PAXG Tokenized-Gold Discount Reversion, Hedged Against Spot Gold (Long PAXGUSDT.BINANCE_SPOT / Short XAUUSD.SPOTMETAL, 1H, Market-Neutral, 4-Parameter)

Cross-venue, market-neutral relative-value trade between a crypto-native gold token and the spot-gold market it can be redeemed against. PAX Gold (PAXG) is a fully allocated, redeemable claim on one troy ounce of London Good Delivery gold. Its fair value is spot XAU/USD plus a slowly varying structural premium or discount (mint and redemption fees, the USDT/USD basis, crypto-side demand). PAXG trades 24/7 in thin crypto liquidity. Crypto treasuries and traders use it as a risk-off parking asset, so crypto-side liquidation waves, stablecoin flows and weekend trading push PAXG away from its usual basis to gold, while spot gold (a deep OTC market) is unaffected. Creation and redemption arbitrage is slow (KYC, minimum sizes, days to settle), so these gaps are not closed at once but revert over hours to days. Strategy: on each 1-HOUR bar where BOTH legs have a fresh close (spot-gold session open), compute basis_t = PAXG_close / XAU_close - 1 and its deviation dev_t = basis_t minus the rolling median of basis over the last `median_lookback` aligned observations. When PAXG is CHEAP against its own recent basis (dev_t <= -entry_dev_pct), buy PAXG spot and short an equal USD notional of spot gold on SPOTMETAL. Close both legs when the deviation has reverted (dev_t >= -exit_dev_pct) or after `max_hold_hours`. Only the discount side is traded: PAXG on BINANCE_SPOT cannot be shorted, and the spot listing (from 2020-08) gives about 6 years of history against about 19 months for the PAXG perp. The hedge removes exposure to the gold price. XAUUSD.SPOTMETAL is the spot-gold anchor, as the factory rules require for gold as a spot market; the PAXG token on Binance is the crypto-venue instrument. Prior art: the knowledge base holds no PAXG, XAUT or PAXG-vs-gold hypothesis, and SPOTMETAL carries 0.3% of experiments, so this is a new price series and a new mechanism (dislocation of a redeemable token from its underlying, not momentum or breakout). A scoping look at hourly PAXG spot from Dec-2025 to Oct-2026 used the Binance gold perp as a stand-in, because the SPOTMETAL 1h catalog is still being backfilled; the strategy itself must use XAUUSD.SPOTMETAL. Against a 168-bar median the deviation had a std of about 0.20%. The 13 episodes beyond -0.5% in about 10 months reverted on average +0.35% within 24h and +0.54% within 72h; episodes beyond -0.8% reverted about +0.8% in 72h. More and larger gaps are expected in the 2020-2022 crypto crash windows (May 2021, May/Jun/Nov 2022). Execution: a bar-close market decision on the 24/7 PAXG leg fills at the signal bar's close, the faithful equivalent of a next-bar-open fill. The gold leg is on a session venue and fills at the next bar's open (next_open_fill, supported). Entries are only evaluated while the gold session is open, so both legs go on together. An exit that triggers while gold is closed (weekend or the daily 17:00-18:00 NY break) is executed at the first bar after gold reopens, with the PAXG leg closed at the same bar, so the pair is never left unhedged by design. Overnight financing on the short gold leg (receives fed funds - 2.5%/yr, so it pays when fed funds is below 2.5%) is charged by the platform's funding ledger. No supplementary feed is needed: OHLCV of both legs only.