Oracle-Anchored Real-World Assets in Practice

A Full Lifecycle Case Study of the PAXG/USDC Pool on Stabull

By Jamie McCormick, Co-CMO, Stabull Labs

The first article in the 15 part “Deconstructing DeFi” Series.

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Tokenised gold presented a particularly demanding test.

Gold is not a synthetic asset. Its price is discovered globally, across deeply liquid off-chain markets, and responds to macroeconomic forces rather than crypto-native narratives. If on-chain execution for gold were to emerge, it would do so only once infrastructure, pricing, and liquidity were all in place.

This case study traces the full lifecycle of the PAXG/USDC pool on Stabull, from its creation by the Stabull team in December 2024 through to the execution behaviour observed as gold breached $5,000 per ounce in January 2026.

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Asset Context: Tokenized Gold on-Chain

PAXG is a tokenised representation of physical gold issued by Paxos Trust Company. Each PAXG token corresponds to one fine troy ounce of LBMA-accredited gold, held in London vaults, with custody, storage, and insurance handled at the issuer level. Paxos publishes regular attestations and bar-level allocation data.

USDC serves as the settlement leg: a fiat-backed stablecoin designed to function as on-chain cash.

Together, PAXG and USDC form a hybrid real-world-asset / stablecoin execution venue. One leg is volatile, macro-driven, and externally priced; the other provides dollar-denominated liquidity and settlement. This makes the pool structurally distinct from FX stablecoin pairs, while still allowing execution quality to be assessed clearly through oracle-anchored pricing.

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Pool Creation and Early Seeding

The PAXG/USDC pool was created by the Stabull team on 9 December 2024, as confirmed by on-chain deployment and initial liquidity transactions visible on PolygonScan.

Initial activity consisted of small, deliberate liquidity deposits rather than execution. No swaps, fee transfers, or routing behaviour were present at launch. This aligns with the pool’s role at that stage: infrastructure being brought live and seeded, rather than a venue actively soliciting flow.

Historical TVL data from Dune Analytics shows the pool starting near zero and increasing gradually following creation. There is no evidence of economically meaningful activity prior to December 2024.

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Phase One: Deployment and Early Availability (Dec 2024 – Early 2025)

In the months following creation, the pool entered a prolonged early phase characterised by:

• low TVL
• small, infrequent liquidity adjustments
• long idle periods with no swaps

Transaction history from this period shows sporadic transfers but no sustained execution. There is no evidence of routing systems, arbitrage, or solver-driven behaviour interacting with the pool.

At this stage, the pool existed as available infrastructure rather than an execution venue — live, but not yet demanded by the market.

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Phase Two: Incentivised Availability and Liquidity Formation (Mid-2025)

As 2025 progressed, Stabull began actively promoting the PAXG/USDC pool via Merkl, with the explicit goal of ensuring liquidity availability while organic demand remained limited.

These campaigns succeeded in attracting capital. TVL increased materially, moving from low four-figure levels into the mid-five-figure range and stabilising there for an extended period.

Importantly, this increase in capacity was not immediately accompanied by sustained execution.

Swaps remained infrequent and unevenly distributed. Directional runs were absent, and there was no clear weekday or weekend rhythm. This mirrors behaviour seen in other incentive-led phases across DeFi: liquidity becomes available before routing systems have sufficient economic reason to make consistent use of it.

In this phase, incentives supported availability, not demand.

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Quiet Readiness Under External Pricing (Late 2025)

By late 2025, the pool had settled into a relatively stable liquidity range, with only modest week-to-week variation.

Execution remained light, but the system itself was operating correctly:

• oracle anchoring tracked external gold prices accurately
• liquidity depth was sufficient for execution
• pricing held steady under occasional trades

The venue was ready — even if demand had not yet arrived.

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January 2026: Gold Moves, Execution Follows

January 2026 marked a clear inflection point.

As gold prices accelerated toward and through $5,000 per ounce, on-chain execution in the PAXG/USDC pool increased meaningfully.

From 1 January through a partial 26 January 2026:

• 1,488 reconstructed swaps were executed
• approximately $136,000 of USD-equivalent output volume was processed

Trades arrived in clustered, directional bursts rather than as isolated swaps. Timing patterns are consistent with programmatic or economically automated execution, rather than discretionary retail trading.

This activity emerged organically. The vast majority of January execution occurred before the PAXG/USDC pool became discoverable via OpenOcean on Polygon.

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Discovery Without Fanfare: Aggregators on Polygon

OpenOcean’s integration with Stabull on Polygon went live only in the final week of the analysis window.

As with the Base deployment for EURC/USDC, this integration was not positioned as a launch and was not accompanied by promotional activity. Instead, it quietly made Stabull pools visible to routing infrastructure already operating on the network.

Aggregators do not send volume. They surface venues to routing logic, which then tests, compares, and incorporates — or ignores — those venues based on execution quality.

Given how closely January’s EURC/USDC execution on Base followed this same discovery pattern, we are optimistic to observe whether similar behaviour emerges on Polygon for PAXG/USDC as OpenOcean’s routing systems begin to interact with the pool under live conditions.

We’re grateful to the OpenOcean team for their support in extending Stabull’s discovery surface across chains.

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On-Chain Prices and Off-Chain Gold Markets

Implied PAXG prices derived directly from Stabull swaps were compared against daily XAU/USD reference prices published by Investing.com.

While perfect alignment is neither expected nor required — on-chain trades occur intraday and settle in USDC — the series track closely in both direction and level, including through gold’s move above $5,000.

Observed deviations are small and transient, reflecting timing and local liquidity rather than structural mispricing. This behaviour is characteristic of an oracle-anchored execution venue.

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Capital Efficiency and Pool Turnover

Throughout January, the pool maintained liquidity around the $20,000 level, with only modest variation.

Against this base, cumulative turnover during the month was approximately 6.5×. While small in absolute terms, capital was reused multiple times without degradation of execution quality.

The pool functioned as execution infrastructure rather than passive inventory.

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Fee Generation and Native Yield

The pool charges a 0.015% swap fee, with 70% accruing to liquidity providers and 30% to the protocol. Fees accrue natively in USDC and PAXG.

Across January, liquidity providers earned approximately $11.7 in total fees. Using average observed pool balances for each Monday–Sunday week, this implies native yields in the 0.8–1.2% APR range, paid as a mix of stablecoins and tokenised gold.

These are native, mixed-asset returns, independent of incentive programs.

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Rethinking Gold Exposure

In traditional markets, gold exposure is almost entirely directional. Returns depend on price movement alone, often with negative carry once storage, financing, or management costs are considered.

Providing liquidity to a PAXG/USDC pool changes that structure. Liquidity providers retain exposure to gold through PAXG, while also earning execution-driven fees in USDC and PAXG.

Gold, in this context, is not merely held — it is used.

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Verifiability and Participation

All activity discussed here is fully verifiable on-chain.

Liquidity can be added or removed at any time via the Stabull interface, with fees accruing inside the pool and included on withdrawal:

👉 PAXG/USDC pool on Polygon
https://app.stabull.finance/pools/0x553d3D295e0f695B9228246232eDF400ed3560B5?chain=137

The pool is also included in an active Merkl campaign, providing additional incentives alongside native swap fees:

👉 Merkl PAXG/USDC campaign
https://app.merkl.xyz/opportunities/polygon/ERC20LOGPROCESSOR/0xBeFC1CbF4A8C4a8AF76d2E35287F11a3Ac4fCa29

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Closing Thought

The PAXG/USDC pool did not grow through hype alone.

It progressed through distinct lifecycle stages — creation, early seeding, incentivised availability, quiet readiness, and finally execution — before being revealed by a genuine macro catalyst.

January did not create demand for on-chain gold execution. It revealed what happens when infrastructure is already in place and the market finally has a reason to use it.

Stabull’s role was not to force adoption, but to be ready when it arrived.

About the Author

Jamie McCormick is Co-Chief Marketing Officer at Stabull Finance, where he has been working for over two years on positioning the protocol within the evolving DeFi ecosystem.

He is also the founder of Bitcoin Marketing Team, established in 2014 and recognised as Europe’s oldest specialist crypto marketing agency. Over the past decade, the agency has worked with a wide range of projects across the digital asset and Web3 landscape.

Jamie first became involved in crypto in 2013 and has a long-standing interest in Bitcoin and Ethereum. Over the last two years, his focus has increasingly shifted toward understanding the mechanics of decentralised finance, particularly how on-chain infrastructure is used in practice rather than in theory.