Digital Gold: The Case for a Shared Infrastructure

05 - The path forward

5.1 Recap: The case for digital gold

Gold has played a prominent role in financial services for thousands of years. As financial infrastructure becomes increasingly digital, the strategic question is no longer whether gold should be digitised, but how it can participate fully in modern financial systems without compromising its defining attributes.

This paper presents a vision for an ecosystem where gold keeps its traditional role but becomes easier to access, move, and use within modern financial systems. In this future state, investors could access and use digital gold through a broader network of market participants, who can build on shared infrastructure, consistent standards, and continuous assurance between physical metal and its digital representation.

The central insight is that many of today’s constraints are structural rather than technological. Fragmentation across custody, liquidity, redemption, governance, and assurance has limited the scale of digital gold, increased its costs, and weakened its fungibility. Without action, digital gold risks remaining peripheral to the financial systems shaping capital markets, payments, and digital assets more broadly. Gold as a Service is proposed as a response to this challenge.

Gold as a Service is a platform that would allow innovation to flourish on top of common foundations, reducing duplication while preserving competition, choice, and issuer ownership. By shifting the trust and compliance of individual products to shared infrastructure, Gold as a Service could unlock deeper liquidity, stronger interoperability, and broader adoption, so gold remains fit for purpose in a digital era.

5.2 A call for collaboration

This paper does not aim to prescribe a final design for Gold as a Service or promote a single implementation. 

Instead, it sets out a commitment to action. Realising this future requires engagement across the gold value chain and the digital asset ecosystem, driven by three key classes of paricipants:

1. Upstream and midstream participants including bullion banks, vault operators, logistics providers, insurers, auditors, and liquidity providers will play a critical role in shaping how physical gold can support scalable, digital-native use cases under shared standards of integrity, reporting, and redemption.
    
2. Downstream participants including banks, fintechs, asset managers, exchanges, wallet providers, and consumer platforms are best placed to design the products, experiences, and use cases that bring digital gold to life for end users, building differentiated offerings on top of common infrastructure rather than fragmented stacks.
    
3. Technology providers, market infrastructure firms, and regulators have an opportunity to help define interoperable frameworks that balance innovation with resilience, governance, and consumer protection.

The World Gold Council’s role is to act as a neutral convener and operator, actively bringing stakeholders together to develop shared infrastructure, test assumptions, and translate this vision into practical pathways forward. Whether your organisation is looking to help build foundational infrastructure, launch new digital gold products, or integrate gold into existing financial workflows, there is an opportunity to engage, collaborate, and help shape outcomes as this initiative moves forward.

The World Gold Council invites market participants to challenge, refine, and strengthen this vision as it progresses into execution. Organisations and regulators interested in contributing to, building on, or piloting the concepts outlined in this paper are encouraged to engage. All perspectives on how to develop these ideas further are welcome. While the platform is still in its concept design phase, the World Gold Council is committed to bringing it to market.