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ToggleThe World Gold Council, which has 29 mining members and was founded in 1987, is not going to stand idly by and watch the tokenized gold market grow. This week, it joined forces with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to release a white paper , "Digital Gold: The Case for a Shared Infrastructure," formally proposing a shared infrastructure framework called "Gold as a Service," which is aimed directly at the $4.9 billion tokenized gold market currently controlled by Paxos and Tether.
In an interview , Mike Oswin, Head of Global Market Structure and Innovation at WGC, used a straightforward analogy to explain the framework's positioning: "Like the Intel logo on a laptop." He pointed out that WGC's involvement is to provide quality assurance for the entire industry, rather than launching competing tokens from scratch.
What problem does the framework solve?
The biggest obstacle to tokenizing gold at present is not demand, but the entry barrier. The custody of physical gold requires warehousing infrastructure, complex logistics coordination, and a whole set of standardized processes such as reconciliation, compliance, and redemption—these costs are extremely heavy for new issuers.
The shared services platform proposed by WGC aims to streamline these processes, enabling more institutions to issue tokenized gold under a unified standard without having to build their own custody and compliance systems from scratch. The potential effect of this move is to significantly lower the market entry barrier, thereby diluting the first-mover advantage of Paxos and Tether.
Current players: London Vault vs. Swiss Nuclear Bunker
The two main players currently have different strategies. Paxos' PAXG stores its gold in London's Brink's vault, which is regulated by the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS); Tether's XAUT stores its gold in a Cold War-era nuclear bunker in Switzerland. In terms of fee structure, XAUT has no custody fees, but charges a 0.25% fee for direct purchases or redemptions; PAXG uses a tiered fee structure.
The World Gold Council (WGC) is not new to the tokenized gold space. It established SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) back in 2004, and this ETF now boasts a size of $126 billion, making it one of the world's largest gold ETFs. This background is precisely the source of the WGC's confidence in proposing a "shared infrastructure" framework.
The timeline remains a mystery during the conceptual stage.
The biggest ambiguity in this white paper is that the WGC has not disclosed any timetable or implementation roadmap, and the entire proposal remains at the conceptual stage. This means that the narrative of "challenging Tether and Paxos" is more of a strategic signal than an immediate competitive threat in the short term.
The market also needs to assess whether the WGC's framework can truly convince existing issuers and institutions to adopt it. After all, Paxos and Tether have already accumulated considerable first-mover advantages in custody, compliance, and users. The brand logic of "quality endorsement" alone may not be enough to shake up the existing landscape.
Animal area observation
The $4.9 billion tokenized gold market is still in its early stages within the RWA (Real-World Asset) sector, but the WGC's entry sends a clear signal: a core organization in the traditional gold industry chain is attempting to dominate the standard-setting power for on-chain gold. If the "Gold as a Service" framework is ultimately implemented, the most direct beneficiaries will be new issuers who intend to enter but are hindered by infrastructure barriers, while Tether and Paxos will face pressure to have their standards redefined by external forces. This struggle for control over tokenized gold has only just begun.
