For millennia, gold has meant one thing: something you can hold in your hands. That definition is changing fast, and the World Gold Council (WGC) is now stepping in to improve it with a bold blockchain-powered blueprint that could reshape how the world owns and trades gold.
The council, working alongside Boston Consulting Group, has introduced what it calls Gold as a Service. It released a white paper on it, saying that the service will enable issuers to build and operate digital gold products on a consistent, trusted foundation rather than recreating the same complex infrastructure independently.
Gold as a Service would not directly be a consumer-facing product. Instead, the intention is to support the suppliers and vendors that underpin gold product creation. Issuers would have full ownership of their products, value propositions, brands, and customer relationships. The infrastructure would provide the underlying operating layer, bringing together core functions such as custody, vaulting, issuance, reconciliation, compliance, liquidity access, and redemption. By coordinating these elements, Gold as a Service aims to reduce operational complexity and lower barriers to entry.
Continuous audits, standardized custody, and cross-product fungibility are among the features on offer, addressing gaps the market has lived with for years. Mike Oswin, who heads market structure and innovation at the WGC, reached for a familiar analogy to explain the vision of Gold as a Service: Intel’s processor stickers, the small labels that once told laptop buyers exactly what was powering their machine. “If you see that little symbol, you know it’s Intel inside,” said Oswin. “You’re getting the best processor, so you know you’re walking out with what you need,” he added.
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Breaking Down the Barriers
Paxos and Tether have effectively written the rules of gold tokenization so far. Their respective products—PAX Gold and Tether Gold—sit at a combined market cap of nearly $5 billion, built on custody arrangements each company assembled from scratch. Paxos parks its reserves in London vaults run by Brink’s; Tether stores tons of physical gold in Switzerland, inside a bunker that spent the Cold War as a nuclear shelter. The WGC wants to move past that build-it-yourself approach entirely.
Part of what makes gold a harder sell than stablecoins is simple economics. Cash and treasuries earn interest. Gold, sitting behind reinforced doors, does not do so, and it just runs up storage bills. That cost burden has kept many potential issuers on the sidelines, and the WGC’s platform is directly aimed at lowering that entry point.
A Market on the Move
The tokenized real-world asset market has surpassed $27 billion in on-chain value, with gold-backed products gaining more prominence than previously. Some analysts see the sector crossing $100 billion before 2026 is out.
Bybit, the world’s second-largest crypto exchange by trading volume, has already read the room. Its newly launched XAUT Earn lets users collect yield on Tether Gold holdings, which is a concept that would have seemed out of place in any conversation about gold investing just a few years ago. Indeed, gold is no longer just a metal to hold. It is becoming a system to connect, and that could reshape the foundations of global finance.
