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Craft · 22 July 2026

Hallmarks and Assay: How Anyone Proves Gold Is Gold

…eness verified by an independent third party — not weight, value, age or craftsmanship. · Fire assay remains the referee method; XRF is fast and non-destructive but reads only the surface. · Karat and fineness describe the same thing on different scales: 18ct is 750 parts per tho…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

How Fake Gold Is Detected

…rful: the mint's tolerances are tighter than a counterfeiter's economics usually allow. · Fire assay remains the legal reference method; every non-destructive technique is a proxy calibrated against it. · Underkarated jewellery, not exotic tungsten-cored bars, is the fraud that c…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Industry · 20 August 2026

The Refiner's Ledger

…bar and a Good Delivery brick sits a chain of chlorination furnaces, electrolytic cells, assay labs and accreditation committees that decides which gold the world's markets will accept without question — and which gold gets quietly refused. · Doré, the raw semi-refined alloy pou…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Industry · 2 July 2026

Nine Nines: Inside a Modern Gold Refinery

…ining is two-stage: fast chlorination to ~99.5%, then electrolysis to 99.99% and above. · Fire assay, a technique older than the periodic table, remains the referee method for purity. · Good Delivery accreditation governs which bars trade without re-assay in the wholesale market.…

Tomas Herrera · 19 min read

Industry · 6 August 2026

The Scrap Trade

…e responds to price faster than mine output can. · Scrap is priced off spot, adjusted for assayed fineness, then discounted for testing, refining, transport and each intermediary's margin. · High-street payouts commonly land well below spot for the contained gold; specialist refi…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Science · 9 August 2026

The Metallurgy of Karat

…(750, 585, 375) states the same fact as karat in parts per thousand and is the number an assay office actually verifies. · Is 24k gold better than 18k? Purer, not better. 24k is the softest usable form of the metal and will deform under everyday handling, lose stone settings and…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Markets · 11 September 2026

The Last Audit: What We Actually Know About the World's Official Gold

…gramme, completed in 2017, was as much an audit as a move: every returned bar was melted, assayed and recast — the most thorough verification any major holder has published. · The audit gap does not prove gold is missing. It does mean the market's most-quoted supply number is, at…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

History · 14 July 2026

The Gold Standard: How a Soft Yellow Metal Became Money

…ified immediately. The noble gases will not sit still in a purse. The alkali metals catch fire in damp air. Anything radioactive is self-evidently unsuitable. Iron and copper corrode; lead is soft and dull and, as the Romans learned slowly, poisonous. That leaves a small cluster…

Marguerite Adler · 14 min read

Markets · 20 June 2026

Bring It Home: Central Banks and the Great Gold Repatriation

…Gold in a domestic vault a thousand miles from the settlement system must be shipped, re-assayed if its bars are not Good Delivery, and re-entered into the chain of custody before it can do anything at all. · Domestic vault capacity is the binding constraint on repatriation. Bui…

Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Financial Disclaimer

…rospectus, not the ticker. · Physical dealing: coins and small bars carry dealer spreads, assay risk, counterfeit risk, storage cost and, in some jurisdictions, sales tax. The 'spot price' is not the price at which a retail buyer transacts. · Fraud: precious metals attract a pers…

Markets · 8 August 2026

Moving Bullion: The Logistics Nobody Prices

…at leaves the chain — held privately, for example — can re-enter, but normally only after assay or re-refining, because the guarantee rests on continuous custody rather than on the bar itself. · Why do London and New York prices diverge? Because the two markets trade different th…

Ingrid Sørensen · 15 min read

Markets · 18 August 2026

The Vault Beneath the City

…. An earmarked bar is identified by a unique serial number, a refiner's stamp, a fineness assay and a weight, and it is allocated in the vault's records to one specific owner. It sits physically in a caged compartment assigned to that owner, stacked on wooden pallets in the same…

Ingrid Sørensen · 22 min read

Craft · 5 June 2026

The Alchemy of Craft: What Goldsmiths Know That Machines Don't

…e value lies precisely in the fact that it cannot be run again. · Reading a hallmark · In assay-office jurisdictions, the marks struck into a finished piece are a compressed provenance record: the sponsor's mark identifying the maker, the fineness in millesimal form, the assay of…

Yusuf Demir · 16 min read

Craft · 3 August 2026

The Wedding-Season Bid: How Jewellery Demand Sets the Floor

…ing has been the more effective intervention, and for a different reason. By requiring an assayed purity mark, it attacks the oldest problem in the retail trade: pieces sold as 22 karat that assay at 19 or 20. That fraud is a tax on exactly the households least able to verify wha…

Yusuf Demir · 15 min read

Mining · 5 August 2026

Grade, Cut-off and the Arithmetic of an Open Pit

…per tonne is one part per million — the metal is invisible in the rock and is detected by assay, not by eye. · What is cut-off grade? The lowest grade at which a tonne of rock generates more revenue than it costs to process. Rock above it is ore and goes to the mill; rock below i…

Amara Okonjo · 20 min read

Markets · 17 August 2026

Paper Gold: What You Own When You Do Not Own Bars

…n holding coins? It trades a set of risks rather than removing them. Paper removes theft, assay doubt and dealer spreads, and adds counterparty, custodial and structural risk. Coins remove counterparty risk and add storage, insurance, verification and a wide bid-offer spread. The…

Ingrid Sørensen · 23 min read

Industry · 4 August 2026

The Gold Inside Your Phone

…und one gram of gold per tonne. Populated circuit boards from consumer equipment commonly assay in the hundreds of grams per tonne, and dense telecom and computing hardware can run higher still. In grade terms, a container of scrap boards is a spectacular orebody that arrives pre…

Tomas Herrera · 18 min read

Science · 8 August 2026

The Metal That Went Medical

…change is the instrument Most analytical techniques need a reader. Aggregation-based gold assays need an eye. If a biological binding event can be made to pull particles together or hold them apart, the result is a visible red-to-blue transition — a measurement anyone can perform…

Amara Okonjo · 19 min read

Markets · 8 September 2026

The Real-Rate Trade: Why Gold Moves When Bond Yields Do

…he bond market · The precedents: 1970s and 2008 · The real-rate framework was born in the fires of the 1970s. After the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, gold was allowed to float freely against the dollar. For much of that decade, the Federal Reserve was perceived as…

Ingrid Sørensen · 25 min read

Markets · 6 August 2026

Why Central Banks Started Buying Gold Again

…ower-fineness bars into current Good Delivery specification so they are tradeable without assay disputes. · Why the reported numbers lag Official reserve statistics are self-reported, published with a delay, and in several jurisdictions revised long after the fact. Some purchases…

Ingrid Sørensen · 14 min read

Industry · 7 August 2026

After the Cyanide

Every ounce of mined gold leaves behind roughly a tonne of processed rock and the water that carried it. What happens to that material after the last shift is the part of the industry with the longest…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Mining · 19 August 2026

Nine Grams a Tonne

What does it actually cost to pull an ounce of gold out of the ground? The honest answer runs through grade decline, energy and water bills, permitting delays and the closure liabilities nobody prices…

Amara Okonjo · 18 min read

History · 9 August 2026

The Hoard Problem: What Buried Gold Actually Tells Us

A field of gold torcs and coins is a spectacular find and a treacherous document. The people who buried it were not writing to us, and the reasons they had for putting it in the ground are exactly wha…

Marguerite Adler · 16 min read

Mining · 22 May 2026

The Other Supply Chain: Artisanal Mining and the Mercury Problem

A significant share of the world's gold is produced by people working with hand tools, informal finance and a neurotoxin. Formalisation is the stated solution. Nobody agrees on what it costs. · Artisa…

Amara Okonjo · 15 min read

Industry · 28 July 2026

Urban Mining: The Richest Gold Ore on Earth Is in Your Old Phone

A tonne of good underground ore holds a few grams of gold. A tonne of discarded circuit boards can hold two hundred. So why is most of it still going into landfill? · Concentration, not tonnage, is wh…

Tomas Herrera · 16 min read

Science · 10 August 2026

Where Gold Actually Comes From

Every gram of gold on Earth was manufactured in an astrophysical catastrophe, arrived here after the planet had already formed, and was then concentrated by hot water. Three separate accidents, none o…

Tomas Herrera · 17 min read

Markets · 2 August 2026

Who Actually Sets the Gold Price

There is no single gold price. There is a London settlement number, a New York futures curve, a Shanghai premium and a jeweller's counter in Dubai — and the distance between them is where the market l…

Ingrid Sørensen · 16 min read

Policies · 6 August 2026

Cookie Policy

…s. The settings live under Privacy in Chrome, Edge and Brave; under Privacy & Security in Firefox; and under Settings then Privacy in Safari, where 'Prevent cross-site tracking' is enabled by default. Mobile browsers expose the same controls under Settings. · Blocking all cookies…

Policies · 6 August 2026

Editorial Standards & Corrections

…conclusions. · 3. Sourcing and verification · Primary documents first: filings, permits, assay certificates, customs data, central bank statistical releases, court records and audited accounts outrank commentary about them. · Two-source rule: a contested factual claim central to…