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Informist, Thursday, Mar. 19, 2026

 

MUMBAI – The World Gold Council on Thursday announced the launch of a shared market infrastructure called 'Gold as a Service' to help overcome limitations of digital gold products such as low fungibility, which in turn constrain consumer trust and hold back market adoption.

 

"Low fungibility limits mobility across the category: products such as gold tokens cannot move seamlessly between venues and counterparties, liquidity becomes fragmented, and the product's digital utility is constrained," the World Gold Council said in a release. "This restricts the development of more fluid secondary and redemption markets and holds back extensions such as lending, borrowing, or payments, beyond being a store of value."

 

Expressing its commitment to creating and orchestrating shared market infrastructure to support the issuance and operation of scalable, interoperable digital gold products, the council said: "This paper explores how infrastructure known as Gold as a Service could be designed to connect physical gold custody with digital issuance and lifecycle management, enabling issuers to build and operate digital gold products on a consistent, trusted foundation rather than recreating the same complex infrastructure independently."

 

Clarifying that Gold as a Service would not directly be a consumer facing product, it said 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 World Gold Council said, and added that 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."

 

Under the shared infrastructure, market liquidity could deepen and become more efficient. The aggregation of venues to redeem physical gold could also power a globally trusted redemption network. The resultant increase in scale could also drive unit costs downwards, with vaulting, insurance, audit, and logistics becoming cheaper as volumes consolidate onto shared platforms. Finally, with increased fungibility, digital gold could become a more attractive base layer for third parties to build on, the council said.

 

The World Gold Council also said that the idea of shared infrastructure is an exploration of how participants across the market can contribute to the next chapter of digital gold. Clarifying that it is not prescribing a single end design, the council said it is setting out the opportunity for participants across the gold value chain and digital asset ecosystem to input into a shared, interoperable, and trusted infrastructure solution alongside the World Gold Council.  End

 

Reported by Abhijit Doshi

Edited by Ashish Shirke

 

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