Paxos-issued phyiscal gold ERC20 token public smart contract repository.
https://www.paxos.com/pax-gold-whitepaper
The contract abi is in PAXG.abi. It is the abi of the implementation contract.
Interaction with PAXG is done at the address of the proxy at 0x45804880De22913dAFE09f4980848ECE6EcbAf78. See
https://etherscan.io/token/0x45804880De22913dAFE09f4980848ECE6EcbAf78 for live on-chain details, and the section on bytecode verification below.
See also our independent security audits by ChainSecurity and a formal verification audit by CertiK. Since Pax Gold is based on Paxos Standard, also see other independent security audits of Paxos Standard by Nomic Labs, ChainSecurity,
and Trail of Bits.
Paxos Gold (PAXG) is an ERC20 token that is Centrally Minted and Burned by Paxos, representing the physical ownership of LBMA accredited Gold Bars.
The public interface of PAXG Gold is the ERC20 interface specified by EIP-20.
name()symbol()decimals()totalSupply()balanceOf(address who)transfer(address to, uint256 value)approve(address spender, uint256 value)allowance(address owner, address spender)transferFrom(address from, address to, uint256 value)
And the usual events.
event Transfer(address indexed from, address indexed to, uint256 value)event Approval(address indexed owner, address indexed spender, uint256 value)
Typical interaction with the contract will use transfer to move the token as payment.
Additionally, a pattern involving approve and transferFrom can be used to allow another
address to move tokens from your address to a third party without the need for the middleperson
to custody the tokens, such as in the 0x protocol.
There is a well known gotcha involving the ERC20 approve method. The problem occurs when the owner decides
to change the allowance of a spender that already has an allowance. If the spender sends a transferFrom
transaction at a similar time that the owner sends the new approve transaction
and the transferFrom by the spender goes through first, then the spender gets to use the
original allowance, and also get approved for the intended new allowance.
The recommended mitigation in cases where the owner does not trust the spender is to first set the allowance to zero before setting it to a new amount, checking that the allowance was not spent before sending the new approval transaction. Note, however, that any allowance change is subject to front-running, which is as simple as watching the mempool for certain transactions and then offering a higher gas price to get another transaction mined onto the blockchain more quickly.
The total supply of PAXG is backed by gold held in professional vaults in London, under the custody of Paxos.
There is a single supplyController address that can mint and burn the token
based on the actual movement of gold in and out of the reserve based on
requests for the purchase, conversion and redemption of PAXG.
The supply control interface includes methods to get the current address of the supply controller, and events to monitor the change in supply of PAXG.
supplyController()
Supply Control Events
SupplyIncreased(address indexed to, uint256 value)SupplyDecreased(address indexed from, uint256 value)SupplyControllerSet(address indexed oldSupplyController, address indexed newSupplyController)
In the event of a critical security threat, Paxos has the ability to pause transfers
and approvals of the PAXG token. The ability to pause is controlled by a single owner role,
following OpenZeppelin's
Ownable.
The simple model for pausing transfers following OpenZeppelin's
Pausable.
Paxos charges a set fee rate for all on-chain transfers of PAXG in order to offset storage fees of gold bars in our vault. The fee controller has the ability to set the fee recipient and the fee rate (measured in 1/100th of a basis point). Paxos will never change the fee rate without prior notice as we take transparency very seriously.
The transfer function takes the debit amount as input, and computes the fee and credit to the recipient as
fee = debit.mul(feeRate).div(feeParts)
credit = debit.sub(fee)
Note that div truncates to an integer (and therefore 18 decimal effective precision).
The "inverse fee problem" is the problem of figuring out the amount to send (the debit), and the corresponding fee, given that you know how much you want the recipient to receive (the credit).
The following is a solution for the fee given the credit
denominator = feeParts.sub(feeRate)
fee = credit.mul(feeRate).div(denominator)
debit = credit.add(fee)
One can prove this is always a solution by expressing the truncate rounding as a set of inequalities.
Note that there is a necessary truncate operation in the div step. The key here is that the rounding
is done in the computation of the expected fee rather than trying to compute the debit directly
from the credit. There are other orders of operations that lead to inconsistent rounding such that
the transfer function will compute a different fee and credit than you intended.
It is sometimes the case that smallerFee = fee.sub(1) is also a solution. It is likely only worth the extra compute
to save 10^-18 PAXG if doing the math off-chain. One checks that
smallerFee = fee.sub(1)
debit = credit.add(smallerFee)
debitFee = debit.mul(feeRate).div(feeParts)
if debitFee == smallerFee { // this is a solution!
return smallerFee
} else {
return fee
}
As required by our regulators, we have introduced a role for asset protection to freeze or seize the assets of a criminal party when required to do so by law, including by court order or other legal process.
The assetProtectionRole can freeze and unfreeze the PAXG balance of any address on chain.
It can also wipe the balance of an address after it is frozen
to allow the appropriate authorities to seize the backing assets.
Freezing is something that Paxos will not do on its own accord,
and as such we expect to happen extremely rarely. The list of frozen addresses is available
in isFrozen(address who).
In order to allow for gas-less transactions we have implemented a variation of EIP-865. The public function betaDelegatedTransfer and betaDelegatedTransferBatch allow an approved party to transfer PAXG on the end user's behalf given a signed message from said user. Because EIP-865 is not finalized, all methods related to delegated transfers are prefixed by Beta. Only approved parties are allowed to transfer PAXG on a user's behalf because of potential attacks associated with signing messages. To mitigate some attacks, EIP-712 is implemented which provides a structured message to be displayed for verification when signing.
function betaDelegatedTransfer(
bytes sig, address to, uint256 value, uint256 serviceFee, uint256 seq, uint256 deadline
) public returns (bool) {
To facilitate upgradeability on the immutable blockchain we follow a standard two-contract delegation pattern: a proxy contract represents the token, while all calls not involving upgrading the contract are delegated to an implementation contract.
The delegation uses delegatecall, which runs the code of the implementation contract
in the context of the proxy storage. This way the implementation pointer can
be changed to a different implementation contract while still keeping the same
data and PAXG contract address, which are really for the proxy contract.
The proxy used here is AdminUpgradeabilityProxy from ZeppelinOS.
The implementation contract is only used for the logic of the non-admin methods.
A new implementation contract can be set by calling upgradeTo() or upgradeToAndCall() on the proxy,
where the latter is used for upgrades requiring a new initialization or data migration so that
it can all be done in one transaction. You must first deploy a copy of the new implementation
contract, which is automatically paused by its constructor to help avoid accidental calls directly
to the proxy contract.
The proxy contract and implementation contracts are verified on etherscan at the following links:
etherscan token link
Because the implementation address in the proxy is a private variable,
verifying that this is the proxy being used requires reading contract
storage directly. This can be done using a mainnet node, such as infura,
by pasting the network address in truffle-config.js and running
truffle exec ./getImplementationAddress.js --network mainnet
To run smart contract tests first start
ganache-cli
in another terminal
Then run
make test-contracts
You can also run make test-contracts-coverage to see a coverage report.