The World Gold Council (WGC), the organization that helped launch the first US gold-backed exchange-traded fund (ETF) in 2004, proposed a shared infrastructure framework on March 19 designed to standardize the tokenized gold market currently dominated by Tether and Paxos. The initiative, detailed in a white paper co-authored with Boston Consulting Group (BCG), introduces “Gold as a Service,” an open platform connecting physical gold custody with digital issuance systems. If adopted, it could reshape a $4. 9 billion market that crypto-native firms built from scratch