Coinbase said on November 6, 2026 that eligible US users can now borrow USDC against PAX Gold, making tokenized gold the first collateral the exchange’s borrowing feature has accepted that is not a crypto asset. The announcement, posted on X, reads: “You can now instantly borrow USDC against PAX Gold (PAXG) on Coinbase. Tokenized gold, backed by the real thing.”
A regulated exchange sells access to DeFi rails
The structure matters as much as the product. Paxos issues PAXG, a token each backed by physical gold held in a vault. A newly created USDC|PAXG market on Morpho Blue, a lending protocol running on Base, supplies the liquidity. Coinbase supplies the front end and the users, inside its main app rather than a separate wallet or protocol interface.
The division of labor is the signal: a regulated exchange distributing a commodity asset through decentralized lending rails without operating them. Borrowers deposit their gold and borrow USDC against it; the position is liquidated by a loan-to-value mechanism when the collateral falls relative to the loan, rather than on fixed repayment dates.
Rates are variable and set by the Morpho Blue market, not by Coinbase, which sits between its users and the protocol. The exchange did not build new liquidity plumbing for gold: the new collateral type plugs into Morpho’s existing setup, the kind of work that makes adding further non-crypto collateral cheap.
The RWA storefront pattern
Placing a tokenized real-world asset in front of millions of app users is the pattern tokenization has been building toward, and Coinbase has moved the same direction elsewhere: it launched a tokenized credit fund to challenge BlackRock’s BUIDL in May 2026, and earlier that year Chainlink began 24/7 pricing for tokenized real-world assets with Aave as its launch partner.
The loans extend a Coinbase and Morpho partnership that began in January 2025 with Bitcoin-backed USDC loans and later accepted Ethereum, XRP and Solana as collateral. That integration has reportedly supported about $3.4 billion in collateral, with more than $1.7 billion in active crypto-backed loans.
Availability is limited to eligible US users, and New York residents are reportedly excluded. Specific loan-to-value thresholds and rate ranges for the gold market have not been published.
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