You Won’t Believe What Gold-Backed Crypto Did While Central Banks Napped

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What to know:

  • Gold demand just hit its highest first-quarter peak in a gobsmacking nine years, mostly because people still haven’t figured out you can’t eat gold but will try to hoard it anyway.
  • Gold ETFs and gold-backed cryptos went on a bit of a bender, with the latter seeing a 77% leap in monthly transfer volume. Somewhere, a blockchain sneezed.
  • Gold’s average price reached historic, nosebleed-worthy levels, before catching its breath and tripping over its own feet last week.

In the great, glittering bazaar of precious metals, a subtle drama unfolded: central banks—those venerable, buttoned-up bastions of financial orthodoxy—seemed to lose interest in pawing at gold. Perhaps they were distracted by a shiny new spreadsheet or simply realized they could no longer fit any more bullion under the national mattresses.

Meanwhile, investors, upon discovering the existence of “gold-backed cryptocurrencies,” collectively exclaimed, “Ah! A modern way to ignore Warren Buffett’s advice!” and started buying tokens with such vigor one wonders if alchemy was involved. Over the last month, more than $80 million worth of goldy tokens were minted, presumably without anyone actually swinging a pickaxe anywhere except perhaps in Minecraft.

The result? The digital gold bug community pushed total market cap up 6% to a tidy $1.43 billion. Monthly transfer volumes soared 77% (if only gym attendance could escalate as briskly), hitting $1.27 billion, all while leaving actual gold smugly glinting in safes, untouched by human hand or grubby algorithm.

Setting the scene, the World Gold Council, which probably hasn’t gone to a proper party since 2016, announced total gold demand at a whopping 1,206 tonnes. Central banks bought less—244 tonnes versus a previous 365 (that’s what happens when you run out of vault space, or perhaps enthusiasm).

Gold ETFs lumbered into the center ring, investing more than double compared to last year, hoovering up 552 tonnes, because nothing says “fear of the future” quite like stockpiling metal you can’t chew, spend, or use as a doorstop for very long.

All this derring-do pushed gold prices to an all-time quarterly high—$2,860 per ounce—a sum guaranteed to make pirates and dentists everywhere weep with envy. This was before gold prices then sneakily dropped 2.35% last week, because of course they did: markets, much like cats, move only when you’ve stopped watching.

Traditional gold forms, like jewelry (remember that?), slouched towards pandemic-era lows—nobody’s rushing to impress at virtual meetings with gold-plated lapel pins, apparently. But bar and coin demand soared in China, proving once again that when it comes to shiny things, humanity never really changes. 🪙💰✨

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2025-05-03 23:27