Major Gold Trade Group Releases Framework for Tokenized Gold

For the World Gold Council, trade associations have represented their industries since 1987. Their membership is comprised of 29 companies, mostly major players in the global gold mining industry. One particular time frame to take note of is 2004 — when they developed and introduced SPDR Gold Shares (an exchange traded fund in the US). Over the years this particular investment vehicle has grown into a market capitalization of 126 billion dollars and has changed how institutional investors invest in gold.

Most recently, on March 20, 2026, they published a white paper that discussed the possibility of creating a comparable product to SPDR Gold Shares and apply it to a tokenized gold investment brand. This new concept would be referred to as Gold-as-a-Service. This is a significant milestone as it's the first large-scale effort to standardize the many small competing platforms that have existed historically in the tokenized gold space.

This white paper was co-authored with Boston Consulting Group and was released on a week when gold prices in the spot market exceeded $5,300 an ounce — the highest gold prices we've seen in quite some time. This spike is due to factors such as uncertainty with international relationships, institutional safe-haven flows and the broader move out of equities.

What Gold as a Service Actually Proposes

The concept at play here is that we would create a common infrastructure for physical and digital systems that is shared by every tokenized gold issuer. Currently, every tokenized gold issuer is building their own custody, compliance, audit, and redemption arrangements from scratch. Tether Gold has its stored gold in a vault (previously a Cold War-era nuclear bunker) in Switzerland; while PAX Gold has its stored gold with Brink's in London. Thus, the two companies built separate operating stacks, resulting in no interoperability between the two companies' respective operational stacks.

Under the Gold as a Service concept, the fragmented architecture of today's tokenized gold market would be eliminated, and instead, a common platform that integrates the physical custody of gold with the digital custody of tokenized gold products would be created. As a result, standardized custody coordination, reconciliation, compliance, and redemption will occur through shared infrastructure instead of through individual and independent proprietary systems. Ideally, the result would be a digital tokenized gold market, with products from all independent issuers having the same verified and authenticated backing and assets, and products issued from different companies can easily be transferred from one platform to another.

Five features have been identified by WGC that would be included in the common platform are as follows: standardized issuance and management protocols; enhanced fungibility across all tokenized gold products; continuous and engrained audit and proof of backing capabilities; interoperability with existing financial markets and infrastructure; and increased utility for lending and borrowing markets for tokenized gold. Each of these features directly addresses an existing operational gap in the current tokenized gold market; however, they all pose significant obstacles to implement.

Why Tether and Paxos Are the Reference Point

The WGC is implicitly posing a question to the two largest players in the tokenized gold space. Tether Gold has a current market capitalization of ~$2.6B. PAX Gold has a current market capitalization of ~$2.3B. Together, these two products make up most of the total value in the $4.9 billion tokenised gold marketplace. Both have been proven to function as intended; both have been audited; both offer the option for customers to redeem their tokens and receive delivered physical gold; and both remain a part of a closed, proprietary system which effectively prevents them from communicating as to their individual and collective performance.

The WGC has identified this lack of interoperability as an area of concern for itself and its members' clients — a fund manager that holds PAXG cannot utilize it interchangeably with XAUT when trying to leverage it in a DeFi lending pool. An institution that wishes to switch issuers for these two products will face numerous challenges associated with the redemption process; will encounter multiple custody relationships and will experience differences in the types of verification standards employed by each issuer. Under the WGC's proposed shared platform model, a PAXG and XAUT product backed by a shared custody framework will participate in DeFi as fungible; therefore, an investor will be able to use them outside of their original closing proprietary systems and at different times in accordance with their financial needs.

Matthias Tauber of the Boston Consulting Group made the statement that, "The question is no longer if gold will be digital; it's now how the digitally transformed gold will participate in today's ever-growing and evolving financial services landscape without compromising the physical integrity of gold." The WGC believes that digital gold that utilizes the same infrastructure (like a shared custody model) will create and protect the integrity of physical gold as the product universe continues to grow.

The Market Backdrop Makes This Land Differently

The timing of the issuance of the World Gold Council's (WGC) new framework for gold-backed tokens coincided perfectly with gold breaking through the $5,300/oz barrier. PAXG and XAUT have been trading at over $1 billion daily in tokenized gold over recent peak demand periods, proof that there has been significant growth in both the trading volume of tokenized gold and other tokenized commodities; these two asset classes collectively represent approximately 20% of all tokenized real-world assets that are recorded on-chain, with an increase of 340% in the past year.

The price of gold at $5,300 tells us that any previously issued tokenized gold tokens are now worth much more than they were 18 months ago. Furthermore, the market for new issuers wanting to enter the gold-backed token market is growing rapidly due to the difficulty of creating the entire operational stack from scratch. A new issuer will find a way to plug into the shared infrastructure that is created by Gold as a Service, and will not need custody, audit, and compliance capabilities built from scratch.

What Happens Next

The white paper is a proposal. The platform doesn't exist yet. The WGC is developing it, which means consultation with member companies, technology selection, regulatory review across multiple jurisdictions, and eventual rollout to willing issuers. That timeline is measured in years, not months.

The institutional credibility the WGC brings is real. It built the gold ETF market from zero. The tokenized gold market is currently where gold ETFs were in 2002 — functional but fragmented, credible with early adopters but not yet integrated into mainstream financial infrastructure. A shared platform backed by the industry's own trade association is the kind of signal that changes that calculus for institutions still watching from the sidelines.

The gold is already digital. The infrastructure is catching up.