By Jenna Wright, Managing Director, Digital Assets, LMAX Group
Gold traded $361 billion per day in 2025. The gold price peaked at US$5,589.38, its all-time high, on January 28, 2026. The market is deep, electronic, global and structurally sound. During the trading week, participants can move size, hedge risk and access price discovery across a mature network of dealers, venues and liquidity providers. It’s a marvel of modern financial engineering.
The problem, however, is the weekend.
Between 5 pm ET on Friday and 6 pm ET on Sunday, gold goes dark. For a growing segment of participants, that 49 hours of market silence has shifted from tolerable inconvenience to a commercial constraint.
The largest institutional players can live with it. Banks, commodity trading firms and major hedge funds have managed weekend gap risk for decades. Their balance sheets and risk frameworks were built for this. Weekend closure is a nuisance for them, not a threat.
Further down the chain, the calculus changes. Brokers offering leveraged gold products to professional and retail clients sit in an uncomfortable position every Friday afternoon. They cannot hedge their exposure for two days, yet they remain responsible for every position their clients hold. Gold is up more than 60% in a single year with sharp intraday moves that have become routine. At high leverage, even a modest gap on Monday’s open can land squarely on the intermediary’s balance sheet. So, firms limit client activity heading into the weekend. Traders want to stay in. The broker’s risk framework says no.
Market makers and digitally native trading firms face a different version of the same constraint. These firms price, hedge and manage gold risk in near real time. Capital efficiency matters to them as much as directional conviction. A two-day pause in hedging capability, imposed by nothing more fundamental than the calendar, is an operational problem they would pay to solve.
Gold made up nearly half of all broker CFD volumes last year. That concentration of activity in a single commodity makes the 49-hour gap a structural issue, not a fringe complaint. This is the context in which tokenised gold and gold perpetual futures deserve serious attention.
Though often dismissed as niche experiments, crypto-adjacent and offshore, the tokenised gold market has grown from roughly $1 billion to $6 billion in two years and generated $178 billion in trading volume in 2025 alone. Relative to a $361-billion-a-day traditional gold market, those are early numbers. But traders know what a growth curve like that looks like, and the trajectory here is hard to ignore. Gold perpetual futures are appearing across institutional and digital asset venues. When that many participants build or adopt 24/7 gold-linked instruments, they are delivering a message: a commercially important part of the market has outgrown the operating hours of the infrastructure it depends on. Rather than wait for the system to adapt, they are building around it.
The use cases already taking shape reflect this. Brokers are looking at weekend gold products to keep client books open without warehousing unhedgeable risk overnight and through the weekend. Market makers pricing tokenised gold are pairing it with perpetual futures in arbitrage strategies that are structurally familiar, even if the underlying wrapper is new. Digitally native firms that built their operations around 24/7 crypto markets are applying the same muscle to a commodity that has been traded for centuries.
The end client may never know or care whether the instrument is technically tokenised. The value lies beneath: better capital efficiency, faster collateral mobility, and the ability for intermediaries to manage exposure without overcommitting balance sheets every Friday afternoon. The infrastructure improvement matters more than the label on the product.
Declaring gold as a 24/7 market is the easy part. Preserving credible price discovery and executable liquidity outside traditional hours is harder.
Weekend liquidity in early gold products is relatively limited. Reference pricing can become circular when too many venues derive prices from one another rather than from genuine order flow. Funding mechanics in perpetuals can distort trading behaviour if they are poorly designed. These are hurdles that will not be overcome lightly, and no serious participant will migrate meaningful risk to an instrument they do not trust under stress.
The right solution is to develop a complement that functions within existing frameworks. These instruments solve a tangible, immediate problem for intermediaries and market makers that cannot sit through a 49-hour closure with open risk. They exist alongside the institutional gold market. They fill a gap it was never designed to address.
If liquidity deepens and pricing frameworks mature over time, these products may accomplish something larger: expanding the set of participants willing to engage with gold outside traditional hours. A deeper out-of-hours ecosystem would not fragment gold’s established infrastructure. More participants trading, hedging and transferring risk across more of the week will only serve to improve market continuity.
The gold market does not need reinventing. Thanks to the many minds who have shaped it over past decades and centuries, this market is more capable and stronger than ever. But the future is here, and market participants, particularly infrastructure providers, need to recognise that a meaningful share of modern gold activity now sits in operating models built around continuous pricing, continuous collateral movement and continuous risk transfer.
