A practical orientation to how gold moves from mine to market, where responsible-sourcing claims enter the chain, and where public information becomes hard to compare.
Large-scale industrial mining produces roughly four fifths of the gold mined each year. It works ore bodies with heavy equipment, open pit or underground, under a mining title, with a mill on site that turns rock into doré, a rough bar of gold and silver ready for a refiner.
Artisanal and small-scale gold mining, ASGM for short, is modelled at 15 to 20% of newly mined gold, a figure that traces to a single 2017 estimate and has been re-cited since. It works riverbeds, shallow pits and old workings with simple tools, often outside any formal title, and it is how somewhere between 10 and 20 million people earn a living, depending on the source. Much of it recovers gold with mercury, which is why so many of the programmes on this Hub are about mercury-free processing and formalisation.
The two worlds have different regulators, different buyers and different problems. What they share is the next step.
Gold leaves a mine as doré or as concentrate, passes through traders, exporters and sometimes a state buyer, and converges on a short list of accredited refiners before it is a bar anyone will accept. The board below is the Hub's own map of that chain: every mine, trader and refiner it holds, and the sourcing and shipping links between them. Grab any entry and pull.
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The value chain as the Hub holds it. Each shape is a mine, trader or refiner the Hub holds; each line is a sourcing or shipping link with a public source behind it.
The refining step is the narrowest point in the whole chain. The London Bullion Market Association's Good Delivery List counted 66 gold refiners in July 2026; the Responsible Minerals Initiative recognised 94 as conformant. Almost everything the world buys as gold has passed one of them, which is why refiners carry most of the accountability weight in responsible sourcing, and why so little artisanal gold, under 1% of Good Delivery throughput by the LBMA's own count, reaches them directly.
Between mine and refiner sits the part of the chain public sources describe least well: local buyers, aggregators, exporters and, in a growing number of countries, a state agency that buys or licenses all small-scale gold. The Hub's Directory holds every such actor it has found, and the Supply chain pages hold the rules that apply along the way.
Demand for gold splits four ways: jewellery, bars and coins bought as an investment, central-bank reserves, and technology, where gold sits in electronics and dentistry. Central banks alone bought 863 tonnes in 2025 according to the World Gold Council, and total demand for the year passed 5,000 tonnes once over-the-counter trading is counted, worth about US$555 billion.
That demand is what sets the price, and the price is what pulls gold out of the ground. When it broke US$4,000 an ounce on 8 October 2025, one of 53 records that year, every riverbed and every old working became worth digging again. The Numbers page holds every published reading behind these figures, tagged by how each one was produced.
Refined gold carries no trace of where it was mined, who mined it, or what happened on the way. That is the whole problem of responsible sourcing. A large share of small-scale production never enters a declared channel: Swissaid's trade-gap research estimates 321 to 474 tonnes of undeclared African artisanal gold a year, and 435 tonnes smuggled out of Africa in 2022, 80 to 85% of it to the United Arab Emirates. Those figures are modelled from trade mirrors, not counted by any registry.
Gold can fund conflict, launder money and poison rivers, and it can also be the only cash income in a district. The systems built to tell one from the other, assurance standards, national regulation, traceability technology and market-access schemes, all concentrate on the refining gate described above. This Hub documents those systems, the actors they apply to, and the evidence for what each of them actually does.
The Numbers page shows every published reading for each figure on this page, tagged by how it was produced.