Historical replay · GLD
Two Wicks in Six Days: Tokenized Gold in October 2025
PAXG, the token backed by physical gold, plunged to $3,600 on October 10 and spiked to $4,790 on October 16 — neither move was about gold. The 6% drop on October 21 was the real thing.
PAX Gold (PAXG) is a crypto token backed one-for-one by physical gold held in London vaults, so in principle it should trace the metal's price. In early October 2025 gold had just crossed $4,000 an ounce for the first time, extending one of its strongest years in decades, and PAXG opened this window near $4,032.
On the evening of October 10, PAXG got caught in something that had nothing to do with gold. Between 21:10 and 21:20 UTC — the same minutes in which the broad crypto market was going through a liquidation cascade — it fell from about $4,012 to a low of $3,600, roughly 10%. Five minutes later it was back near $3,876, and it closed the day at $3,983.
Over the following week the price climbed steadily with gold, from about $4,037 on October 12 to around $4,373 by the evening of October 16. Then, at 22:10 UTC, PAXG spiked from about $4,383 to $4,790 in a single five-minute candle — about 9% — on volume several times higher than the surrounding candles, and was back near $4,410 before the next one closed. The following day it drifted down to around $4,188 before closing at $4,239.
The final leg was genuine. PAXG rose to $4,401.66 on October 20 as gold set a new record, then fell to a close of $4,098 on October 21 — a daily drop of about 6%, in line with a sharp reversal in the metal itself that was widely reported as one of gold's biggest one-day falls in years.
Three large moves, and only one of them was about gold. Watching this window hour by hour is a useful exercise in telling apart a venue-specific wick — sudden, brief, instantly reversed — from a real repricing of the underlying asset, which tends to build over hours and doesn't snap back.