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 an alternative of constructing all the pieces from scratch, as famous in a whitepaper co-authored with Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
With “Gold as a Service,” WGC needs to cut back complexity relating to launching digital gold choices, whereas guaranteeing belief, compliance, and environment friendly operations.
Issuers can concentrate on customer-facing components equivalent to pricing, branding, and consumer 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 allows the issuance and administration of digital gold merchandise, and a connecting layer that retains bodily gold and digital information synchronized.
Fragmented methods maintain again the way forward for digital gold
Based on the WGC, whereas gold stays a extremely trusted retailer of worth, with an enormous world provide price over $30 trillion, its market construction has lagged behind the shift towards digital finance.
Traders more and more count on digital entry, together with fractional possession and real-time transactions, however present digital gold merchandise are fragmented, inconsistent, and troublesome 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 splendid kind, digital gold would operate 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” may tackle 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 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 may help gold grow to be extra accessible, extra simply traded and absolutely built-in into trendy monetary methods — guaranteeing it stays as related tomorrow because it has been for millennia,” he added.
The Council has invited contributors 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 basically managed by Tether Gold (XAUT) and Paxos Gold (PAXG), which collectively account for round 92% of complete market share.
