There were many attempts in the past to sell tokens that are claiming to be gold-backed but nothing is heard of them ever since. They must have all failed.
I know one project that do this and still alive till today. They run a bounty campaign and in fact pays quite well, around $4k or so per month for their participant. Not sure where they get the liquidity but last time I checked, they have around 150 ETH to market-buy their own tokens from the internal exchange. Pretty sure they have some running and profitable business before they start the project as it's impossble to get 150 ETH out of nowhere. They don't do an ICO too. But that's just an outlier, I still pessimistic about the whole asset-backed crypto in general.