Sakhila Mirza must turn a decade of rule-making experience at the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) into real-world systems as incoming president of New York-based traceability platform, Responsible Gold.
Her remit is clear: marry hard-won policy with live systems and prove that blockchain can fulfill promises of proving real-time provenance of precious metals. Mirza spent her years as the LBMA’s general council and deputy CEO building industry standards to provide a foundation for trust and integrity, she told The Northern Miner in an interview.
“The standards that industry has developed should always be considered the baseline,” she said. “Garbage in, garbage out. Data integrity is the key differentiator of what makes a good platform.”
Mirza faces the task of embedding those standards in a blockchain network under intense regulatory scrutiny. Tracing gold is increasingly important as investors, regulators and consumers demand greater assurance that the metal is ethically sourced and free from ties to conflict, environmental harm or human rights abuses. With reports that US$30 billion of gold was smuggled out of Africa in 2022, the market for all supply chain tracing is forecast to soar to US$106 billion by 2037 from US$3 billion last year, New York-based Research Nester forecasts.
By establishing a verifiable chain of custody—from mine to vault—companies can demonstrate compliance with international standards, reduce reputational risk and meet growing ESG expectations. For miners and refiners, transparent sourcing can also open access to premium markets and responsible investors.
Houston-based Responsible Gold is among a handful of commercial firms including Everledger, Minespider and Circulor that already offer traceability platforms for gems, gold and battery metals.
Past blockchain pilots by the World Gold Council and LBMA under its Gold Bar Integrity Programme of 2019 tested bar tracking on permissioned ledgers. They proved the concept but never scaled beyond limited trials.
“Responsible Gold must bridge that gap,” Mirza said.
Supply chain logbooks
Mirza arrived at Responsible Gold two weeks before her appointment became public. The firm uses distributed-ledger technology to track gold from mine to vault, she explained.
Think of blockchain as a shared logbook: each time a gold bar moves you write its details on a fresh line and everyone keeps a copy; no one can erase or change earlier lines, so the bar’s journey stays intact and verifiable.
Miners key-in ore source and risk-mitigation data at extraction. Logistics firms log transport events on-chain. Refiners record serial numbers and purity tests. Vault operators log hand-offs. On-chain compliance checks flag missing or inconsistent entries before bars enter downstream markets or tokenization.
Rules matter
For Mirza, governance sits atop the ledger. She must figure out how Responsible Gold is to certify node operators, enforce know-your-customer rules and manage permissions while keeping the network open enough to scale.
Mirza’s challenge is to design layers that protect data and permit diverse participants to join a single trusted ecosystem. The platform must be able to interoperate with existing schemes, Mirza said. It could on-board artisan, small and mid-tier miners, some of which often lack verifiable paper trails.
“Without broad participation, provenance remains a theory,” she said.
Mirza was also appointed as the portfolio manager at Pandion Asset Management, a Securities and Exchange Commission-registered fund closely aligned with the firm’s sourcing principles.
Big task
On the innovation front, Responsible Gold plans tokenization offerings that uses the same audit chain to make gold more accessible. Tokenization is the title of ownership with mark-up of the responsibly sourced gold that has travelled successfully from mine to vault.
The Pandion Responsible Gold fund will draw on that provenance data as a performance indicator – linking real-time traceability and investor products, she said.
Mirza didn’t downplay the scale of the task. If she succeeds, she will turn gold provenance from promise into practice. She has “a lot to learn,” she said, “but equally a lot for me to hopefully direct” as she brings LBMA standards into a live ledger. The work won’t be simple.
“I wish I could say it’s a straightforward path,” she said. “Some of the simplest tasks do become complicated.”
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