The World Gold Council (WGC), a London-based business physique established to advertise gold markets on behalf of main mining corporations, has proposed “Gold as a Service,” a shared infrastructure that connects bodily gold custody with digital issuance and administration.
The initiative goals to make it a lot simpler for corporations to launch gold-backed merchandise by offering a ready-made, trusted system as a substitute of constructing every little thing from scratch, as famous in a whitepaper co-authored with Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
With “Gold as a Service,” WGC desires to cut back complexity on the subject of launching digital gold choices, whereas making certain belief, compliance, and environment friendly operations.
Issuers can concentrate on customer-facing parts equivalent to pricing, branding, and person expertise because the platform handles backend operations.
The mannequin works by way of three built-in layers: a bodily layer that manages actual gold (sourcing, storage, transport, and redemption), a digital layer that permits the issuance and administration of digital gold merchandise, and a connecting layer that retains bodily gold and digital information synchronized.
Fragmented techniques maintain again the way forward for digital gold
In accordance with the WGC, whereas gold stays a extremely trusted retailer of worth, with an unlimited world provide value over $30 trillion, its market construction has lagged behind the shift towards digital finance.
Buyers more and more anticipate digital entry, together with fractional possession and real-time transactions, however present digital gold merchandise are fragmented, inconsistent, and tough to scale.
As we speak’s digital gold ecosystem is held again by operational complexity, excessive prices, and a scarcity of standardisation throughout custody, possession, and redemption. This creates belief points, limits liquidity, and prevents totally different merchandise from functioning as a unified market.
In its supreme kind, digital gold would perform as a seamless, fungible asset class, the place models are equal throughout platforms, backed transparently by bodily gold, and simply transferable, tradeable, or usable as collateral, the WGC said.
The WGC expects that the proposed “Gold as a Service” might deal with these points. The imaginative and prescient is to finally remodel gold from a fragmented set of digital merchandise right into a liquid, built-in asset inside trendy monetary techniques.
“Monetary companies are present process a fast and pervasive digital transformation and gold should additionally evolve to take care of its position within the world monetary system,” mentioned World Gold Council CEO David Tait.
“Shared infrastructure can assist gold grow to be extra accessible, extra simply traded and totally built-in into trendy monetary techniques — making certain it stays as related tomorrow because it has been for millennia,” he added.
The Council has invited individuals from each inside and out of doors the normal gold business to contribute to the platform’s growth.
Tokenized gold has outgrown its area of interest
The announcement comes as tokenized gold has grown from a small nook of the crypto ecosystem right into a market with roughly $5.5 billion in mixed capitalization as of March 2026, per Forbes.
The tokenized gold market is essentially managed by Tether Gold (XAUT) and Paxos Gold (PAXG), which collectively account for round 92% of whole market share.
Disclosure: This text was edited by Vivian Nguyen. For extra data on how we create and assessment content material, see our Editorial Coverage.
