Follow the Central Banks: Why Tokenised Gold Is the On-Chain Trade of the Decade

Overview

Central banks have been net buyers of gold for 16 consecutive years. In 2022, 2023, and 2024, they bought more than 1,000 tonnes each year – the highest sustained run since the 1960s. In 2025, they bought 863 tonnes, the fourth consecutive year above 500 tonnes and still well above the 2010-2021 annual average of 473 tonnes. This trend appears to be accelerating in 2026.

Central bank gold accumulation is not a coincidence or a temporary anomaly. It is a deliberate, documented response to several structural forces – the 2022 weaponisation of dollar reserves, the ongoing de-dollarisation of global reserve portfolios, and gold’s proven performance during geopolitical and inflationary stress. 

A practical solution to ease this stress on physical gold supply and distribution is tokenised gold. It is physically backed, audited, on-chain gold and gives DeFi-native investors access to the same strategic exposure that sovereign reserve managers are building, without requiring a vault relationship, a minimum denomination in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, or Western jurisdictional exposure. GoldNZ, issued by New Zealand-based regulated digital asset issuer Techemynt, is the implementation that adds a Pacific vault jurisdiction to that proposition.

Central Bank Gold Buying Activity

Total gold demand in 2025 exceeded 5,000 tonnes for the first time in recorded history, with a value surpassing US$555 billion. 1 The annual average price was US$3,431 per ounce – a 44 per cent increase year-on-year, with 53 new all-time highs set across the year. By January 2026, gold had traded above US$5,000 per ounce for the first time. 14

This is no longer a story about one or two central banks building reserves. The following table shows the six largest Central Bank net buyers in 2025:

An important data-quality note: the World Gold Council estimates that approximately 57 per cent of 2025 central bank buying was not reported in official disclosures. 2 The published figure understates the actual total. The direction of the signal is, if anything, stronger than the headline number suggests.

The World Gold Council’s Central Bank Gold Reserves Survey 2025, which drew responses from 73 central bank reserve managers – a record sample – found that 95 per cent expected global central bank gold reserves to rise over the following 12 months, also a record. 3 Not one respondent expected a decline. 76 per cent believed gold would hold a higher share of reserves in five years.

Central Banks Push Towards Protecting Wealth 

A clear recent trigger from gradual buying to structural accumulation was driven by a decision made on February 26, 2022, when the G7, the European Union, and Australia announced the freezing of approximately US$300 billion of Russian central bank foreign exchange reserves. The majority – over US$193 billion – sat at Euroclear in Belgium. 8

The significance of this event for every central bank risk manager in the world was not the amount. It was the mechanism. Reserves held in foreign custodian accounts – denominated in dollars, euros, sterling, or yen, settled through Western clearing infrastructure – can be frozen by a political decision. The legal basis was improvised, the process was rapid, and the affected institution had no recourse. No judicial process preceded it.

Gold does not have this property. Domestically vaulted physical gold has no foreign custodian. It cannot be sanctioned. It cannot be debased. It carries no counterparty risk from the issuing government. The World Gold Council’s 2025 survey found that the top stated reasons central banks now hold gold are crisis performance, diversification, inflation hedge, store of value, and – explicitly – the absence of counterparty risk. 3

China’s parallel reduction of US Treasury holdings from a peak of approximately US$1.32 trillion in November 2013 to US$683.5 billion in December 2025 – the lowest since 2008 – reflects the same portfolio logic operating in the world’s largest holder of dollar reserves. 6 The People’s Bank of China extended its gold-buying streak to a 17th consecutive month in March 2026, with official holdings reaching approximately 2,313 tonnes.

What the signal means: the flow model for investors

Central bank buying is slow, quarterly-disclosed, and not tradeable in real time. Its value as a signal is not tactical. It is structural. What sustained buying at above-average rates for 16 years tells an investor is that the world’s largest and best-resourced asset allocators have concluded that gold deserves a larger share of their portfolios than it held in 2009.

J.P. Morgan published its US$6,300 target on February 2, 2026, explicitly linking it to the structural diversification trend and forecasting 800 tonnes of central bank buying in 2026 alone. 10 The upside case of US$8,000 to US$8,500 is conditional on household gold allocation rising from 3 per cent to 4.6 per cent globally – a scenario that institutional investors are better positioned to analyse than to predict. 11

The Tokenization opportunity

Central banks have been net buyers of gold for 16 consecutive years. The specific acceleration since 2022 is directly traceable to the weaponisation of dollar reserves, which demonstrated to every sovereign risk manager that foreign exchange holdings in Western custodian accounts carry political risk that gold does not. 

Tokenised allocated gold – with full beneficial ownership, independent audited reserves, and on-chain transferability – gives DeFi-native investors access to the same structural trade without the denomination floors, vault relationships, or Western jurisdictional exposure of traditional gold formats. The tokenised gold market’s 360 per cent growth in 2025, combined with institutional validation from the World Gold Council and Boston Consulting Group, indicates the direction of travel is established.

GoldNZ adds a new dimension to existing tokenised gold products that do not provide: a vault jurisdiction in New Zealand, outside the sanctions architecture, whose reach was demonstrated in 2022, and whose effects on gold flows were demonstrated again during the 2026 Iran conflict. In gold hot spots like Dubai, the conflict created chaos in the local market. Traders dumped their gold for heavy discounts as they desperately fumbled to  

Ripple and BCG’s April 2025 joint report projects the tokenised real-world asset market will US$18.9 trillion by 2033, with gold among the most natural early-stage candidates given its universal recognition and deep existing market liquidity. McKinsey’s June 2024 analysis projects a more conservative US$2 trillion tokenised asset market by 2030, excluding cryptocurrencies and stablecoins. 17 Even the conservative estimate represents a multi-order increase from today’s US$7.3

On-chain flow data is transparent and real-time. The central bank buying signal described above is disclosed quarterly, with significant lags and unreported components. On-chain transfer volume and wallet-level holdings for tokenised gold products are publicly observable on-chain, continuously. For an investor applying flow analysis to their portfolio, this is a material improvement in signal quality over waiting for central bank disclosure cycles.

The World Gold Council and Boston Consulting Group’s March 2026 joint paper, Digital Gold: The Case for a Shared Infrastructure, proposes a formal open platform connecting physical gold custody with digital issuance. 15 BCG Managing Director Matthias Tauber states the question is no longer whether gold will be digital, but how it can participate in modern financial systems without compromising physical integrity.

GoldNZ: the New Zealand implementation

Products such as PAX Gold and Tether Gold have demonstrated the mechanics at scale in LBMA and Swiss vault infrastructure. Techemynt’s GoldNZ, launched in March 2026, adds a new jurisdictional dimension to the mix, alongside similarly robust infrastructure.  

Each GoldNZ token represents one troy ounce of investment-grade gold, fully allocated and segregated in Commonwealth Vault’s New Zealand facilities, with independent audited reserves. 20 The product is governed by a bare trust under New Zealand law – a legal structure that gives token holders beneficial ownership rights to specifically identified physical gold, not a fund interest. If Techemynt ceased to operate, the trust assets would remain the property of the beneficial owners, not general creditors. That is a different legal relationship from holding a share in a gold ETF.

The token is available on Ethereum, Polygon, and Base, using the same contract address across all three networks – a multi-chain deployment that eliminates single-network risk and maximises DeFi integration optionality. Techemynt is a registered Financial Service Provider in New Zealand (FSP773214) and issues the product under the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism Act 2009 compliance framework, with full customer due diligence required for all verified holders.

The New Zealand vault jurisdiction is the product’s structural differentiator relative to the existing tokenised gold market. New Zealand sits outside NATO, outside OFAC jurisdiction, and has no history of arbitrary asset seizure. The Federal Reserve’s 2025 paper documents gold’s share of official reserves more than doubling since 2015 as sovereign managers diversify away from dollar-denominated assets held in Western custodians. 6 GoldNZ offers on-chain investors the same jurisdictional logic – gold stored in a conflict-remote, OECD-member jurisdiction under English common law, accessible on-chain at one troy ounce per token.

Techemynt also issues NZDS, New Zealand’s first dollar-backed stablecoin, launched in 2021. It also issues SilverNZ, providing a full suite of tokenised New Zealand reserve assets within a single regulated compliance framework. For investors managing a multi-asset on-chain portfolio, the ability to move between gold, silver, and NZD liquidity on-chain without leaving the Techemynt ecosystem is a treasury management capability that no other single-issuer product currently replicates.