The World Gold Council (WGC) has just announced a decisive step to reshape the way gold operates in an increasingly digital financial system, with a plan to build a common infrastructure to unlock the next development stage of digital gold.
Despite recent fluctuations, gold is still one of the best performing assets, and it is noteworthy that market sentiment towards crypto gold is increasing sharply. Industry data shows that the market capitalization of crypto gold increased by 177% in 2025, from about 1.6 billion USD to 4.4 billion USD.
However, despite that rapid growth rate, this sector still faces long-term structural challenges, especially when decentralized platforms try to connect digital innovation with a physical asset. This complex and fragmented context is what WGC wants to address through its latest initiative.
On Thursday, WGC in collaboration with Boston Consulting Group released a white paper titled "Digital Gold: The Case for a Shared Infrastructure", which proposed the "Gold as a Service" model - an open platform to connect physical gold deposits with digital systems used to issue and manage gold-guaranteed products.
In essence, this proposal aims to standardize key processes such as coordination of custody, reconciliation, compliance and conversion - factors that have already limited the ability to expand and compatibility between digital gold products in recent years.
Digital gold has developed very quickly, but supporting infrastructure has not kept up.
Currently, we are witnessing a fragmented ecosystem where each supplier almost has to rebuild the same complex process. This creates inefficiency and ultimately limits growth" - Mr. Mike Oswin - Global Director of Market Structure and Innovation at WGC, said in an interview.
Mr. Oswin explained that although many developers are quickly building digital product support platforms, many of them fail because the physical asset environment is too complex and difficult to access.
The challenge lies in handling the complexity - from establishing agreements, ensuring liquidity, finding the right liquidity providers; to warehousing, insurance, legal ownership - ensuring a sufficiently tight legal structure to protect investors that they actually own physical gold assets" - he said.
He also emphasized that although encryption has helped expand access to gold, the lack of common standards is limiting gold's integration into modern financial systems: "Gold is inherently a physical asset, and that creates its own challenges when you try to digitize it," he said. "You need absolute confidence in custody, ownership and convertibility. Without common infrastructure, these guarantees are very difficult to maintain consistently across platforms.
The "Gold as a Service" model is proposed to solve these problems by gathering market participants to build a common platform for digital gold issuance. By integrating continuous counterpart mechanisms, auditability and standard legal framework into the system, this platform aims to enhance trust while improving swapability between products.
According to Mr. Oswin, one of the most important results is the potential to turn gold from a passive value-saving asset into a more dynamic financial asset: "If you can standardize how digital gold is issued and circulated, you will open up more widespread uses" - he said. "Gold can become a deployable capital source - used as collateral, integrated into lending markets, or seamlessly moved between financial platforms.
This initiative also reflects the broader efforts of the gold industry to ensure that this precious metal still maintains its important role as the financial market is rapidly transitioning to a digital environment.
