(Kitco News) - The World Gold Council has announced that it is taking a decisive step toward reshaping how the yellow metal functions in an increasingly digital financial system, unveiling plans to build shared infrastructure aimed at unlocking the next phase of digital gold adoption.
Despite the recent volatility, gold has been one of the top-performing assets, and notably, sentiment around tokenized gold has surged. Industry data shows tokenized gold recorded a 177% increase in market capitalization in 2025, expanding from roughly $1.6 billion to $4.4 billion last year.
Yet despite that rapid growth, the sector continues to face persistent structural challenges, particularly as decentralized platforms attempt to bridge digital innovation with a physical asset. It is this complex and fragmented landscape that the WGC is attempting to address with its latest initiative.
On Thursday, the WGC in partnership with Boston Consulting Group published a white paper, Digital Gold: The Case for a Shared Infrastructure, which outlines a “Gold as a Service” model—an open platform designed to connect physical gold custody with the digital systems used to issue and manage gold-backed products.
At its core, the proposal aims to standardize key processes such as custody coordination, reconciliation, compliance and redemption—areas that have limited scalability and interoperability across digital gold products in recent years.
“Digital gold has evolved quickly, but the infrastructure supporting it hasn’t kept pace,” Mike Oswin, Global Head of Market Structure and Innovation at the WGC, said in an interview. “What we’re seeing today is a fragmented ecosystem where each provider is effectively rebuilding the same complex processes. That creates inefficiencies and ultimately limits growth.”
Oswin explained that while a lot of developers are quickly building platforms to support digital products, a lot ultimately fail because the physical landscape can be difficult to understand and navigate.
“ The challenges come with this kind of the complexity to get all the agreements in place, be it liquidity, making sure you have the right providers to provide you the right type of liquidity that you need; custody in a vault; insurance; legal title, making sure you have the right legal structure to wrap around the physical gold that gives the guarantees to your investors that they have full legal title to the physical asset,” he said.
Oswin noted that while tokenization has helped broaden access to gold, the lack of standardization has constrained its ability to integrate seamlessly into modern financial systems.
“Gold is inherently a physical asset, and that introduces unique challenges when you try to digitize it,” he explained. “You need absolute confidence in custody, in ownership, in redemption. Without shared infrastructure, those assurances are harder to deliver consistently across platforms.”
The proposed “Gold as a Service” model looks to address those issues by bringing shareholders in the marketplace together to create a common foundation for digital gold issuance. By embedding continuous reconciliation, auditability and standardized legal frameworks into the system, the platform aims to enhance trust while improving fungibility across different products.
For Oswin, one of the most important outcomes is the potential to transform gold from a static store of value into a more dynamic financial asset.
“If you can standardize how digital gold is issued and moved, you open the door to much broader use cases,” he said. “Gold can become deployable capital—something that can be used as collateral, integrated into lending markets, or moved seamlessly across financial platforms.”
The initiative also reflects a broader push within the gold industry to ensure the metal remains relevant as financial markets continue their rapid digital transformation.
“Financial systems are evolving quickly, and gold needs to evolve with them,” Oswin added. “This isn’t about changing what gold is—it’s about making sure its core attributes of trust, liquidity and stability can exist in a digital environment.”
The WGC is now calling on market participants, technology firms and financial institutions to collaborate on developing the shared infrastructure, signaling that the next phase of digital gold’s growth may depend as much on cooperation as it does on innovation.
