The World Gold Council (WGC) is no longer sitting on the sidelines as the tokenized gold market grows organically. The organization, founded in 1987 with 29 mining members, this week released a white paper titled "Digital Gold: The Case for a Shared Infrastructure" in collaboration with Boston Consulting Group (BCG). It proposes a shared infrastructure framework called "Gold as a Service," aiming directly at the $4.9 billion tokenized gold market currently dominated by Paxos and Tether.
Mike Oswin, WGC's head of global market structure and innovation, used a straightforward analogy to describe the framework's positioning: "Like the Intel sticker on a laptop." He explained that WGC's intervention is meant to provide a quality endorsement for the industry, not to launch a competing token.
What Problems Does the Framework Solve?
The biggest barrier to tokenized gold today is not demand but the entry barrier. Physical gold custody requires warehousing infrastructure, complex logistics, and a full set of standardized processes for reconciliation, compliance, and redemption — costs that are prohibitive for new issuers. The WGC's proposed shared service platform aims to streamline these links, allowing more institutions to issue tokenized gold under a unified standard without building their own custody and compliance systems from scratch. The potential effect is to significantly lower the market entry threshold, thereby diluting the first-mover advantages of Paxos and Tether.
Current Players: London Vault vs. Swiss Nuclear Bunker
The two major incumbents have distinct setups. Paxos' PAXG stores gold in London's Brink's vaults, regulated by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS); Tether's XAUT holds its gold in a Cold War-era nuclear bunker in Switzerland. On fees, XAUT charges no custody fees but a 0.25% fee for direct purchases or redemptions, while PAXG uses a tiered fee structure. The WGC itself is no stranger to the tokenized gold space — it launched the SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) ETF in 2004, which now holds $126 billion in assets, making it one of the largest gold ETFs globally. This track record underpins the WGC's confidence in proposing the shared infrastructure framework.
Concept Stage, Timeline Unclear
The biggest gray area in the white paper: the WGC has not disclosed any timeline or implementation roadmap. The entire proposal remains at a conceptual stage. This means the narrative of "challenging Tether and Paxos" is more of a strategic signal in the short term than an immediately actionable competitive threat. The market will also need to assess whether the WGC's framework can convince existing issuers and institutions to adopt it — after all, Paxos and Tether have accumulated considerable first-mover advantages in custody, compliance, and user base. The brand logic of "quality endorsement" alone may not be enough to shake the current landscape.
The $4.9 billion tokenized gold market is still early within the broader RWA (Real World Assets) track, but the WGC's entry sends a clear signal: a core organization from the traditional gold industry chain is attempting to seize control over the standard-setting for on-chain gold. If the "Gold as a Service" framework eventually materializes, the biggest beneficiaries will be new issuers who want to enter but are stuck at the infrastructure hurdle, while Tether and Paxos face pressure from standards being redefined by an external force. The battle for the narrative power of tokenized gold has just begun.