A stablecoin called pmUSD has 94,001,203 tokens outstanding and a $1.00 target. It last traded at $0.6121.

The gold backing it has been surveyed and audited. It is also still underground.

What RAAC Built

pmUSD is issued by RAAC — Real Asset Acquisition Corp — from a single Ethereum contract at 0xc0c17dd08263c16f6b64e772fb9b723bf1344ddf. It is the stable leg of a product line RAAC calls RWf(x), which borrows its structure from f(x) Protocol. You deposit tokenized gold, and the system splits your exposure in two: pmUSD, which is meant to hold a dollar, and xPM, a leverage token that absorbs the price swings. RAAC's own documentation walks through the example — $150 of gold in, $100 of pmUSD and $50 of xPM out.

The token scaled fast. DefiLlama's supply history shows 1.1 million pmUSD on December 28, 2025 and 9.57 million by January 13. The next day the figure reads 109,151,374. A hundred million tokens appeared in one day, on a stablecoin most of the market had never heard of.

Supply peaked at 109,701,204 on March 1 and has drifted down since. It now sits at 94,001,203.62 — a number that has not changed in 67 days. The last movement was June 10, when roughly 6.2 million tokens were burned. Nothing has been minted or redeemed since.

The Collateral Is a Mining Claim

Here is where pmUSD stops resembling other gold-backed tokens. Its collateral is IONau, issued by I-ON Digital Corp (OTCQB: IONI). According to I-ON's published collateral framework, each IONau token represents five troy ounces of "proven in-situ gold" — metal geologically verified where it lies rather than extracted and poured into a bar.

Compare that to PAXG or Tether Gold, where every token maps to refined bullion sitting in a vault with a serial number you can look up. IONau maps to ore. The framework leans on a 5:1 reserve ratio and an 80% valuation haircut to bridge the gap, and it states the rule plainly: "Collateral cannot exit the system without a proportional reduction in outstanding claims."

⛏️ What Backs Each IONau Token

Asset: five troy ounces of proven in-situ gold — reserves certified in place rather than mined.

Structure: 5:1 reserve ratio, an 80% haircut on valuation, and title held as updatable vNFTs in a vault contract.

Settlement: a T+2 cycle modeled on institutional asset-backed securities.

Enforcement of last resort: judicial foreclosure under the Yukon Miner's Lien Act.

Reference gold price used (February 2026): $5,311.29 per ounce, valuing each IONau unit near $26,556 before the haircut.

Most stablecoin reserve reports end with an accountant counting bars in a vault. This one ends with a territorial mining statute and a foreclosure process. Both can be legitimate. They are not the same speed of recovery, and the gap shows up in the price.

Gold has not helped. PAXG, which tracks spot, peaked at $5,496 on January 29 and traded near $5,023 in mid-February, close to the reference price I-ON used. It changes hands around $4,378 today, roughly 20% below the January high. A collateral pool marked at February's gold price is worth meaningfully less in August.

When the Peg Broke

pmUSD behaved for months. It closed at $0.9903 on April 1 and $1.0025 on May 1. Four days later it printed $0.6824, and it has not seen 90 cents since. The bottom came on July 30 at $0.3588, a 64% discount to the target. The recovery to $0.6121 has been partial and slow.

📉 pmUSD Price vs. Its $1.00 Target

Source: CoinGecko daily price series for Precious Metals USD, February–August 2026.

Why the Discount Refuses to Close

A normal depeg gets repaired by arbitrage. Buy the token at 61 cents, redeem it for a dollar of collateral, keep the difference. Enough people do that and the price snaps back. Two things block that trade here.

The first is written into the protocol. RAAC's documentation states there are "no liquidations or self-liquidation mechanisms." When the system falls below full collateralization, minting is blocked and redemption converts to pro-rata. The docs spell out what that means with an example: hold 200 out of 1,000 tokens and you are entitled to 20% of whatever collateral remains, rather than to a dollar.

The second is the exit itself. Every venue trading pmUSD moved $35,322 in the last 24 hours, against $57.5 million of market value. The 30-day average is closer to $20,755 a day. Two Curve pools carry almost all of it; the Uniswap V3 pair against USDC did $209. Anyone trying to sell even 1% of the supply would push the price far below 61 cents before finding a buyer.

The supply tells the same story. If redemption paid anything close to par, someone would have burned tokens to collect. The last burn was June 10, 2026, taking supply from 100,201,204 to 94,001,204. Sixty-seven days later the number is identical to the decimal.

The Company Behind the Gold

I-ON Digital Corp closed at $0.15 a share on August 14, 2026 — a market capitalization of $5.12 million across 34.11 million shares. Its 52-week range runs from $0.11 to $2.00, it is down 83.5% year to date, and average daily volume is 6,600 shares.

I-ON's equity is not the collateral; the gold claims are. But the company that certifies those claims and would have to stand behind the redemption process is worth about 9% of the face value of the stablecoin it supports. That is a fact worth holding in mind before reading the phrase "backed by gold" on any landing page.

Four Questions for Any RWA-Backed Token

pmUSD is a clean case study, and the checks generalize to every tokenized-asset product now advertising yield.

  • Where is the asset, physically? "Backed by gold" stretches to cover both a numbered bar in a Zurich vault and a survey report on an undeveloped claim. Those are different products at different prices.
  • What happens on the bad path? Read the under-collateralized case in the docs, not the happy path. Pro-rata redemption means your claim shrinks with the collateral instead of holding at par.
  • How much does it actually trade? Market capitalization is not liquidity. A $57 million token clearing $20,000 a day has no exit at size, whatever the dashboard says.
  • Is the supply moving? Healthy stablecoins mint and burn constantly. A supply frozen to the decimal for two months is a signal in itself, and it is free to check on DefiLlama.

What the 61 Cents Is Telling You

Nothing in the public record suggests the gold is fictional. The audits are posted, and I-ON's collateral framework is more detailed than most stablecoin attestations you will read this year. My read is that the market is not pricing whether the metal is there. It is pricing how long it would take a holder to reach it, and 67 days of frozen supply says the honest answer is a long time.

If you hold a real-world-asset token, the number worth tracking is not the advertised yield. It is daily volume divided by circulating supply. That ratio tells you what your position is worth on the day you want out — which, for pmUSD, is 39 cents away from the number printed on the tin.