The World Gold Council plans to build a shared infrastructure platform for digital gold
The World Gold Council (WGC), a London-based industry body established to promote gold markets on behalf of leading mining companies, has proposed “Gold as a Service,” a shared infrastructure that combines physical gold storage with digital issuance and management.
The program aims to make it easier for companies to launch gold-backed products by providing a ready-made, trusted system instead of building everything from scratch, as noted in a white paper compiled by Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
With “Gold as a Service,” WGC seeks to reduce complexity when it comes to implementing digital gold offerings, while ensuring trust, compliance, and efficiency.
Publishers can focus on customer-facing aspects such as pricing, branding, and user experience as the platform handles the back-end tasks.
The model operates in three integrated layers: a physical layer that manages physical gold (acquisition, storage, transportation, and redemption), a digital layer that enables the issuance and management of digital gold products, and a connecting layer that stores physical gold and synchronized digital records.
Different systems are delaying the future of digital gold
According to the WGC, while gold remains the most reliable store of value, with the largest global asset worth more than $30 billion, its market structure has lagged behind the transition to digital finance.
Investors continue to expect digital access, including fractional ownership and real-time transactions, but existing digital gold products are fragmented, inconsistent, and difficult to scale.
The digital gold ecosystem has been delayed due to operational complexity, high costs, and a lack of standardization across storage, ownership, and redemption. This creates trust issues, limits capital, and prevents different products from functioning as a unified market.
In its ideal form, digital gold can serve as a seamless, frictionless asset class, where units are equal across platforms, transparently backed by physical gold, and easily transferable, tradable, or usable as collateral, the WGC said.
The WGC expects that the proposed “Gold as a Service” can address these issues. The latter idea transformed gold from a collection of digital products into a liquid, integrated asset within modern financial systems.
“Financial services are undergoing rapid and pervasive digital transformation and gold must evolve to maintain its role in the global financial system,” said World Gold Council CEO David Tait.
“A shared infrastructure can help gold become more accessible, easier to trade and more fully integrated into modern financial systems – ensuring it remains as relevant tomorrow as it has been for millennia,” he added.
The Council invited participants from inside and outside the traditional gold industry to contribute to the development of this platform.
Token gold has outgrown its niche
The announcement comes as token gold has grown from a small corner of the crypto ecosystem to a market with an estimated $5.5 billion in combined revenue as of March 2026, according to Forbes.
The tokenized gold market is largely dominated by Tether Gold (XAUT) and Paxos Gold (PAXG), which comprise about 92% of the total market.
