Last updated: 2026-07-09
2025 Broke Sovereign Mints Into Winners and Losers
Record gold and silver prices in 2025 did not lift all sovereign mints equally: the Perth Mint and the Royal Mint posted double- and triple-digit demand growth while the US Mint's American Eagle sales collapsed by more than half, revealing how price-sensitive North American retail buyers have become relative to their Asian and European counterparts.
1. The 2025 sales divergence
The US Mint sold 183,500 ounces of American Eagle gold coins across all denominations in 2025, down more than 55 percent from 2024, and sold 11.57 million one-ounce American Silver Eagles, down 53 percent year over year (Kitco News, Perth Mint and British Royal Mint see solid bullion demand, US Mint sees decline). The decline began early in the year: US Mint sales data for the first half of 2025 already showed a 47 percent year-over-year drop in 1 oz Gold Eagles and a 43 percent drop in Silver Eagles compared with the same period in 2024, with even the traditionally resilient 1/10 oz Gold Eagle — the "safe haven" fractional product for small buyers — falling 59 percent (FindBullionPrices.com, US Mint Bullion Sales 2025: Sales Plunge, Investors Get Picky).
Australia's Perth Mint moved in the opposite direction, selling 454,514 ounces of gold bullion in 2025, up 16 percent, while its silver sales fell only 5 percent to 8.22 million ounces — a far smaller decline than the US Mint's silver collapse (Kitco News, Perth Mint and British Royal Mint see solid bullion demand). Perth Mint's General Manager of Minted Products, Neil Vance, attributed the strength to expectations of early-2026 interest rate cuts, US economic uncertainty, and global instability, noting that "minted bars performed strongly, reinforcing their ongoing appeal as a core investment choice during periods of market volatility" (Kitco News, Perth Mint and British Royal Mint see solid bullion demand).
2. Britain's first-time-buyer boom
The Royal Mint, which does not publish unit sales figures, reported gold sales up 144 percent and silver sales up 526 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025 alone, alongside a structural shift in its customer base: the number of customers buying bullion reached an all-time high, up 35 percent on 2024, with 62 percent of 2025 bullion customers making their first-ever purchase (Kitco News, Perth Mint and British Royal Mint see solid bullion demand). Buying-to-selling ratios reinforce the one-way nature of the flow: for every customer who sold gold to the Royal Mint in Q4 2025, seven bought, and for silver the ratio was fifteen to one (Kitco News, Perth Mint and British Royal Mint see solid bullion demand). The Royal Mint's own release noted the price of a gram of gold passed £100 for the first time in October 2025, with a kilo bar — described as "roughly the size of an iPhone" — exceeding £100,000 in value the same month, as the gold price broke through £3,000 per ounce (Kitco News, Perth Mint and British Royal Mint see solid bullion demand).
3. What sits behind the divergence: WGC's investment-demand data
The World Gold Council's full-year 2025 Gold Demand Trends report confirms the pattern at the global level: total investment demand smashed the prior 2020 annual record, rising 84 percent year over year to 2,175.3 tonnes, with bar and coin investment alone accelerating to a 12-year high of 1,374.1 tonnes, up 16 percent, even as gold-backed ETF inflows of 801.2 tonnes drove the largest share of the increase (World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends Full Year 2025 — Investment). The divergence between US retail softness and Asian retail strength persisted into Q1 2026: China's bar and coin demand hit an all-time quarterly record of 206.9 tonnes, up 67 percent year over year and surpassing the prior Q2 2013 record of 155 tonnes, while total US investment demand growth remained comparatively muted (World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends Q1 2026 — Investment).
Current status: Sovereign mint output is bifurcating along regional lines — US retail bullion demand is contracting sharply even as prices hit records, while UK and Asian retail demand accelerates. Watch: whether US Mint sales stabilize in 2026 as first-time-buyer economics in the UK and China continue outperforming, and whether the WGC's full-year 2026 Gold Demand Trends report (due January 2027) confirms the regional split as durable rather than a one-year anomaly.
Last updated: 2026-07-09
Perth Mint's Gold Token Failure Is Still the Sector's Cautionary Tale
The Perth Mint Gold Token was the most credible sovereign-mint-backed gold token ever launched — issued in partnership with a state-owned refiner-mint — and its 2023 wind-down, initiated by its technology partner rather than the mint itself, remains the clearest precedent for why tokenized bullion products require durable multi-party governance, not just credible underlying metal.
1. What PMGT was and why it collapsed
The Perth Mint Gold Token launched in 2019 as an Ethereum-based token issued by Trovio (formerly InfiniGold) representing an allocated claim on physical gold held by the Perth Mint, Australia's government-owned mint and refiner. On 1 March 2023, Trovio announced it "has recently made a decision to no longer support the smart contract due to several factors after a number of years in operation" and would "begin an orderly unwind with token holders" (PMGT.io, Trovio will no longer support the Perth Mint Gold Token and will begin an orderly unwind with token holders). Token holders were directed to either trade out of their PMGT position against the market maker on the Australian exchange Independent Reserve, or redeem tokens directly for Perth Mint GoldPass certificates — a paper-based, non-blockchain claim on the same underlying gold (PMGT.io, Trovio will no longer support the Perth Mint Gold Token). Crucially, the wind-down decision came from Trovio, the technology and smart-contract partner, not from the Perth Mint itself, which continued operating its GoldPass certificate program after PMGT's discontinuation — illustrating that even when the underlying metal custodian is a stable sovereign institution, tokenization can still fail at the technology-partner layer.
2. The structural lesson for RWA metals platforms
PMGT's failure was not a fraud, a metal shortfall, or a regulatory shutdown — it was a unilateral commercial decision by the smart-contract issuer to discontinue support after "a number of years in operation," with the wind-down process details published only progressively over subsequent months (PMGT.io, Trovio will no longer support the Perth Mint Gold Token). For any platform designing a tokenized claim on physical metal, PMGT demonstrates that the token issuer's business continuity is a distinct risk layer from custodial integrity of the metal itself, and that redemption pathways must be pre-specified and multi-party-governed rather than dependent on a single technology vendor's ongoing willingness to operate a smart contract.
3. Retail demand strength has not translated into renewed sovereign-mint tokenization
Despite the surge in Perth Mint's own physical bullion sales — up 16 percent in 2025 to 454,514 ounces (Kitco News, Perth Mint and British Royal Mint see solid bullion demand) — no major sovereign mint has relaunched a directly mint-issued gold token at PMGT's scale since the 2023 wind-down. The gap between record retail physical demand and the absence of a credible sovereign-backed token successor underscores that the binding constraint on institutional tokenized-bullion adoption is not metal supply or investor appetite, but unresolved questions of legal structuring, redemption guarantees, and long-term technology-partner commitment.
Current status: PMGT remains fully wound down; Perth Mint continues to operate GoldPass as a non-blockchain digital gold certificate. Watch: any announcement of a new sovereign-mint-backed tokenization initiative, and whether such a program addresses the issuer-continuity gap that ended PMGT.
Last updated: 2026-07-09
The 400-Ounce Bar Still Rules Institutions, but the Kilobar Is Winning Retail Asia
Two bar formats now dominate global gold logistics for entirely different reasons: the roughly 400-ounce LBMA Good Delivery bar remains the fixed reference unit for institutional settlement and central bank reserves, while the 1-kilogram bar has become the format of choice for the fast-growing Chinese and other Asian retail and trade-finance markets — and the two markets rarely intersect directly.
1. The Good Delivery bar's precise specification
The LBMA's Good Delivery Rules define a gold bar's acceptable weight range as 350 to 430 fine troy ounces (approximately 10.9 to 13.4 kilograms), with a minimum fineness of 995.0 parts per thousand, specific length (250mm ±40mm), width (70mm ±15mm) and height (35mm ±10mm) tolerances, and mandatory marks including serial number, refiner's stamp, fineness to four significant figures, and year and month of manufacture for bars produced from January 2019 onward (LBMA, Good Delivery List Rules, 2024/2025 edition). The colloquial "400 oz bar" label is a format reference rather than an exact weight: actual gross weight varies bar to bar within the 350–430 oz envelope, and settlement value is based on each bar's individually assayed fine gold content, not a uniform per-bar quantity. Silver Good Delivery bars carry their own separate 2025 rule change: bars produced from 1 January 2025 must weigh 1,000 troy ounces with a ±10 percent tolerance, tightened from the former 750–1,100 troy ounce range that will now be phased out of vault stock (LBMA, Good Delivery List Rules, 2024/2025 edition).
2. Why the kilobar is a structurally separate market
A kilobar (approximately 32.15 troy ounces, typically cast at 999.9 fineness) carries a refiner's Good Delivery accreditation but does not itself qualify as a Good Delivery bar under LBMA rules, because loco-London institutional clearing runs exclusively on the 350–430 oz format (Golden Ark Reserve, LBMA Good Delivery Standard for Gold Bars). This structural separation is precisely why kilobars have become the dominant retail and regional trade-finance format across Asia: they are small enough for private investor purchase and delivery, yet large enough for wholesale trade, without needing to interface with 400-ounce institutional settlement infrastructure at all. The result is two parallel gold markets moving largely independent volumes — 400-ounce bars flowing through LBMA-member vaults, central bank reserves, and ETF custody, and kilobars flowing through refiners directly into Asian retail and exchange-based delivery networks such as the Shanghai Gold Exchange (Shanghai Gold Exchange, Trading Rules).
3. Arbitrage flows are now bridging the two markets at record scale
The bifurcation does not mean the two markets are disconnected from price arbitrage: in August 2025, Bloomberg reported that record volumes of gold were flowing into Shanghai warehouses as traders exploited a persistent premium between Chinese domestic prices and international loco-London pricing, requiring 400-ounce institutional bars to be imported, refined down, and recast into the kilobar and other formats the Shanghai Gold Exchange and Chinese retail market demand (Bloomberg, Record Gold Floods Into Shanghai Warehouses on Arbitrage Play). This recasting step — converting institutional-format bars into retail-format kilobars — is itself a refining-capacity bottleneck, meaning the pace at which international gold can satisfy Chinese retail demand is partly a function of Asian refining throughput discussed elsewhere in this ecosystem, not simply of available above-ground gold stock.
Current status: The 400-oz bar and the kilobar remain functionally separate market infrastructures serving institutional and Asian-retail demand respectively, bridged mainly by arbitrage-driven refining and recasting flows. Watch: whether Shanghai Gold Exchange delivery volumes and China's record 2026 retail bar-and-coin demand sustain the current recasting bottleneck through the rest of 2026, and whether that bottleneck creates further loco-London versus Shanghai price dislocations.