Mining Forum Americas 2026 agenda

For twenty years, we have advanced a single thesis: in an environment of fiscal dominance, structurally higher inflation, and eroding confidence in sovereign credit, gold is not a relic to be tolerated but a monetary anchor to be allocated to. The 20th-anniversary In Gold We Trust report sharpens that thesis into a framework I now apply directly in portfolio construction — the creeping remonetization of gold.

I will lay out the Six Vectors driving that process — six channels that do not add up so much as feed one another in a self-reinforcing loop:

• Reserves — gold as sanctions-resistant sovereignty; reserves you do not physically control are not reserves in a crisis.
• Private demand — the largest institutional allocation gap in monetary history, with pension funds still holding under 2%.
• Balance sheets — silent recapitalization through revaluation reserves, with no new debt required.
• Anchoring — gold-linked sovereign credit re-emerging as a credibility anchor.
• Accumulation — the West is still largely asleep, against ~9,700 t bought since 2010, almost entirely in the East.
• Tokenization — digital gold that remains neutral and censorship-resistant where CBDCs, by design, do not.

From the seat of an allocator managing real capital, the implications are concrete rather than rhetorical. Central banks bought a record 863 t in 2025 (USD 95.2bn), and for the first time in survey history not one expects its reserves to fall. Government bonds are losing their sacrosanct status, the classic 60/40 is structurally impaired, and non-inflatable assets are migrating from satellite to core holdings. The relevant question is no longer whether gold belongs in an institutional portfolio, but rather what size and form.

The world holds hundreds of trillions of dollars in real assets, and most of that value sits immobile. It cannot be divided, it cannot move, and it cannot readily be pledged as collateral. Nowhere is that constraint felt more acutely than in mining, where the asset is measured in decades and the capital markets that finance it are measured in quarters. Tokenization is the mechanism that converts static ownership into something transferable, divisible, and financeable, and it is arriving at a moment when the demand side has never been more urgent: the AI buildout and the energy transition are pulling copper, rare earths, and energy inputs forward at a rate that conventional equity, debt, and streaming markets were not built to supply.

In this keynote, Monty C. M. Metzger sets out what he calls the Ownership Age, the argument at the center of his new book Tokenization: Capital for Humanity, publishing in September 2026. Metzger founded LCX, one of the first regulated digital asset exchanges in Europe, and Toto Finance, a commodity tokenization platform built specifically for mining and resource companies, which brings in-ground reserves, off-take agreements, energy, and carbon on-chain and connects producers directly with global capital markets. He will describe how the structures actually work in practice, where the regulatory perimeter currently sits across Europe, the Gulf, and the United States, and why a growing number of resource-holding states now see tokenization as a way to finance their reserves without surrendering ownership of them.

The session is directed at issuers and investors weighing a capital pathway that did not exist a decade ago, and it addresses the questions that determine whether that pathway is usable:

• What tokenization changes in the capital stack for developers and producers, and how fractional ownership, collateralization, and secondary liquidity compare with conventional streams, royalties, converts, and equity issuance.

• Which instruments are investable today under existing regimes such as MiCA, Liechtenstein's TVTG, and the Gulf frameworks, and which remain conditional on rules that have not yet been written.

• How sovereign and state-held resource positions are being financed while ownership is retained, and what that implies for jurisdiction risk, partner selection, and offtake negotiation.

• What the AI and energy-transition demand curve means for copper, gold, and rare earths, and how tokenized offtake reaches pools of capital that do not participate in traditional mining equities.

• What issuers should ask of a tokenization counterparty on custody, transfer agency, disclosure, and redemption before committing an asset to a platform.