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7 results for “counterparty risk” in Industry
Industry · 20 August 2026
The Refiner's Ledger
…the system relies heavily on documentation that is easiest to falsify precisely where the risk is highest. · Refiners occupy the single chokepoint in the gold supply chain where fungibility is created — the point at which gold from a thousand different, often untraceable, sources…
Tomas Herrera · 17 min read
Industry · 7 August 2026
How Fake Gold Is Detected
…and treat any deep discount to spot as what it almost always is — a price that reflects a risk the seller understands better than the buyer does. · The tungsten problem, and why density alone stopped being enough · Tungsten is the reason modern verification is layered. Its densit…
Tomas Herrera · 16 min read
Industry · 2 July 2026
Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery
…ore has to travel as paperwork alongside the metal: mine certificates, transport records, counterparty due diligence and audit. Refiners now maintain compliance teams comparable in size to their metallurgical staff. · Recycling, which is most of the business · It surprises people…
Tomas Herrera · 19 min read
Industry · 7 August 2026
After the Cyanide
…is the only reagent that dissolves gold selectively at industrial scale and low cost; the risk lies in handling and storage, not in the chemistry being exotic. · Free cyanide degrades in sunlit water over weeks; the durable hazards at a closed mine are usually metals and acidity,…
Tomas Herrera · 16 min read
Industry · 6 August 2026
The Scrap Trade
…akes a margin, and each margin is defensible on its own terms — the counter carries fraud risk and holding cost, the consolidator carries transport and insurance, the refiner carries process losses. Stacked, they explain most of the gap between spot and what a seller is offered.…
Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read
Industry · 4 August 2026
The Gold Inside Your Phone
…ermanently and is not coming back. What it also demonstrated is the shape of substitution risk in this market: it is slow, it is capital-intensive, it requires requalification of every affected part, and once it happens it is irreversible. Nobody converts back to gold because the…
Tomas Herrera · 18 min read
Industry · 28 July 2026
Urban Mining: The Richest Gold Ore on Earth Is in Your Old Phone
…n by the last few hundred million years of hydrothermal activity. There is no exploration risk. There is only the far more mundane problem of getting the ore to the plant. · The collection problem is bigger than the chemistry problem · Metallurgically, recovering gold from circui…
Tomas Herrera · 16 min read
