Gold is trading at $4,691 today. The tokenized gold market has surpassed $5.5 billion. And the same organization that built the world’s largest gold ETF just proposed the most ambitious overhaul of digital gold infrastructure ever attempted.
The $163 Billion Question
The World Gold Council helped launch SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) in 2004. That fund now sits at $163 billion. Tether Gold (XAUT) and Pax Gold (PAXG) – the two dominant tokenized gold products in crypto – together hold close to $5 billion. The gap between those two numbers is the entire argument for why “Gold as a Service” exists.
On March 19, WGC published a white paper co-authored with Boston Consulting Group proposing shared backend infrastructure for the tokenized gold market – standardizing custody, compliance, audits, and redemption across all issuers. This could be the rails that everything else runs on.
What Changes And What Doesn’t
Right now, Tether and Paxos each built their own custody moats from scratch. Tether stores XAUT reserves in a Swiss vault. Paxos uses London vaults via Brink’s. Both operate in silos. The result: low fungibility, fragmented liquidity, and a trust barrier that keeps everyday investors out.
WGC’s Global Head of Market Structure Mike Oswin put it plainly – think Intel Inside. A visible standard that tells you exactly what you’re getting before you buy.
BCG’s Matthias Tauber framed the stakes directly: “The question is no longer whether gold will be digital; it’s how it can participate in modern financial systems without compromising physical integrity.”
Bybit Moved the Same Day
On the exact day the white paper dropped, Bybit launched a yield-bearing tokenized gold product letting users earn interest on Tether Gold. Gold sitting in a vault earns nothing. That’s always been its weakness against stablecoins. Bybit’s move, and WGC’s paper, are both answering the same question at the same time.
With oil surging and markets rattled by the Iran conflict, gold’s role as a safe haven is being tested in real time. The WGC’s bet is that the next chapter of that role gets written on-chain.
No implementation timeline has been disclosed. The proposal is still conceptual and depends on industry-wide adoption. But for XAUT and PAXG holders, the message is clear: the institution that made gold mainstream once before is coming for the tokenized gold market next.
Whether it gets there is the only thing left to watch.
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FAQs
Tokenized gold is a digital asset backed 1:1 by physical gold in vaults, letting investors trade, transfer, or redeem gold easily on blockchain networks.
The proposal introduces a shared infrastructure standard for the tokenized gold market. By unifying custody, compliance, and audits across all issuers, it aims to increase trust, improve liquidity, and make digital gold more accessible to everyday investors.
Both offer security but through different structures. Tokenized gold gives you direct ownership on the blockchain with verifiable reserves, while ETFs like GLD offer institutional management. The new proposed standards aim to close the trust gap between these two options.
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