[Asset Technical Assessment] PAXG on Aave V4 Ethereum
Author: Aave Labs
Date: 2026-07-17
Summary
Technical assessment of PAXG (Paxos Gold) for onboarding to Aave V4 Ethereum, following the Technical Asset Listing Framework.
Overall result: 
MEDIUM
At the token level PAXG is clean: a standards-compliant, 18-decimal ERC20 with no fee on transfer, no rebasing, and no transfer hooks, backed by a live, low-risk Chainlink PAXG/USD feed and covered by recent multi-firm audits. Control of the token is issuer-held and concentrated: one Paxos control key holds root admin, mint authority, freeze, seize, and pause across the token and its supply controller, while a second is the proxy admin able to replace the token’s entire code. Both are Paxos MPC-based keys that require multiple parties to authorize any action, so control does not rest on a single key; the residual technical considerations are that these powerful roles sit behind no on-chain timelock, that mint capacity is uncapped at the manager level, and that the same control key owns the LayerZero cross-chain route (see Sections 3 and 6).
Listing Recommendation
From a technical standpoint, PAXG is eligible for listing on Aave V4 Ethereum, with the considerations below carried as caveats rather than conditions. The token’s control consists of Paxos MPC-based keys that require multiple parties to authorize any action, so the collateral’s supply integrity and holder balances do not rest on any single key. The considerations worth monitoring are the concentration of mint, freeze, seize, pause, and upgrade authority in those control keys with no on-chain timelock, the uncapped mint authority at the manager level (cap-raising is not separated from minting), and the LayerZero route’s owner and delegate resting on the same control key; moving these behind an on-chain timelock as exposure grows would be further hardening. A live Chainlink PAXG/USD feed already exists, so wiring the oracle is a routine Aave-side listing step.
Asset under review
| Field |
Value |
| Asset |
Paxos Gold (PAXG) |
| Target chain |
Ethereum mainnet (chain ID 1) |
| Target market |
Aave V4 Ethereum |
| Token contract |
0x45804880De22913dAFE09f4980848ECE6EcbAf78 |
| Native to target chain? |
Yes. Ethereum is the home chain where Paxos mints and burns PAXG; a LayerZero route to Solana can also mint and burn the Ethereum token (see Section 6). |
| AAcA classification |
Commodity-backed financial instrument (a tokenised claim on physical gold, non-yield-bearing) |
PAXG is a gold-backed token issued by Paxos, a New-York-regulated trust company: each unit represents one fine troy ounce of allocated London Good Delivery gold held in custody by Paxos, and its dollar value tracks the gold spot price rather than a one-dollar peg. Paxos mints PAXG when a customer’s gold is deposited and burns it on redemption, and as the regulated operator it can freeze accounts and seize balances. The token is an upgradeable proxy; on 2 June 2026 it was moved to a new implementation on Paxos’s unified token codebase, and a LayerZero cross-chain route to Solana was added.
0. Pre-screening
PAXG is deployed and source-verified on Ethereum mainnet at 0x45804880De22913dAFE09f4980848ECE6EcbAf78, an upgradeable proxy whose current implementation 0x7da4c5d9eca180a03765a6d27196f2a0380fa543 was set on 2 June 2026 (the proxy’s only implementation change since its 2019 creation) and is covered by named multi-firm audits (see Section 7). As a commodity-backed token tracking the gold market, it is not in any non-approved or sanctioned category, and it has no existing Aave reserve to carry over, so this assessment stands alone. The residual concern is that control is issuer-held and concentrated in the Paxos control keys, detailed in Section 3.
Rating: MEDIUM → deployed, verified, audited, and not sanctioned, but issuer-controlled with control concentrated in the Paxos MPC-based control keys (see Section 3).
1. ERC20 Compliance
PAXG is a standards-compliant ERC20 with 18 decimals (within Aave’s accepted band): transfer() and transferFrom() return a boolean, and there is no fee on transfer (the legacy fee mechanism was removed in the June 2026 implementation), no rebasing, no ERC777 or ERC1363 hooks, and no flash mint. It implements EIP-2612 permit and EIP-3009 for gasless approvals and transfers with a signature-malleability guard, standard signed-message flows. There is no address whitelist, so any smart contract can hold and move PAXG under normal conditions, keeping DeFi composability intact; the only transfer restriction is the issuer freeze and the global pause, assessed under access control (see Section 3).
Rating: 
GOOD
2. Oracle
A live Chainlink PAXG/USD feed exists on Ethereum at proxy 0x9944D86CEB9160aF5C5feB251FD671923323f8C3 (8 decimals, reading approximately 4,009 US dollars, updated well within its 24-hour heartbeat, classified Low Market Risk). PAXG is not yield-bearing (each token is a fixed one-ounce claim with no growing exchange rate), so no Correlated-Asset Price Oracle (CAPO) adapter is required on mechanical grounds and a direct feed suffices. No source is wired into the Aave oracle today; wiring the existing feed is a routine Aave-side listing step, not an issuer defect.
Rating: GOOD
3. Access Control
Every sensitive power over PAXG resolves to one of two Paxos-operated control keys. The first, 0x3Af3e85f4f97De7AD0f000B724Fb77fE5ffc024B, holds the token root admin, pause, and freeze-and-seize roles, and on the separate SupplyControl contract it holds the admin and manager roles, so it can add itself (or any address) as an allow-any minter, raise or remove mint rate limits, swap the token’s supply controller, or upgrade the supply controller. The second, 0xc94bcf6e1d8b3558e3b62e743630d50497e3851c, is the token’s proxy admin and can replace the entire implementation with arbitrary code. Both are Paxos MPC-based keys that require multiple parties to authorize any action, so neither is a single key. A 3-hour delay exists on the token and supply controller, but it governs only the handover of the root-admin role itself: it does not delay minting, freezing, seizing, pausing, or upgrading the supply controller, which take effect immediately. The residual considerations are that these powerful roles are concentrated in the two control keys with no on-chain timelock, that mint authority is uncapped at the manager level (the manager role can add an allow-any minter or raise any cap in a single transaction), and that the freeze, seize, and pause capabilities could block a liquidation or destroy pledged collateral.
Rating: MEDIUM → mint authority, freeze, seize, pause, and the token upgrade path resolve to Paxos MPC-based keys rather than single keys, but these powerful roles are concentrated with no on-chain timelock and mint capacity is uncapped at the manager level.
4. Exchange Rate and Yield
Not applicable. PAXG is not yield-bearing: each token is a fixed one-to-one claim on one ounce of gold, with no convertToAssets or pricePerShare exchange rate, no rebase, and no yield accrual to holders. Its dollar value moves with the gold market and is priced by the Chainlink PAXG/USD feed (see Section 2), not by an on-chain redemption rate.
Rating: 
N/A
5. Token Architecture
PAXG is a single canonical proxy on Ethereum with no duplicate or legacy entry point to the same supply; the Solana representation is a separate LayerZero mint-and-burn peer (see Section 6), not a second Ethereum contract. Supply is issuer-controlled: Paxos supply controllers mint and burn against off-chain gold deposits and redemptions, and the LayerZero route can also mint and burn, with SupplyIncreased, SupplyDecreased, and standard Transfer events emitted for observability. The implementation uses no tx.origin for authorization and no delegatecall beyond the proxy’s own delegation, and every privileged function is role-gated (enumerated in Section 3). The concentration of control over that supply is captured in Section 3, not here.
Rating: GOOD
6. Bridge and Cross-Chain Risk
Ethereum PAXG is bridge-mintable: a LayerZero V2 Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT) route uses a burn-and-mint model in which the Ethereum token is minted and burned directly rather than locked in escrow, with a single peer configured (Solana). The route is technically well-configured: both directions require three Decentralized Verifier Networks (DVNs, the parties that must independently attest each message) with none optional (LayerZero Labs, Canary, and Paxos, two of them independent of Paxos), the message libraries are pinned rather than default, and the inbound mint is bounded at approximately 4,440 PAXG per 24-hour window. The residual consideration is that the OFT owner and the LayerZero delegate are the same Paxos control key as the token and supply roles, so that control key can add destination chains, change the verifier set, or raise the mint limit with no timelock, and there is no pause on the OFT. Ethereum PAXG’s supply integrity therefore now also depends on this cross-chain stack.
Rating: MEDIUM → the route is well-configured (three required verifiers including two independent of Paxos, pinned libraries, a bounded mint rate), but its owner and delegate is the same Paxos control key that holds the token roles, able to add chains, change verifiers, and raise limits with no timelock.
7. Audit and Security History
The deployed codebase carries recent, named, multi-firm coverage: Zellic reviewed the core token and SupplyControl and, separately, the PAXG-specific migration; Trail of Bits reviewed the LayerZero OFT integration; and Halborn reviewed related contracts. Across this codebase exactly one Critical was ever raised (a frozen-account check, resolved before deployment), and everything on PAXG’s own execution path is Low or Informational; Paxos also runs a one-million-dollar bug bounty on Cantina that names the PAXG contracts. The deployed implementation’s runtime bytecode is byte-for-byte reproducible from the public audited source (matching down to the trailing compiler-metadata hash), the deployed source is verified on-chain, and the deployment post-dates every audit, so the audited code and the code in production are the same end to end.
Rating: GOOD
8. Dependencies
PAXG rests on Paxos’s off-chain gold custody and reserves, which are attested off-chain and cannot be confirmed by on-chain reads (inherent to a commodity-backed asset), the Paxos control keys for mint, freeze, seize, pause, and code replacement (the dominant technical dependency, see Section 3), the Chainlink PAXG/USD feed (see Section 2), and the LayerZero route with its verifier set and Solana peer (see Section 6). Redemption to physical gold or fiat is an off-chain Paxos process, so a liquidator has no on-chain redemption path and must exit through secondary-market liquidity in PAXG. These dependencies are reputable and, for the on-chain parts, audited, but value rests on off-chain reserves and control funnels through the Paxos control keys.
Rating: MEDIUM → dependencies are reputable and, on-chain, audited, but the backing is off-chain gold attested off-chain and on-chain control funnels through the Paxos MPC-based control keys.
9. Summary
Findings table
Ratings in this table are plain text (Good / Medium / Critical / N/A), no icons.
| Area |
Key finding |
Rating |
| 0. Pre-screening |
Deployed and source-verified on Ethereum at 0x45804880…Af78, implementation rotated once (2 June 2026) onto Paxos’s audited unified codebase; not sanctioned; no existing Aave reserve; control is issuer-held and concentrated in the Paxos MPC-based control keys (see Section 3). |
Medium |
| 1. ERC20 |
Standards-compliant, 18 decimals; returns bool, no fee on transfer (legacy fee removed), no rebase, no hooks, no flash mint; EIP-2612 and EIP-3009 present; only restriction is the issuer freeze and pause. |
Good |
| 2. Oracle |
Live Chainlink PAXG/USD feed on Ethereum (8 decimals, approximately 4,009 US dollars, 24-hour heartbeat, Low Market Risk); not yield-bearing so no CAPO required; not yet wired to Aave, a routine Aave-side step. |
Good |
| 3. Access control |
Root admin, mint authority (via SupplyControl admin/manager), freeze, seize, and pause resolve to one Paxos MPC-based control key; a second is proxy admin able to replace the token code; roles are concentrated with no on-chain timelock (the 3-hour delay covers only root-admin handover) and mint is uncapped at the manager level. |
Medium |
| 4. Exchange rate / yield |
Not yield-bearing: a fixed one-to-one claim on one ounce of gold, no exchange-rate method, no rebase, priced by the Chainlink feed. |
N/A |
| 5. Token architecture |
Single canonical proxy, supply issuer-controlled and also mint-and-burnable by the LayerZero route, standard supply and transfer events; no tx.origin, no delegatecall beyond proxy delegation; concentration captured in Section 3. |
Good |
| 6. Bridge and cross-chain |
LayerZero V2 OFT burn-and-mint route to Solana only; three required verifiers (two independent of Paxos), pinned libraries, inbound mint bounded at approximately 4,440 PAXG per 24 hours; owner and delegate are the same Paxos control key, no pause. |
Medium |
| 7. Audit and security |
Recent multi-firm coverage of the deployed codebase (Zellic core and PAXG-specific, Trail of Bits for the OFT, Halborn); one ever-Critical resolved pre-deployment, rest Low/Informational; deployed bytecode reproduced byte-for-byte from the public audited source, verified on-chain; one-million-dollar bug bounty. |
Good |
| 8. Dependencies |
Off-chain gold custody and reserves (attested off-chain), the Paxos MPC-based control key, the Chainlink feed, and the LayerZero route and Solana peer; no on-chain redemption, so liquidators exit via secondary markets. |
Medium |
Disclaimer
Aave Labs has no formal or informal affiliation with Paxos or the PAXG issuer beyond this technical assessment. Aave Labs has not been compensated by Paxos or any related party in connection with this work.
Copyright
Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.