Digital Gold Could More Than Triple by 2031, the World Gold Council Says. What Would Investors Own?

The World Gold Council and Boston Consulting Group put the digital gold market at about US$45–55 billion and project US$160–170 billion by 2031 in their base case; the US$700 billion in the report’s title is demand held back by today’s barriers, with no date. What a holder owns depends on the product, from title to bars to a claim on a company, and the report’s own survey puts trust first among the barriers, with redemption one of its tests.

Published October 20, 2026 · 20 min read

Key Takeaways

• On 19 October 2026 the World Gold Council and Boston Consulting Group put the digital gold market at about US$45–55 billion, roughly 370 tonnes of gold and around 0.4% of the US$13 trillion physical investment gold market. Vaulted app and platform accounts are about 89% of it by value and tokenised gold about 11%.
• Their base case projects US$160–170 billion by 2031, about 27% a year, between a bear case of US$70–80 billion and a bull case of US$270–280 billion. All three hold the gold price constant and leave out a major hack, custody failure or fraud.
• The US$700 billion in the title is not a forecast: it is how much larger the market would be if every barrier fell at once, at today’s population and wealth, and it carries no date. Net of money moved from other gold products, the base case adds about US$95 billion of new demand for gold.
• Trust is the first barrier. Nearly four in five investors surveyed need to trust a provider before investing; 33% want better proof of physical backing and 35% clearer regulation. Redemption is often at one location worldwide, with minimums such as a 400-ounce bar.
• A digital holding can be title to identified bars, a share of a pool or a claim on a company, and a yield on gold is paid by a borrower or another counterparty, not by the metal. The Council is also building Gold as a Service, infrastructure for digital gold issuers, which its chief executive tied to the report.

On 19 October 2026 the World Gold Council and Boston Consulting Group published Digital Gold: Unlocking a $700-Billion Opportunity, a study of gold that investors hold through an app account or a blockchain token instead of in their own hands. It puts that market at about US$45–55 billion today, equivalent to around 370 tonnes of gold, and in its base case projects US$160–170 billion by 2031, growth of around 27% a year. The figure in its title is a different kind of number: an estimate of demand that today’s barriers hold back, with no date attached.

This article sets out what the report measured and what it modelled, who it expects to buy, and then the question behind the barrier its own survey puts first, trust: what a holder of digital gold actually owns, and who stands between them and the metal. All amounts are in US dollars. The market sizes are the value of gold held in custody for investors, not trading volume, and the 2031 figures are scenarios, not measurements.

How Big Is the Digital Gold Market Today?

The World Gold Council puts the digital gold market at about US$45–55 billion, or roughly 370 tonnes of gold: around 0.4% of the US$13 trillion physical investment gold market, a figure it dates to August 2026 and which counts central banks’ gold, bars, coins, ETFs and over-the-counter holdings. The estimate is built from the bottom up, by adding the custody holdings of more than 70 products, 25 of which disclose them; the rest were estimated, and all the disclosed holdings were restated at one gold price.

The report counts two kinds of product. Vaulted digital gold is an app or platform account through which investors own physical gold held by a third-party custodian; it is the older of the two, with the first products dating from 2005. Tokenised gold is a blockchain token that gives ownership of a fixed quantity of gold in custody; the first such products, Paxos Gold among them, were launched in 2019. Physically backed gold ETFs, leveraged products and gold-backed stablecoins are outside the definition.

Tokenised gold is the smaller part, and the Council calls it the main source of recent activity. Its value rose about fivefold from late 2024, from US$1.2 billion to around US$6 billion, while its underlying volume rose 2.8 times. Two tokens, Tether Gold (XAUT) and Paxos Gold (PAXG), make up more than 90% of the public tokenised market, and the Council, citing CoinGecko, puts spot trading in gold tokens at more than US$90 billion in the first quarter of 2026, more than in the whole of 2025. The Academy’s Digital & Tokenized Gold Assets section explains how a token is structured and what to check before buying one.

What Does the US$700 Billion Figure Measure?

The US$700 billion measures demand held back, not the size of a future market: the report estimates that if every barrier to adoption fell at once, at today’s population and wealth, the market would be about US$700 billion larger than it is now. Nothing in that figure is phased in and nothing grows, so it carries no date. The Council calls it a ceiling, and its press release says it is not a near-term forecast.

The number is modelled, with the survey supplying the key inputs. Respondents were shown cards describing digital gold products with different barriers removed and asked how much they would invest, which lets the effect of each barrier be estimated on its own; those effects were then applied to population and wealth data for 96 countries. Removing all four barriers, the Council calculates, would raise the share of investors holding digital gold by 13 percentage points and the share of their portfolios in it by 2.5 points.

For the five years to 2031 the report models three scenarios instead. All three assume more people able to invest digitally and more investable wealth; they differ in how far and how fast the barriers fall. In the bear case none is addressed at meaningful scale, and the market grows to US$70–80 billion on those underlying drivers alone. In the base case the barriers are partly removed and their effect phases in over 15 years, giving US$160–170 billion. In the bull case they fall faster and more widely, giving US$270–280 billion.

The 27% is the growth rate of the market’s size, not a return on gold. Growing from the middle of today’s range, US$50 billion, to the middle of the base case, US$165 billion, over five years works out at 27% a year compounded. Because the gold price is held constant, a large move in it either way would change the dollar size of every scenario, and, the report notes, investor demand as well.

The scenarios also leave out two events that many of the report’s own respondents named: 44% said a major hack or security breach would most undermine their confidence in digital gold, and 41% a custody failure or fraud at a large issuer. Neither is modelled; the scenarios assume the market goes on working as it does now.

Who Would Be Buying Digital Gold?

Mostly people who do not own gold yet, on the report’s reading of its survey: about 65% of the latent demand sits with people who have not invested in gold before. Younger investors are the most receptive. Awareness of digital gold reaches 50% among 25- to 34-year-olds, against 23% among those aged 55 and over, and both the intention to buy and the share of a portfolio people say they would put in peak in the 25–34 group.

Current holders tell a similar story. Of the digital gold holders surveyed, 52% held no gold in any form before their first digital purchase, and 92% of that group have since bought other forms of gold. The Council reads this as digital gold acting as a gateway to bullion. These are holders’ own reports, not evidence that the app caused the later purchase, and “other forms of gold” is wider than coins and bars.

About US$95 billion Net new demand for gold by 2031 in the report’s base case. After subtracting money that would move from other gold products. It is smaller than the base case’s growth in market size, which counts both.

For a reader who already holds bullion, the more telling finding may be the next one: about 53% of the current gold investors surveyed said they would pay for digital gold with money from outside gold, from other investments or from cash not invested at all. The Council concludes that digital gold is likely to grow the gold market more than carve it up. It still expects some money to move between products if digital gold wins investors’ trust, though little beside the new demand.

What Do You Own When Your Gold Is Digital?

What you own depends on the product’s terms: a digital gold holding can be legal title to identified bars, a share in a pool of metal, or a contractual claim on a company, and its value tracks the gold price in all three cases. Take two investors with an ounce each, one holding a 1 oz coin, the other a balance of one ounce in an app. Both gain or lose with the gold price. The first owns the coin outright. The second relies on a chain of agreements, records and service providers to establish what is theirs and to enforce it.

The bullion market’s own distinction is the place to start. In the LBMA’s guide to precious metal accounts, an allocated account holds specific bars, listed by number, weight and fineness, and the holder has no credit exposure to the institution keeping them, which acts as a custodian, much like a safe-deposit box. An unallocated account is a contractual claim on the institution, like a balance at a bank. Allocation is not insurance: unless the agreement says otherwise, the LBMA notes, the owner of allocated metal arranges its own. Our storage guide compares the two for a private holder.

Five questions separate one product from another:

1. Who legally owns the gold: you, as title to identified bars; you, as a share of a pool; or the provider, with you holding a claim on it?
2. Who holds it, and is it kept apart from the provider’s own assets?
3. May anyone else use it: does the agreement allow it to be lent, leased or pledged?
4. Can you take delivery, and at what minimum, where and at what cost?
5. What happens if something fails: the provider’s insolvency, a hack, a reconciliation error or a suspended redemption?

The rows are not exclusive. A vaulted digital account can hold allocated bars, and a token can stand for allocated or pooled gold, so a product’s name says little and its terms say the rest. The Royal Canadian Mint’s exchange-traded receipts, which we examined earlier this month, show how the pieces come apart: holders own the gold directly, yet it is stored unallocated, the Mint expects to use some or all of it in refining and coin-making, and a redemption for metal takes at least 10,000 receipts, about 103 ounces in September 2026. For a smaller holder the practical exit is cash.

A blockchain records who controls a token. It does not, by itself, show that the gold behind the token is safely kept, or settle what a holder can recover if the issuer fails. Coins in your own keeping avoid any issuer’s promise but not theft or loss; professional custody lifts that burden and adds an institution to rely on. Neither is safest in every case. The Academy’s How to Hold Your Metals section sets the common structures out in order, from bullion in your own safe to tokens, and ETFs, which the report leaves out of digital gold, are weighed against coins and bars in our comparison of physical gold and gold ETFs.

Why Is Trust the Biggest Barrier?

Trust comes first among the four barriers the report identifies, ahead of access, utility and cost, because investors want evidence that the gold exists and a way to reach it: nearly four in five of those surveyed said they need to trust a provider before investing. Asked what would make them more likely to invest, 33% chose better proof and transparency of physical backing, and 35% clearer regulation and consumer protection.

Redemption is where backing is proven, and the report finds the terms restrictive: in many cases a single location worldwide, and minimums such as a 400-ounce bar. It describes redemption today as working mainly as a guarantee, something that makes a product credible more than something holders use. A right to redeem hundreds of ounces at a single location does little for a holder of a few grams, and selling a token on an exchange is a different thing from a legal right to the bullion behind it.

Regulation is moving in places. Indonesia has a dedicated regime for digital gold, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority has opened a Call for Input on tokenised gold, and Hong Kong has committed to bringing gold-backed tokens into its framework for tokenised investment products. The tension remains. Gold is often described as no one’s promise to pay; a digital wrapper can bring back intermediaries, technical dependencies or both, and each one is something more for a holder to check.

What Do Rick Rule and Peter Schiff Say About Tokenised Gold?

Both see tokenisation as a way to make gold usable as money again, and Rule attaches a condition: a trustworthy custodian and gold that is really there. In an interview with Michelle Makori that Miles Franklin Media posted on LinkedIn on 14 May 2026, Rick Rule described gold’s problem as friction, the cost of buying and selling and the difficulty of making change, and said tokenisation solves it. The condition, in his words, is a “trustworthy fiduciary”: a holder of the receipt behind a token must know that the gold is there and can be reached. Once that trust problem is solved, he said, he suspects gold will return to its former role as money within two or three years. That is his expectation, not ours.

Peter Schiff made a similar case in an interview with Alessandro of Risk Takers that SchiffGold published on 24 March 2026: tokenised gold, he said, makes gold “a lot more portable, a lot more fungible”, and could help people use it as a medium of exchange to the extent that it is more widely adopted.

Both remarks predate the report, and neither man is represented here as having commented on it. Their case is about gold moving more easily. Whether a particular token deserves trust is a separate question, and a gold-backed payment system would still have to settle who owns the gold, how the backing is checked and what happens when a holder wants it back. Rule’s condition is the same one the Council’s survey puts first.

Can Digital Gold Earn a Yield?

Digital gold can earn a yield only by being put to work: gold pays nothing by itself, so a return on it comes, typically, from lending it or posting it as collateral, and the report also mentions writing options on it. Whoever is on the other side of the arrangement pays the return. Yield is the feature the report finds most often cited as a reason to choose digital gold, ahead of making payments with it, although redemption matters most to existing gold investors and yield to digital-asset investors.

The arrangements already exist, mostly on crypto platforms. The Council notes that PAXG and XAUT can be posted as collateral on Aave, a decentralised lending platform that alone holds more than half of the tokenised gold deposited in such services; that Arch Lending, a crypto lender, began accepting both as loan collateral in September 2026; and that Paxos Labs has launched PAXGy, a PAXG-backed token that builds in a yield by lending gold to institutional borrowers.

Each step changes the holding. Gold that has been lent is owed back by a borrower instead of being held for you, and the return arrives only if that borrower performs. Gold pledged to secure a loan can be sold if the required margin is not kept up. These can be legitimate uses, but they do not carry the same risks as gold that is simply stored, and our article on Tether’s bullion lending sets out what changes when metal is lent. Before accepting an advertised return, a holder needs to know which of storing, trading, pledging or lending is happening to their gold.

Why Is the World Gold Council Promoting Digital Gold?

The World Gold Council has a stake in the market it is describing: it is developing infrastructure for it. On 19 March 2026 it published Digital Gold: The Case for a Shared Infrastructure, a paper Boston Consulting Group prepared for it, which proposes Gold as a Service: an operating layer that would bring together the custody, vaulting, issuance, reconciliation, compliance and redemption behind digital gold products, so that issuers need not each build their own. It would not be sold to consumers; issuers would keep their own products and customers. Launching the new report, the Council’s chief executive, David Tait, said Gold as a Service is designed to supply the infrastructure that demand needs in order to scale.

None of that makes the research wrong. The survey is large, the method is published and the report states its limits. But the Council is an industry membership organisation that champions gold, and it is developing infrastructure for this market, so its projections are best read as scenarios from an interested participant, not as independent estimates of what will happen.

What Would Show the Market Is Maturing?

The report names four signals that should show before 2031 whether digital gold is on track for its base case, its bull case or neither. Each can be observed, which makes them more useful than its totals:

• Regulation and redemption: whether consultations such as the UK’s and Hong Kong’s turn into rules, and whether metal can be redeemed in more places and in smaller amounts.
• Banks: whether major banks put digital gold in their own apps, as banks and payment apps already have in India, China and Indonesia.
• Cost: whether new revenue models, such as a share of trading fees, let providers charge holders less.
• Utility: whether lending, collateral and payments move from crypto platforms to regulated institutions.

Two cautions of our own. A holder’s cost is the whole of it, from the spread on buying and selling to custody, transaction and redemption fees, and a low fee in one place can be recovered in another. And a lending or collateral arrangement shows what it is worth when markets are under stress, not when they are calm.

The Bigger Picture

The report argues, from a large survey and a published method, that digital gold could bring new people to gold instead of only moving existing holders around, and that the ways of owning gold are changing again, as they did from 400-ounce bars to one-ounce coins to fund shares. It leaves each holder’s own question where it was: what the gold is for.

A holder who wants gold for long-term diversification may find that a low-cost, well-structured product serves that purpose. One who holds it to depend less on the financial system may put more weight on direct ownership, even at some cost in convenience. One who wants fast settlement or collateral may accept more intermediaries in return. Access, ownership and resilience are separate properties, and a product can offer one without the others. Whatever the format, the same questions apply: what you own, who holds it, whether you can redeem it, and what happens if a provider fails.

Sources and Methodology

Market sizes, scenarios, survey results and definitions are from the World Gold Council and Boston Consulting Group’s report Digital Gold: Unlocking a $700-Billion Opportunity, published on 19 October 2026 and read in its web edition that day: the executive summary and the sections on the market today, the barriers, the scenarios, new investors, the four signals, the glossary and the methodology. The report sized today’s market from the custody holdings of more than 70 products, the disclosed ones restated at one gold price, and modelled growth across 96 countries holding 98% of global investable wealth, from a survey by Toluna of more than 12,000 retail investors in 12 markets and interviews with 20 industry experts; samples differ between its exhibits. The main figures were checked a second time against the Council’s press release of the same day. The 27% a year worked from the ranges’ midpoints is our arithmetic; the report gives “around 27%”. The account distinctions are from the LBMA’s guide to precious metal accounts, and the ETF redemption terms from the SPDR Gold Trust’s FAQ of January 2025, as one fund’s example. The three forms a holding can take, the mechanics of lending and pledging, and the cautions on cost and stress are our explanation, not the report’s. The Rule and Schiff remarks are from the publishers’ own pages; the Rule excerpt’s transcript reads as machine-generated, so he is paraphrased except for two words.

Conflicts of interest: the World Gold Council is an industry membership organisation that champions gold, and it is developing Gold as a Service, infrastructure for digital gold issuers, which its chief executive tied to this report. Boston Consulting Group produced the report with the Council and prepared the March paper for it. Peter Schiff’s company, SchiffGold, sells and stores bullion, Rick Rule runs Rule Investment Media, and the Rule interview was published by Miles Franklin Media. GoldSilverPortfolio earns an affiliate commission from Silver Gold Bull, a dealer 55.4% owned by Gold.com, in which Tether, whose group’s gold token XAUT is named above, holds about 12% according to Gold.com’s filings. This article recommends no token, account, fund or dealer.

Primary sources

• World Gold Council and Boston Consulting Group — “Digital Gold: Unlocking a $700-Billion Opportunity” (19 October 2026): the executive summary and the sections “The digital gold market today: a niche at an inflection point”, “Why appeal is not (yet) converting”, “The result: a $160 billion market by 2031”, “A new generation of gold investors”, “What to watch: four signs of a breakout”, “Glossary” and “Methodology”
• World Gold Council — “Unlocking Digital Gold’s US$700bn Opportunity”, press release via Business Wire (19 October 2026)
• World Gold Council — “Digital Gold: The Case for a Shared Infrastructure” (19 March 2026), prepared by Boston Consulting Group
• LBMA — “A Guide to the Loco London Precious Metals Market”, chapter 8, “Precious Metal Accounts”
• SPDR Gold Trust — “FAQ” (January 2025)
• Miles Franklin Media — interview excerpt with Rick Rule and Michelle Makori, with transcript, posted on LinkedIn (14 May 2026)
• SchiffGold — “Peter Schiff: Tokenization Gold Can Remonetize Gold” (24 March 2026)