WGC launches initiative to develop open platform for digital gold

The World Gold Council (WGC) is launching an initiative to build new market infrastructure designed to unlock the next era of digital gold’s development.

On Thursday, WGC announced it has co-authored a white paper titled Digital Gold: The Case for a Shared Infrastructure with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) that explores a new platform to support the issuance and operation of scalable, interoperable digital gold products.

The open platform – called “Gold as a Service” – is designed to connect the physical custody of gold with the digital systems used to issue and manage gold-backed products.

By standardizing essential market processes such as custody coordination, reconciliation, compliance and redemption, the model aims to reduce operational complexity, improve access and enable greater consistency across digital gold products, the Council said.

Modernizing digital gold

The white paper acknowledges that gold has already undergone meaningful digitalization, with trading, clearing and recordkeeping now largely electronic, and a growing range of digital gold products such as tokens now available.

Yet despite these innovations, digital gold remains limited in scale largely due to structural constraints. Launching and operating digital gold products remains complex, with limited standardization and reduced fungibility restricting its ability to integrate with modern financial systems.

Gold as a Service is proposed as a response to these challenges. Recognizing the physical nature of gold, it is designed to modernize how gold integrates with an increasingly digital financial ecosystem, while preserving the asset’s foundational attributes that have underpinned its role and relevance for millennia, WGC said.

Key features of the platform would include: seamless product issuance and management, ease of trade, embedded trust and assurance, interoperability by design, and broader utility.

“Financial services are undergoing a rapid and pervasive digital transformation and gold must also evolve to maintain its role in the global financial system,” World Gold Council CEO David Tait said in a news release. “Gold as a Service is the latest step in the World Gold Council’s digital gold innovation program, designed to strengthen trust, transparency and market efficiency.”

“The question is no longer whether gold will be digital; it’s how it can participate in modern financial systems without compromising physical integrity. Together with the World Gold Council, we explored what it takes to build trusted rails for digital gold, at market scale,” BCG managing director Matthias Tauber added.

To contribute to what it describes as a “pioneering initiative”, the WGC is calling for innovators and market participants from inside and outside the gold industry to convene, challenge and contribute to the development of this shared infrastructure.

Read the full white paper and Lite paper here.