Over recent decades, gold has partially digitised. Trading, clearing, and record keeping are largely electronic and digital gold products have emerged, including gold ETFs, vaulted digital gold accounts, certificates, and tokenised gold, and there are wholesale initiatives aimed at improving settlement and collateral efficiency.
Despite this progress, some digital gold applications remain limited in scale, relative to the broader digital financial market. This reflects challenges in the current market structure, rather than the shortcomings of existing solutions. Launching and operating digital gold products is complex and costly. It requires issuers to coordinate custody, vaulting, logistics, insurance, compliance, technology, liquidity, audit, and redemption services. Issuers must also manage product integrity across a fragmented vendor landscape, which results in high fixed costs, and a slow time to market.
The current fragmented landscape results in low fungibility of digital gold products, which in turn constrains consumer trust and holds back market adoption. Without consistency or standards across backing, custody, audit, and redemption terms, consumers cannot assume digital gold products are interchangeable. As a result, consumers must revisit their trust in each individual product, its issuer, and its underlying holdings. In parallel, low fungibility limits mobility across the category: products such as gold tokens cannot move seamlessly between venues and counterparties, liquidity becomes fragmented, and the product’s digital utility is constrained. This restricts the development of more fluid secondary and redemption markets and holds back extensions such as lending, borrowing, or payments, beyond being a store of value.
Overall, these trust and mobility frictions compound into weaker product‑market fit, demonstrated by the limited penetration and low awareness of many digital gold products among everyday investors relative to mainstream gold products.
If the industry cannot overcome these challenges, digital gold will likely remain a collection of siloed products. Innovation at the product level would persist, and gold risks becoming less integrated and harder to use in digital financial systems than assets that are underpinned by infrastructure operating with consistent standards and processes.
Against this backdrop, the World Gold Council is committed to creating and orchestrating shared market infrastructure to support the issuance and operation of scalable, interoperable digital gold products. This paper explores how infrastructure known as Gold as a Service could be designed to connect physical gold custody with digital issuance and lifecycle management, enabling issuers to build and operate digital gold products on a consistent, trusted foundation rather than recreating the same complex infrastructure independently.
Gold as a Service would not directly be a consumer facing product. Instead, the intention is to support the suppliers and vendors that underpin gold product creation. Issuers would have full ownership of their products, value propositions, brands, and customer relationships. The infrastructure would provide the underlying operating layer, bringing together core functions such as custody, vaulting, issuance, reconciliation, compliance, liquidity access, and redemption. By coordinating these elements, Gold as a Service aims to reduce operational complexity and lower barriers to entry.
The new infrastructure would not change what gold is, but how it participates in an increasingly digital financial system. It would allow gold to be always accessible, increasingly fungible across trusted systems, and interoperable with both traditional financial infrastructure and emerging digital rails. With the intention to deliver trust, legal certainty, and simplicity from day one, many of the infrastructure's core benefits have the potential to compound as the infrastructure grows.
Market liquidity could deepen and become more efficient as products gather under a shared infrastructure. The aggregation of venues to redeem physical gold could power a globally trusted redemption network. Scale could also drive unit costs downwards, with vaulting, insurance, audit, and logistics becoming cheaper as volumes consolidate onto shared platforms. Finally, with increased fungibility, digital gold could become a more attractive base layer for third parties to build on. This would give app builders confidence they can access broad, portable liquidity across the market. With a dedicated infrastructure, market participants and entrepreneurs would be better positioned to develop new products and use cases. These would extend how gold is accessed and used over time, within evolving market and regulatory frameworks. Retail customers could access gold in smaller denominations, move it easily across wallets and platforms, and extend its role beyond a store of value into everyday uses such as payments, savings, lending, and borrowing, without sacrificing the integrity or backing of physical gold.
This paper is an exploration of how participants across the market can contribute to the next chapter of digital gold. It is not prescribing a single end design; instead, it sets out the opportunity for participants across the gold value chain and digital asset ecosystem to input into a shared, interoperable, and trusted infrastructure solution alongside the World Gold Council. To do this, the World Gold Council would work with upstream actors such as miners and with midstream partners including bullion banks and other liquidity providers to align on responsible sourcing standards, and best practices for integrity, reporting, and redemption. It would also collaborate with downstream institutions such as retail investment platforms to deliver differentiated products and use cases. Technology providers, market infrastructure firms, and regulators would also have a role to play in shaping resilient frameworks that balance innovation with governance and consumer protection. The World Gold Council's role would be to act as a neutral convener and system orchestrator, consulting market participants, facilitating participation, and de-risking progress as the industry engages in challenging and refining this future.
01 - The gold market today and the emergence of digital gold
1.1 Gold’s enduring role
Gold has long played a central role as a strategic asset for investors, serving both as a store of value and a long term investment that helps protect and enhance wealth. Its performance reflects a distinctive combination of counter-cyclical investment demand and pro-cyclical consumer demand, which together underpin gold’s resilience across economic cycles. During periods of heightened uncertainty or declining confidence in currencies, policy, or financial markets, investment demand for gold has historically increased, and its price has risen (Exhibit A).
Demand in gold is rooted in gold's physical properties and economic fundamentals. Gold is scarce and durable: annual mined supply adds only around 1.8% to the existing above-ground stock, and almost all gold ever mined (~220,000 tonnes) remains in circulation in usable form.1
This limited and persistent supply, combined with diverse sources of demand, reinforces gold’s role as a long-term store of value and a core component of a well‑diversified investment portfolio.
Gold also benefits from broad, long‑standing confidence, which is reinforced by how institutions and households use it in practice. In the World Gold Council’s 2025 Central Bank Gold Reserves Survey, 85% of organisations said gold’s performance in crisis was relevant to their decision to hold gold, 81% cited diversification was also relevant, and 80% cited store of value.2 The Gold Retail Market Insights survey of 18,000 retail investors found consistent perceptions of gold as a safe, durable, and a traditional store of value; retail investors commonly hold gold for wealth protection and long-term returns.3
1.2 How the gold market works today
The gold market today is large, global, and highly liquid. It is anchored in a large stock of above ground metal, estimated at 220,000 tonnes.4 This is equivalent to over US$30 trillion at current prices, held as jewellery, bars, coins, and official reserves (Exhibit B).
It is helpful to separate the market into retail and wholesale. In retail, gold ownership remains predominantly physical, concentrated in jewellery concentrated in jewellery, bars, and coins – often as long-term savings or for wealth protection. As shown in Exhibit B, jewellery accounts for the largest share of above-ground gold stocks, while bars and coins represent the primary form of direct investment holdings.
While retail ownership is highly visible, most day-to-day trading activity takes place in the wholesale market, led by banks, dealers, central banks, and institutional investors. Much of this activity is centred on the London ‘Over The Counter’ (OTC) precious metals market ('Loco London'), where gold traded must meet the London Good Delivery standards and changes ownership through account transfers rather than by physically moving bars for each trade. The London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) reports that more than 90% of wholesale OTC precious metals trading clears through unallocated Loco London accounts, reflecting how widely this model is used.5 For example, gold trade volumes were more than US$160 billion a day in the Loco London market alone in 2025.6
>90% Wholesale OTC trading clears through unallocated Loco London accounts
1.3 The emergence of digital gold
Over the past three decades, gold has increasingly shifted from something you primarily store and move physically, to something you can access, trade, and manage digitally (Exhibit C). As trading and record-keeping has moved onto electronic systems and markets have become more connected, investors have begun to expect gold to behave like other modern assets – easy to buy and sell, accessible across time zones, and held and transferred without the logistics, custody, and settlement complexities traditionally associated with physical gold.
From this evolution, digital gold has emerged: a term for product formats that deliver gold exposure (and in some cases, ownership rights) with digital infrastructure.
Today, digital gold products for retail users span across the market, including:
- Digital gold accounts, including allocated and vaulted digital gold (e.g., BullionVault, launched 2005) and pool-allocated digital gold (e.g., Paytm Digital Gold, launched 2017)
- Tokenised gold (e.g., PAXG, launched 2019 and Tether Gold XAU₮, launched 2020)
- Certificates or book‑entry claims (e.g., RBC gold certificates)
- Gold‑backed ETFs6 (e.g., the first gold ETF, launched 2003 and GLD, launched 2004)
Exhibit C: Evolution of retail-facing gold products - A shift from physical custody to digital ownership across different products
Footnotes:
1World Gold Council, Above Ground Stocks (as of December 2025)
2World Gold Council, Central Bank Gold Reserves Survey 2025
3World Gold Council, Gold Retail Market Insights
4LBMA, Precious Metal Accounts
5World Gold Council, Trading Volumes (as of December 2025)
6While primarily embedded in institutional market infrastructure, also widely accessible to retail investors
