Metals.io Platform Launch Expands Trilitech's Tokenized Commodity Offerings on Tezos Network
A new trading platform for tokenized uranium and strategic metals essential to AI industry growth has been unveiled by Trilitech.
Update March 30, 1:20 p.m. UTC: Additional information regarding the broader tokenized commodities market has been incorporated into this article.
On Monday, Trilitech, a development firm based in London that concentrates on the Tezos ecosystem, unveiled Metals.io, a fresh platform designed for the trading of tokenized commodities such as uranium and gold, as stated in an announcement provided to Cointelegraph.
This platform represents an extension of the commodities initiative that Trilitech and the wider Tezos ecosystem initiated through Uranium.io, a uranium marketplace targeted at retail customers that was introduced in December 2024 on Etherlink, which is Tezos' layer 2 solution compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
Upon its initial launch, Metals.io will provide xU3O8 tokenized uranium, tokenized gold, as well as Noemon Tech's RARE token. The xU3O8 product is characterized by Uranium.io as a physical uranium product that has been tokenized, whereas RareTech materials portray RARE as a collection of strategic metals bundled together.
The announcement indicates that the platform's introduction comes as a response to increasing investor appetite for strategic materials linked to industrial applications and infrastructure requirements related to artificial intelligence. This reasoning mirrors the rationale presented during Uranium.io's 2024 launch, which Tezos positioned around uranium's significance in fueling nuclear energy and meeting escalating electricity demands associated with AI.
The goal of Metals.io is to lower the barriers to entry for uranium trading, an activity that was previously exclusive to institutional investors. This new platform operates on the identical foundational technology as uranium.io, which was introduced by Tezos in December 2024.
"One of the founding principles behind the launch of that platform was to level the playing field by making a previously inaccessible critical asset widely available to all investors,"
Ben Elvidge, head of commercial applications at Trilitech
According to Elvidge, approximately 9,000 retail investors have purchased the tokenized uranium product since the platform's introduction to the market.
In August 2025, Hex Trust, a digital asset custody firm, integrated Tezos' Etherlink to provide institutional custody services for tokenized uranium. Earlier, in January of that same year, Transak also formed a partnership with the platform to enable retail investors to purchase tokenized uranium using either crypto or credit cards for amounts as low as $10, representing a dramatic reduction from the $4.2 million minimum requirement in the over-the-counter market.
Crypto exchanges enter tokenized commodities
The demand from investors for tokenized commodities continues to grow. The cumulative market capitalization of tokenized commodities climbed to $7.7 billion on March 6, though it subsequently declined to $7 billion by Monday, based on data provided by RWA.xyz.
The bulk of this market value was represented by tokenized gold, with Tether Gold (XAUT) comprising 38% of the overall market share at $2.5 billion and Paxos Gold (PAXG) making up 34% at $2.2 billion.
In a report released on March 5, Julio Moreno, head of research at the analytics platform CryptoQuant, credited the increasing demand for tokenized commodities to uncertainty surrounding tariffs, elevated interest rates, and heightened safe-haven demand, further noting that "crypto exchanges are becoming global venues for TradFi derivatives."
An increasing number of crypto companies are rolling out tokenized products. On Wednesday, Bitpanda, a crypto broker headquartered in Vienna, introduced Vision Chain, an Ethereum Layer-2 designed for European banks and fintech firms to create tokenized assets in compliance with Europe's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) and Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II).
On March 20, Coinbase unveiled stock perpetual futures for qualified non-US users, providing around-the-clock access to equities in addition to crypto and prediction markets. Other crypto exchanges including Binance and Kraken have similarly introduced tokenized perpetual futures trading options for traders outside the US.