Meld Gold Retires MCAU and MCAG; GOLD$ Still Trades on Algorand DEXs

Meld Gold¹ sells tokens on Algorand that stand for physical metal, one gram at a time: one GOLD$ is one gram of gold, one SILVER$ one gram of silver, and both are meant to be redeemable for the real thing. In practice you buy them on an Algorand exchange such as Tinyman², hold them in a wallet, use them as collateral on Folks Finance³, or send a request through Meld's Convert page⁴ and its bullion partner to take delivery of bars.

The reason to look now is a deadline that has just gone by. MCAU and MCAG, the first two tokens Meld issued on Algorand, closed their last withdrawal window on 29 June 2026, while the pair that replaced them still moves — a wallet transferred 3.5 GOLD$ to another wallet on 9 September, and a day earlier someone on X was asking whether Meld was still active on Algorand⁵ at all. On-chain, it is.

The site's front page is a price board: gold at $4,414.70 an ounce ($141.94 a gram), silver at $66.60 an ounce ($2.14 a gram). An independent spot feed the same morning quoted gold at $4,395.80 and silver at $66.21 an ounce, close enough that the board is not a number the company invented.

What Meld's site puts in front of you

The homepage is a price board with five links across the top — Tokens, About, Audit, Convert, Contact — and a 'Launch app' button. That button does not open a trading screen. It opens app.meld.gold, which is an NFT collections page: two Lunar New Year sets, a 2023 Year of the Rabbit and a 2024 Year of the Dragon, each listing gold and silver coins redeemable for GOLD$ or SILVER$. The values run from 1 GOLD$ for a one-gram coin up to 1,000 SILVER$ for a one-kilogram coin, and the minted counts shown range from 10 to 250. Connecting a wallet offers Pera, Defly or Exodus. There is no buy button, no order book and no price chart.

The Tokens page⁶ is where the substance is. It gives GOLD$ as Algorand asset 246516580⁷⁸ and SILVER$ as 246519683, each with a block-explorer link, and describes them as backed by one gram of the corresponding metal, held in Meld⁹'s network of vaults and facilities and 'fully redeemable for the underlying precious metal'. Beneath them, under a 'Retired tokens' heading, sit MCAU (6547014¹⁰) and MCAG (6587142¹¹): still backed, still redeemable, the page says, but being phased out. Above them is a 'Launching soon' heading with nothing under it.

Convert is a request form rather than a checkout. You pick digital-to-physical or physical-to-digital, choose GOLD$, SILVER$, GLD or SLV, and send the request to Imperial Bullion, described on the page as one of Australia's largest private bullion companies. Pricing is by quote; the only hint at cost is a 'See example pricing' link.

Who is behind it

The issuer is Meld Gold Pty Ltd, an Australian private company registered since 24 February 2020 under ACN 638 548 231, with 'Meld Gold' and 'The Brisbane Mint' among its registered business names, per ABN Lookup¹². Founder and chief executive Michael Cotton came out of the metals trade: the About page¹³ says he launched a jewellery supply business at 18 and was trading millions of dollars of gold by 23, and that he co-founded the Imperial Group, a bullion business, in 2017. That last detail is worth noticing — the bullion partner the Convert form routes to is the founder's own group, so the redemption path and the issuer are not independent of each other.

Cotton has been explicit about why this chain. In a 2021 Algorand announcement¹⁴ he said that after finding Algorand, 'I thought, this is the perfect fit for precious metals and the direct ownership of the precious metals on blockchain'. On the Algorand Foundation's case study¹⁵ he put it in operational terms: it needs 'instant finality, you need high throughput, you need security, you need no downtime, you need all of these factors, which Algorand does so well.'

The site says Meld's assets are accepted by wallets, exchanges and lending platforms across the Algorand and XRP Ledger ecosystems, and lists Pera, Folks Finance, Algomint, BTC Markets, Fireblocks, Pact, Ledger and Defly. The Folks Finance listing is corroborated outside Meld's own pages: the protocol's forum carried a new-listing post¹⁶ in November 2023, and the Algorand Foundation's case study dates the listing of tokenised gold and silver to December 2023. The About page also carries endorsements, including from Peter August, chief executive of the Melbourne Mint, who says Meld is 'using blockchain technology to not just emulate but improve the actual gold market'. Those are testimonials published on Meld's own site, not independent assessments.

How the tokens are built on Algorand

GOLD$ and SILVER$ are Algorand Standard Assets, the chain's native token format, which lets anyone issue a token without writing a smart contract. That is why there is no contract holding metal behind them: the token's creator address has issued nine assets, created zero applications and is opted into none. The metal sits with the vault custodians the audit page names, and every step that turns a token back into a bar runs through the Convert form as a human process.

Two numbers on the tokens themselves are worth understanding. Each carries six decimals, and each was created with a total supply of 100 billion units — 100 billion grams. That is a ceiling on what Meld can issue, not a claim that 100 billion grams of metal exist. The creator address still holds 99,998,003,874 of the SILVER$ supply and, by a share check, 100% of GOLD$. What circulates is what Meld has sold.

Algorand also requires a wallet to opt in to an asset before it can receive it, which is why an opt-in count is the closest thing to a holder count here. More than 100 accounts have opted in to GOLD$, and the twenty largest balances the indexer returned run from 43.6 GOLD$ down to 0.16. SILVER$ is spread a little differently, its largest returned balance being 6,720. Those are real wallets; there are just not many of them.

Who can freeze or reclaim your tokens

Three addresses administer every Meld asset on Algorand. One is the manager, one the freeze address and one the clawback address, and the same three are set on GOLD$, SILVER$, the retired MCAU and MCAG, and the tokens that have not launched. In Algorand's asset model those are the issuer's levers: the freeze address can freeze an account's holding of the token, and the clawback address can forcibly reclaim tokens from a wallet. A clawback exists so an issuer can recover assets; it also means the issuer can take them. The manager address holds zero of every Meld asset and 7.63 ALGO, and has created no applications, so it exists to administer rather than to store metal. Someone holding GOLD$ holds a token Meld can freeze or take back — a choice the issuer made, not a technical accident.

How thin the trading is

GOLD$ is listed and verified on Tinyman, where its pool held about $23,855 on 9 September, and on Pact, which lists ten GOLD$ pools; the pool data returned for those showed zero liquidity. SILVER$'s Tinyman pool held about $24,503. Twenty-four-hour volume across those two pools was $666 for GOLD$ and $1,040 for SILVER$.

The DEX price and the board price do not match. Tinyman last priced GOLD$ at $133.76 — roughly 6% under the per-gram figure the site's front page shows — so the market was valuing a gram of Meld's claim below a gram of metal. Closing that gap means redeeming, and redemption runs through a quote from the bullion partner with no published fee schedule or minimum.

Lifetime volume gives a sense of how much these tokens have actually been used. The indexer returned at least 20,582 transactions for GOLD$, of which 6,191 were real transfers, and at least 17,123 for SILVER$ with 2,948 real transfers — lower bounds, because the query stopped at its page cap. Folks Finance's own treasury proposal in June 2025 counted roughly 1,717 SILVER$ and 15 GOLD$ among the protocol's idle assets, one measure of how much of the supply sits in DeFi at all.

What the 'live audit' reports — and what it doesn't

The Audit page¹⁷ is the closest thing to proof of backing. It names two vault locations — Imperial Vaults in Brisbane and MKS PAMP in Geneva — and lists the United States, Switzerland, the UAE and Australia.

Above the map are four figures: 3,867¹⁸ users, $13,162,756¹⁹ in value locked, 1,893,444²⁰ asset transactions and 37,850²¹ transactions in the last 30 days. The page does not define a user or explain how the transaction total is assembled, and it names no auditor or attestation report. Nothing in this research turned up an independent review of the metal, so the 'live audit' is Meld's own dashboard.

Two things on that page do not hold together. On 9 September the same four figures appeared twice, once under the USD toggle and once under AUD, with dollar signs on both — identical numbers for two currencies means one of them is wrong. An archived snapshot from 11 March 2026 shows the first block reading 0, $0, 0 and 0, with a third block of tiles still saying 'Coming Soon'.

For a second opinion on size, DeFiLlama²² tracks Meld Gold at $10.08m, up 3% over 30 days. Its monthly series peaks at $13.31m in February 2026 — within about 1% of the figure on Meld's own audit page seven months later, which suggests the two are measuring something similar even though DeFiLlama counts only coins held in contracts.

Against the rest of the tokenised-gold field, that is small.

The MCAU and MCAG retirement, in detail

Meld spelled the wind-down out in a notice²³ dated 23 June 2025, authorised by Meld Gold Pty Ltd (ACN 638 548 231). From 10:00am AEST on 24 June 2025, BTC Markets users could no longer buy, sell or deposit MCAU. Until 4:00pm AEST on 29 June 2026 they could withdraw it to a self-hosted address they control. Anyone still holding MCAU on BTC Markets after that would receive Australian dollars on or around 30 June 2026, at the 29 June 2026 spot price of gold plus 1%.

Between the delisting and the cutoff, Meld said it would honour exchanges of certificates for physical gold under clause 2.5²⁴(c) of its terms but would not sell new certificates. Each MCAU token represents one certificate, and each certificate is backed 1:1 with a gram of gold. The notice also carries a warning about scammers impersonating Meld Gold or BTC Markets.

On-chain, the wind-down shows. MCAU's most recent activity was on 6 September 2026 and MCAG's on 27 August 2026, both zero-amount transfers a wallet sent to itself — an opt-in or opt-out, not a payment — and neither token shows a genuine transfer in the most recent 500,000 rounds. MCAU's supply, though, is spread like a token that was actually sold: its creator address holds 0.027 MCAU and its largest holder 25.85, against GOLD$, where the creator still holds essentially everything. Since creation in August 2020, MCAU has seen at least 24,823 transactions and 18,391 real transfers. GOLD$ and SILVER$ followed in June 2021, and the platinum, palladium and currency tokens arrived in early July 2021.

What is next, and how to start

The Tokens page leaves a 'Launching soon' heading open, and the assets behind it already exist. Meld's creator address has issued Meld Platinum (g) (PLAT$), Meld Palladium (g) (PALD$), Meld USD (USD$), Meld GBP, Meld AUD, Meld NZD and Meld EURO — each minted at full supply and each with a single holder on record, the issuer's own address. None has been distributed. Watch the Tokens page for the first one that moves.

The XRP Ledger side is the claim this research could not check. Meld's front page says its assets are accepted across the Algorand and XRPL ecosystems, a photo caption places Cotton at XRP Ledger Apex 2024, and press coverage²⁵ from 2026 describes gold and silver tokens launched on XRPL in 2024. Ledger lookups here did not return Meld tokens, so that half of the story rests on Meld's own pages and press reports. Meld's X account²⁶ still pins a December 2024 raffle result, and the site keeps a Coinbase Quest page²⁷ describing that draw, which offered more than $10,000²⁸ in prizes.

If you want to try the Algorand side, the first step is small: install Pera²⁹ or Defly, opt in to the GOLD$ or SILVER$ asset ID from Meld's Tokens page, and buy on Tinyman with ALGO. Use the IDs from that page rather than a search result — an Algorand asset search for 'Meld' also returns a separate token named 'Meld Gold' with the ticker MeldGold (asset 1182790888³⁰), created by an address this research could not tie to the company.