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 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 scale back complexity relating to launching digital gold choices, whereas guaranteeing belief, compliance, and environment friendly operations.
Issuers can deal with customer-facing parts similar 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 permits the issuance and administration of digital gold merchandise, and a connecting layer that retains bodily gold and digital data synchronized.
Fragmented programs maintain again the way forward for digital gold
In response to 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 count on digital entry, together with fractional possession and real-time transactions, however current digital gold merchandise are fragmented, inconsistent, and troublesome 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 totally different merchandise from functioning as a unified market.
In its perfect 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 acknowledged.
The WGC expects that the proposed “Gold as a Service” may tackle 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 programs.
“Monetary providers are present process a speedy 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 also help gold develop into extra accessible, extra simply traded and totally built-in into trendy monetary programs — guaranteeing 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 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.
