World Gold Council Proposes Gold as a Service Framework

The World Gold Council, in collaboration with Boston Consulting Group, unveiled a white paper on Thursday proposing a shared infrastructure framework called Gold as a Service to standardize and expand digital gold products within global financial systems.

The initiative aims to bridge physical gold custody with digital platforms, enabling banks, fintech firms, and other issuers to create and manage tokenized gold assets more efficiently. By providing a ready-made system for backend operations like custody coordination, settlement, compliance, and redemption, the model seeks to lower barriers to entry and foster interoperability across diverse platforms. This would allow companies to focus on customer-facing aspects such as pricing and user experience, rather than building complex systems from scratch.

Gold has long served as a trusted store of value, with a global supply exceeding $30 trillion, but its integration into digital finance has been hampered by fragmentation and operational challenges. Current digital gold offerings, including tokenized assets, face issues like inconsistent standards, limited fungibility, and high costs for storage and verification. These constraints...