical position without selling it, or put up as margin on a DEX. A treasury holding uranium or nickel exposure doesn't have to choose between sitting on it and deploying it — it can do both. That's a capability gold tokens have already proven out, and it's now available to commodities that never had it before at all.

What's next

Tokenization of industrial metals is new, and the sensible thing is to let the spot markets prove themselves first — real volume, real two-way liquidity, real usage as collateral — before assuming what comes after.

Once a metal has genuine spot liquidity behind it, the natural next step in any market is derivatives layered on top of that spot. Perps may follow for these metals too, and could eventually trade against real spot rather than just a price feed. That said, the direction this points to is options. We think that's plausible for these metals eventually, the same way gold and crypto have gone through that evolution. But options need liquid spot and stable funding rates underneath them before they can price properly, and neither condition is there yet — the underlying spot markets are still thin, and there isn't yet the depth or the volatility infrastructure a real options market would need. That's a horizon, not a headline — worth watching, not worth chasing yet.