Gold bought through an app or held as a token on a blockchain is no longer a fringe idea. On Monday 19 October, the World Gold Council and consultancy Boston Consulting Group published a report on digital gold. According to them, the market is worth 45 to 55 billion dollars today. If the barriers holding investors back were removed, demand could reach up to 700 billion dollars, they write. Kitco highlighted the report a day later.
The news lands in a week in which the gold price itself shows little enthusiasm. On Thursday morning Kitco quoted gold at 4,086.90 dollars per troy ounce, down 1.29 percent, with a day range of 4,066 to 4,145 dollars. TradingEconomics put it at 4,087 dollars, down 1.3 percent, and points to higher oil prices and fears of a US rate hike.
What exactly is digital gold?
The report distinguishes two forms. In the first, you buy gold stored in a vault and follow your share in an app. In the second, your gold sits on a blockchain as a token that stands for a fixed amount of gold. This tokenised gold is growing fast. According to the World Gold Council, it has grown fivefold since late 2024, to around 6 billion dollars. In the first quarter of 2026 more than 90 billion dollars of it changed hands, more than in the whole of 2025.
Compared with the total gold market it remains small. The report sets the digital market against roughly 13,000 billion dollars of physical investment gold: less than 1 percent.
What the report expects by 2031
The 700 billion is a ceiling, not a forecast. The World Gold Council makes that point itself. The base case sees the market growing by around 27 percent a year, to 160 to 170 billion dollars in 2031. If barriers fall faster, it could reach 270 to 280 billion.
The figures come from a survey of more than 12,000 retail investors worldwide and interviews with 20 experts. Nearly nine in ten respondents would consider digital gold under the right conditions. Strikingly, around 65 percent of this latent demand sits with people who do not own any gold yet. Of today’s digital gold buyers, 52 percent held no gold before. Of that group, 92 percent have since bought other forms of gold. Younger people lead the way: half of those aged 25 to 34 know about digital gold, against only 23 percent of those over 55.
Trust is the biggest barrier
According to the report, four things hold investors back: trust, access, utility and cost. Trust weighs heaviest. Investors want stronger protection, transparent proof that the gold really is in the vault, the option to redeem it physically and clearer rules. Where digital gold is sold through familiar channels such as banking apps and payment platforms, as in China, India and Indonesia, the share of investors holding it is up to seven times higher.
Significant investor interest in digital gold is clear, but demand cannot scale without the right infrastructure behind it.
The World Gold Council is therefore building a shared platform, Gold as a Service, meant to help providers bring trustworthy digital gold products to market faster, with sourcing, custody and compliance already in place. Central banks, meanwhile, keep holding physical gold, as we described in our piece on central banks that keep buying gold.
What digital gold means if you want to sell old gold
However digital it sounds, every token and every app should be backed by real gold. That gold is held as bars, and gold cast into bars comes partly from recycling: old jewellery, chains and rings that are melted down and refined. The difference between such scrap gold and gold made for investment is explained on our page about investment gold versus scrap gold.
If you have jewellery or gold coins at home, this report changes nothing about their value today. That depends on three things: the weight, the fineness and the gold price on the day you decide to sell. The report also says nothing about where the price will go in the short term. To find out how we determine weight and fineness, see our page on how to sell old gold.
The World Gold Council sees a bright future for gold held through apps and tokens, but trust remains the biggest barrier. Gold you can hold in your hand does not have that problem. Have weight and fineness measured correctly, and always ask for the price of the day itself.