Precious-metal digital financial assets: whose obligation you hold instead of the metal

When you buy a digital financial asset (DFA) tied to a precious metal, you are buying neither the metal nor a share of a vault, but a digital claim on a specific issuer whose size is pegged to a quantity of metal, most often a gram of gold. The record of your right is held not in a depository but in the information system of an operator included in the Bank of Russia register, and it is this operator, not an exchange, that keeps the records and handles the transfer of the right. This leads to the main practical difference: the risk of such an instrument comes not only from the price of the metal but also from the solvency of whoever issued the obligation.

What an issue actually documents

The issue decision is the issuer's document that sets out what the face value is pegged to, in what form the obligation is settled and when. The peg may be to the Bank of Russia's official accounting price, to an exchange benchmark for the metal, or to the issuer's own methodology with a spread. Settlement may be in cash or in kind, and the two are not the same: cash settlement means that at redemption you are paid the rouble equivalent calculated by the formula in the decision, and you will never receive physical metal. Physical delivery usually comes with conditions attached: a minimum volume, a place of delivery, a bar format, deadlines for submitting a request. It is the issue decision you need to read, not the marketing page: the pricing formula and the list of grounds for refusing physical delivery are found there.

Why this is not an unallocated metal account, a fund or a futures contract

An unallocated metal account is a banking product; the rights under it arise from a contract with the bank and are not covered by deposit insurance. A DFA is a separate legal institution, introduced by the law on digital financial assets and in operation since 2020; the right is recorded in an information system, not in a bank account. An exchange-traded metal fund is a collective structure with a management company and its own valuation mechanism; you can browse such instruments in the funds section. A futures contract is a derivative with variation margin and initial margin requirements. Shares in mining companies give you a stake in a business, not in the metal: their price depends on production costs, debt and taxes, but they can pay shareholders, and the upcoming payouts are shown in the dividend calendar —

A metal DFA has no coupon or dividend at all by default: income arises only from the price difference or from terms explicitly written into the issue.

Liquidity: where you will sell

Exchange-traded instruments have an order book and a market maker — look at any security in the stocks or bonds section to see what a continuous two-way market looks like. DFAs usually have neither. Secondary trading is possible either within the issuer's platform or through an exchange operator, and it is most often thin: you sell to whoever is willing to buy that particular issue on that particular platform. When planning a trade, assume that exiting before maturity may prove either impossible or costly in terms of the spread.

Which metal stands behind the obligation

Gold issues dominate, because gold has a transparent price benchmark and well-understood storage logistics. Silver is less common. Platinum group metals — platinum and palladium — are more complicated: the market is thinner, the price is more volatile, and the benchmark for the formula has to be taken from foreign venues, which adds infrastructure risk. Base metals such as copper or nickel are not precious metals and fall under the metal DFA regime on a different basis — as a peg to industrial commodities.

What to check before buying

Step 1: find the information system operator in the Bank of Russia register and make sure the issue is actually placed there. Step 2: open the issue decision and write down the pricing formula, the term, the redemption procedure and who acts as the tax agent. Step 3: find out whether the issue is backed by real metal, where that metal is stored and whether this is confirmed by an independent document; backing is not mandatory and is often absent. Step 4: check whether early redemption at the issuer's initiative is provided for, and at what price.

Taxes

Income from DFAs is subject to personal income tax; the tax base and the withholding procedure are determined by tax legislation — for guidance on the investment tax base, see 13%. The familiar rules for exchange-traded securities cannot be automatically applied to DFAs: the long-term holding deduction and crediting to an individual investment account do not apply to every digital right, and depending on the issue the tax agent may be the issuer, the operator or no one at all — in which case you will have to file a tax return yourself.

A candid caveat: the site has no data on specific outstanding metal DFA issues — they do not trade on an organised market and do not appear in our market sections. Verify the terms with the issuer, and follow the market backdrop for metals and mining companies in the news and issuer reports.