Digital Gold: Unlocking a $700-billion opportunity

The physical investment gold market is worth about $13 trillion. But digital gold, including vaulted digital gold and tokenised gold, represents less than 1% of the global market. 

We are seeing signs of an inflection point. With more recently launched tokenised products triggering a surge in activity, the fledgling digital gold market has grown into a 45-55 billion category. Tokenised gold generated $90 billion of cumulative spot trading volumes in the first quarter of 2026, more than in the whole of 2025. More importantly, wider financial markets are in the midst of a structural digital transformation. As a result, tokenised investments are increasingly mainstream.

For the purposes of this report, and to understand digital gold’s potential, we surveyed more than 12,000 retail investors globally and interviewed 20 leading experts, helping us unpack the drivers of adoption and factors shaping demand. Our key finding:

Appeal is strong but is not (yet) converting at scale. Nearly 9 in 10 retail investors signal a willingness to invest in digital gold under the right conditions. Our modelling suggests that if stakeholders address the principal barriers to adoption, they can boost both participation and portfolio allocations, unlocking up to $700 billion in latent demand. Fully realised, this would create a market that broadly matches physically-backed gold ETFs today.

Perhaps a more relevant question is: how much potential demand can be converted into investment over the next five years? Our base case is that the digital gold market could grow at approximately 27% CAGR, reaching 160–170 billion by 2031.

Fulfilling this potential will be contingent on market participants addressing four barriers:

1. Trust as the swing factor. Nearly four in five investors say their priority is to trust the provider before investing: when asked what would make them more open to digital gold, the most cited answer is evidence that the product is safe and legitimate. Another important trust lever is a clear and accessible path to redeem holdings for physical gold, which would give investors confidence that a real asset backs their position. Regulation and consumer protection, seen across investor segments as a key barrier to entry will play an important role, too.

2. Access through familiar channels. Where digital gold is embedded in mainstream channels such as super-apps, payment platforms and banking apps, as seen in India, China and Indonesia, penetration is up to seven times higher than in markets where such distribution does not yet exist.

3. New utilities for gold. Unlocking latent demand partially hinges on what digital gold can be used for, not just how easy it is to buy. Yield generation, enabled by lending or use as collateral, is the top-cited unique selling point, ahead of being able to use it to make payments. This points to a potentially significant shift: product innovation could give investors new ways to use gold, alongside its long-standing role as a store of value.

4. Competitive pricing is a prerequisite. Even where other barriers are addressed, digital products must compete on price with alternative formats, including physical gold and gold-backed ETFs. While a low price is not, on its own, a major reason to invest in digital gold, an uncompetitive price point is ranked as the second most common barrier to entry.

While physical gold is enduring, the ways in which people own it have changed over time: from bars and coins to paper certificates, ETFs, vaulted digital accounts and, most recently, tokens. Each innovation has lowered barriers to entry and expanded the market, often by splitting gold into smaller and more affordable units; from 400-ounce bars to one-ounce coins, to ETF shares worth just a few dollars. 

Tokenisation extends that trend, offering the potential to divide ownership into even smaller fractions. It also connects gold to a broader shift in the financial industry, which is that digital assets are becoming increasingly mainstream, supported by younger, digitally native investors.

Its total value outstanding is about 45-55 billion, equivalent to around 370 tonnes. This represents roughly 0.4% of physical investment gold and less than 9% of the $600 billion gold-backed ETF market. One reason is that digital gold has faced structural challenges which have constrained adoption.

Of the two digital gold products considered here, vaulted digital gold is the more established, with the first products dating back to 2005 (e.g., BullionVault).3 Tokenised gold products such as Paxos Gold (PAXG) were first launched in 2019. That difference in market maturity is reflected in volumes. Vaulted digital gold accounts for about 89% of the digital gold market by value, while tokenised gold accounts for about 11%. Both product categories are highly concentrated, with a handful of providers associated with the majority of volumes.

For vaulted digital gold, participants are drawn from across the gold value chain. They include bullion dealers and vault operators, sovereign mints, refiners and banks, alongside distributors such as super-apps and independent platforms. Meanwhile, tokenised gold issuance has generally been confined to a small group of crypto-native entities. But that is changing, with interest now expanding across the value chain and to more traditional financial institutions. HSBC’s Gold Token is one example.

Vaulted digital gold’s scale is also concentrated geographically, with more than half of it held in China, India, and Indonesia, a regional footprint that the tokenised gold market has yet to match.

That said, tokenised gold has been the primary source of recent activity, having seen fivefold expansion since late 2024 (2.8x increase in underlying volumes), from $1.2 billion to $6 billion. The growth has been led by Tether Gold (XAUT) and Paxos Gold, which today represent more than 90% of the public tokenised gold market. Trading activity has also expanded, with combined daily volumes across the two largest tokens up by approximately 45% over the past year.6 Rising transaction volumes point to growing product utility (more detail in Section 3) and represent an opportunity for value capture across the value chain.

That gap between appeal and conversion is the central finding of our research and explains why an increasingly compelling market remains relatively small. To understand how the gap may close, we reviewed awareness of the product category, familiarity of the channels through which it can be purchased, and the factors that convert awareness into ownership.

Consumers tend to invest smaller amounts but at far higher penetration rates in markets where digital gold is available fractionally through familiar, mainstream channels. In China, for example, digital gold can be accessed through platforms such as WeChat, which has more than 1.4 billion monthly active users. In India, it is available through Paytm, PhonePe and Google Pay, and in Indonesia through Pegadaian and Bank Syariah Indonesia. These channels provide access to large, established consumer bases and enable investment at much lower average ticket sizes than channels available in other markets. As a result, awareness and adoption are significantly higher: current penetration is up to seven times greater than in less mature markets, while awareness is more than double.

In markets where products are offered through specialist or less familiar channels (crypto exchanges or bullion-dealer platforms rather than banking apps), awareness is much lower and ownership remains concentrated among the wealthy. Penetration among higher-wealth investors is approximately two and a half times that of lower-wealth investors. Access, in other words, determines not just how many people invest but who they are. Where access is constrained, demand patterns reflect those of specialist investment products.

Digital gold offers significant growth potential, but it lags when it comes to converting awareness into ownership. This stands in contrast to other investment products, which convert at higher rates. One reason is that they have addressed structural barriers, while digital gold has not.

Trust is the swing factor. More evidence that the product is safe and legitimate, together with clearer information for beginners, are the factors most often cited as potential spurs to investment. Beyond those factors, 33% say that better proof and transparency of physical gold backing would increase adoption, and 35% say that clearer regulation and consumer protections would have the same effect.

Utility is another potential driver of uptake. If investors could pay with digital gold, earn a yield through lending, or borrow against it, they would have more reasons to buy. Access and cost complete the picture. While they are not key drivers of demand, restrictions on where digital gold can be bought and whether it can compete with alternative investment products are cited as top reasons that would prevent someone from investing in the future.

Our survey has helped us quantify the impact of each barrier. In aggregate, our calculations show that taking action to address all four barriers could reasonably increase participation by 13 percentage points and allocations by 2.5 percentage points. Regulatory or similar protection is seen as the single most powerful lever for participation. Together, these effects account for the digital gold market’s total latent demand of up to $700 billion.

The potential market for digital gold is far larger than current adoption levels suggest. Nearly 90% of survey respondents say they would consider investing if the main barriers were addressed.

Based on the modelled increase in both market participation and portfolio allocation, removal of all the barriers could unlock up to $700 billion in latent demand.

This is not a near-term market forecast; it is an estimate of the total opportunity in today’s terms.

Consumer sentiment is consistent with the aggregate industry view. Our research shows that market participants see potential and are monitoring demand and exploring options. Interest now spans the value chain and encompasses refiners and mints, exchanges, custodians and banks.

Demand, in other words, is not the problem. Conversion is. The three most important questions now are how much of the opportunity can be captured, how quickly, and what must the industry do to make it happen?

World Gold Council:

Digital gold is still a small part of the global gold market, but our new research suggests the opportunity could be substantial. Drawing on research among more than 12,000 retail investors and 20 leading industry experts, our new report finds that addressing the barriers around trust, access, cost and utility could unlock $650–700bn in latent demand over the longer term. And the opportunity could develop quickly. Our base case sees the digital gold market reaching $160–170bn by 2031.