The World Gold Council (WGC), a London-based business physique established to advertise gold markets on behalf of main mining firms, 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 firms to launch gold-backed merchandise by offering a ready-made, trusted system as an alternative of constructing every part from scratch, as famous in a whitepaper co-authored with Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
With “Gold as a Service,” WGC desires to scale back complexity in the case of launching digital gold choices, whereas making certain belief, compliance, and environment friendly operations.
Issuers can give attention to customer-facing parts reminiscent of pricing, branding, and consumer expertise because the platform handles backend operations.
The mannequin works by 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 data synchronized.
Fragmented methods maintain again the way forward for digital gold
In line 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.
At this time’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 completely different merchandise from functioning as a unified market.
In its excellent kind, digital gold would perform as a seamless, fungible asset class, the place items 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 in the end rework gold from a fragmented set of digital merchandise right into a liquid, built-in asset inside trendy monetary methods.
“Monetary providers are present process a fast and pervasive digital transformation and gold should additionally evolve to take care of its function within the world monetary system,” mentioned World Gold Council CEO David Tait.
“Shared infrastructure can assist gold change into extra accessible, extra simply traded and totally built-in into trendy monetary methods — making certain it stays as related tomorrow because it has been for millennia,” he added.
The Council has invited individuals from each inside and outdoors the standard gold business to contribute to the platform’s improvement.
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 complete market share.
