World Gold Council plans to build 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 connects physical gold custody with digital issuance and management.

The initiative aims to make it much 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 whitepaper co-authored with Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

With “Gold as a Service,” WGC wants to reduce complexity when it comes to launching digital gold offerings, while ensuring trust, compliance, and efficient operations.

Issuers can focus on customer-facing elements such as pricing, branding, and user experience as the platform handles backend operations.

The model works through three integrated layers: a physical layer that manages real gold (sourcing, storage, transport, and redemption), a digital layer that enables the issuance and management of digital gold products, and a connecting layer that keeps physical gold and digital records synchronized.

Fragmented systems hold back the future of digital gold

According to the WGC, while gold remains a highly trusted store of value, with a vast global supply worth over $30 trillion, its market structure has lagged behind the shift toward digital finance.

Investors increasingly expect digital access, including fractional ownership and real-time transactions, but existing digital gold products are fragmented, inconsistent, and difficult to scale.

Today’s digital gold ecosystem is held back by operational complexity, high costs, and a lack of standardisation across custody, ownership, and redemption. This creates trust issues, limits liquidity, and prevents different products from functioning as a unified market.

In its ideal form, digital gold would function as a seamless, fungible asset class, where units are equivalent across platforms, backed transparently by physical gold, and easily transferable, tradeable, or usable as collateral, the WGC stated.

The WGC expects that the proposed “Gold as a Service” could address these issues. The vision is to ultimately transform gold from a fragmented set of digital products into a liquid, integrated asset within modern financial systems.

The Council has invited participants from both inside and outside the traditional gold industry to contribute to the platform’s development.

Tokenized gold has outgrown its niche

The announcement comes as tokenized gold has grown from a small corner of the crypto ecosystem into a market with roughly $5.5 billion in combined capitalization as of March 2026, per Forbes.

The tokenized gold market is largely controlled by Tether Gold (XAUT) and Paxos Gold (PAXG), which together account for around 92% of total market share.