World Gold Council Proposes Shared Infrastructure for Tokenized Gold Products

The World Gold Council, the gold industry’s leading market-development body, announced Thursday it is building shared infrastructure designed to make digital gold products more interoperable, scalable, and easier to launch.

The initiative, detailed in a white paper co-authored with Boston Consulting Group, proposes a platform called “Gold as a Service” — an open middleware layer connecting physical gold custody with the digital systems used to issue and manage gold-backed products.

The platform would standardize backend processes, including custody coordination, reconciliation, compliance, and redemption, while leaving front-end product design and branding to individual issuers.

The tokenized gold market has ballooned in recent months but remains structurally fragile. Total market capitalization has surpassed $5 billion, but the sector is dominated by just two products, Tether Gold (XAUT) and Paxos Gold (PAXG), which control more than 95% of the market.

That concentration reflects the high barriers to entry that the WGC’s white paper aims to address. Launching a digital gold product today requires issuers to independently build custody relationships, compliance pipelines, audit frameworks, and redemption logistics, a fragmented setup that limits competition and hampers fungibility across products.

The WGC argues that a shared service layer could lower those barriers, enabling new issuers to enter the market while making digital gold products more interchangeable, a prerequisite for deeper liquidity and broader DeFi integration.

3 Layer Architecture

The proposed system is organized around three layers. A physical layer would manage sourcing, storage, transport, and redemption of actual gold. A digital layer would handle issuance, ownership records, and product-lifecycle management. Finally, an interface layer would allow issuers to build their own customer-facing experiences on top of the shared stack.

Under this model, issuers would compete on user experience, pricing, and distribution — not on custody infrastructure. The WGC envisions digital gold eventually serving as deployable capital, enabling use cases such as being pledged as collateral for borrowing.

Gold Drops

Gold is trading at around $4,500 per ounce after falling sharply from above $5,000 earlier in the week. Gold rose 64% in 2025, its strongest annual performance in decades, driven by central bank purchases and demand for safe-haven assets amid geopolitical uncertainty.

The rally has catalyzed a wave of tokenized gold activity. In January, the sector crossed $4 billion in market value.

Yet the sector’s growth has also highlighted its structural limitations — exactly the problems the WGC’s initiative is designed to solve. The WGC noted that above-ground gold supply is worth more than $30 trillion, dwarfing the current tokenized market and underscoring the growth potential that standardized infrastructure could unlock.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.