AFX Sovereign L1 Launches Gold Perpetual Markets with 40x Leverage

AFX launched its sovereign Layer-1 mainnet on May 18, 2026, delivering a dedicated execution environment for on-chain perpetuals including Gold (XAU) with up to 40x leverage, 100 ms latency and zero-gas fees. The development caps an eight-day surge in tokenized-gold infrastructure that began with Creek Finance’s XAUm mainnet on Sui on May 11 and continued with Avalon’s institutional XAUT yield product, Doppler’s RWA expansion and Yunfeng’s 1-gram gold token. On May 14, USDT0 added non-custodial BTC-to-XAUt0 swaps on BOB, further lowering barriers. Tokenized commodities reached $5.5 billion and tokenized-gold spot volume hit $90.7 billion in Q1 2026, positioning the new AFX venue to channel institutional flow into XAUUSD-linked derivatives.