The Financial Conduct Authority published a Call for Input on tokenised gold in UK wholesale markets on 14 September 2026 and takes responses until 23 October 2026. The FCA confines the paper to products that confer ownership rights in the underlying physical gold, with backing evidenced consistently and redemption terms that are reliable. Chapter 5 places a direct, allocated ownership interest in a commercially tradable bar, with no pooling and no management of the property as a whole, as more likely to fall outside the collective investment scheme (CIS) and alternative investment fund (AIF) definitions. Fractional interests in a single bar that is managed or disposed of collectively indicate pooling of the kind those definitions describe.
A London Good Delivery bar carries 350 to 430 fine troy ounces, about 10.9 to 13.4 kg, and a kilobar 32.15 ounces, so a direct interest in a whole bar starts at the size of the smallest bar a product admits. Below that size, a holder reaches the metal through a collectively managed bar, which paragraph 5.12 reads as pooling, or through a co-ownership share in an allocated bar, whose status paragraph 5.13 leaves open by asking proponents why such shares would not meet every element of the CIS and AIF definitions. Paragraph 3.7 lists fractional ownership among the consumer-facing gains of tokenisation. Under paragraph 5.9, prudential treatment and use as collateral may differ according to whether a position is classified as gold or as a fund unit.
Four of the twelve conditions paragraph 5.15 sets for any alternative regime concern the holding record: custody, vaulting and segregation (3); reconciliation between physical and on-chain records (4); independent audit of custody records and of the reconciliation method (5); and protection of holders on insolvency (12). For whole bars in allocated custody, the physical side of condition 4 already exists as a document: the holder’s allocation record, matched to the vault operator’s bar list bar by bar by refiner, serial number, fineness and weight.
The Call for Input gathers evidence and leaves existing rules as they stand, and the FCA states that its aim excludes regulating gold-market segments currently outside its perimeter. Any exemption from the CIS and AIF perimeter rests with HM Treasury, and under paragraph 5.17 an exempted token may still fall within the definition of a qualifying cryptoasset in article 88F of the Regulated Activities Order.