Amanah Advisors has issued a Shariah compliance certificate for Tether Gold (XAUT), the gold-backed digital token.
What is XAUT?
XAUT represents ownership of physical gold in tokenised form. Each token corresponds to one fine troy ounce of allocated bullion meeting the London Bullion Market Association Good Delivery standard, held in a custodial vault in Switzerland, with holders able to identify the specific bars linked to their on-chain address. TG Commodities is authorised as a stablecoin issuer and digital asset service provider by El Salvador’s National Commission of Digital Assets. Tokenised gold raises questions conventional bullion products do not: whether the holder acquires a proprietary interest in identified metal or only exposure to its price, and whether allocation records can evidence that claim bar by bar.
The certificate covers XAUT the issuance of XAUT, and specifically its primary issuance, custody and redemption framework. It does not extend to secondary-market trading practices, venues, intermediaries or user conduct, which vary materially in execution and settlement.
Amanah’s Work
Reaching that view required Amanah Advisors to work through the product’s legal and operational architecture rather than its description. The firm examined the Relevant Information Document filed with the Salvadoran regulator, the signed custody and storage agreement, the terms of service, fee schedule and risk disclosures, the reserves attestations and independent auditor’s report, and the on-chain allocation lookup mechanism, mapping each against AAOIFI Shariah Standard No. 57 on gold and its trading parameters. Gold is among the assets where the exchange rules are strictest, so the questions were specific: whether holders acquire a proprietary interest in identified bullion or merely price exposure, how token supply reconciles against the custodian’s bar ledger, how reallocation affects certainty of the subject matter, whether fractional holdings remain genuinely backed, and whether the redemption path functions in practice rather than on paper. The resulting opinion is conditional, not open-ended. It requires continuous full allocation, maintained bar-level records, consistent reconciliation, independent attestation, and no material change to the structure without prior Shariah review. Amanah Advisors advises on tokenised commodity products, stablecoin structures, Islamic investment platforms, funds and takaful operators across the UK, GCC and Southeast Asia, and its founder holds standing Shariah advisory roles in digital assets and tokenisation.
The Impact
The practical consequence is a defined benchmark where there was previously none. Muslim savers and institutions have long been able to hold physical gold, but the tokenised versions of it arrived without any settled Shariah position, leaving individual investors to make a judgement they were not equipped to make or to avoid the asset class altogether. A bounded, published, conditional certificate replaces that guesswork with something a holder can read, and gives other issuers a governance standard against which their own structures can be measured.
More broadly, it matters because capital with a Shariah mandate has had limited access to an asset class built on exactly the thing Islamic finance asks for: a real asset, genuinely owned, with the holder bearing its risk. Tokenisation lowers the entry point for savers in markets where holding allocated bullion is impractical, and clear Shariah governance is what allows Islamic institutions to consider it at all. None of that is settled by one certificate. It is bounded to the issuer, adoption depends on the venues where the token actually trades, and the harder standards work sits ahead rather than behind.
What the CEO Said
Mufti Faraz Adam said regarding this work, “A gold token is only as sound as the ownership sitting behind it. The question we examined was whether a holder acquires a real claim on identified bullion or simply exposure to the gold price, and it was the bar-level allocation and the custody records that allowed us to reach the conclusion we did. We confined the certificate to the issuer level deliberately. Venues differ in how they execute and settle, and a certificate should not paper over that.” — Mufti Faraz Adam, founder and CEO, Amanah Advisors
Amanah Advisors will publish practical Shariah guidelines for traders and for exchanges listing XAU₮, to be incorporated into the certification framework. A full Shariah review and audit will take place annually.
ENDS
About Amanah Advisors Amanah Advisors is a global Shariah advisory firm headquartered in the UK, providing independent Shariah governance, structuring, certification and ongoing supervision to financial institutions, fintechs and asset managers worldwide. Founded in 2015 and led by Mufti Faraz Adam, the firm advises across Islamic banking, investments, takaful, digital assets and tokenisation, benchmarking its work to AAOIFI Shari’ah Standards.
Media contact Amanah Advisors — info@amanahadvisors.com — amanahadvisors.com