Industrial mines produce most newly mined gold; artisanal and small-scale mining is modelled at 15 to 20%. Nearly all of it converges on a short list of accredited refiners before reaching jewellery, investment, central banks and technology. This page maps that shape, and why it is contested territory.
Gold is mined two ways. Large-scale industrial mining accounts for roughly four fifths of newly mined supply. Artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) is modelled at 15 to 20%, a figure that traces to a single 2017 IGF estimate re-cited since, and employs somewhere between 10 and 20 million people depending on the source (WGC cites about 10 million primary livelihoods; IGF 2017 estimated 15 to 20 million).
Whatever the route out of the ground, nearly all of it converges on refiners. The LBMA gold Good Delivery List counted 66 refiners as of July 2026, and RMI's registry counted 94 conformant gold refiners (37 directly audited, 57 recognised via cross-recognition). ASM supplies less than 1% of Good Delivery refiner throughput, per LBMA. That narrowness is why refiners carry most of the accountability weight in responsible sourcing.
Downstream, demand splits across jewellery, investment, technology and central banks, which bought 863 t in 2025 per the World Gold Council. Per WGC and Metals Focus, full-year 2025 demand exceeded 5,000 t including over-the-counter flows, worth about US$555bn.
Every figure is attributed and method-tagged; the full spreads, with every published reading, live on the Numbers page.
A large share of ASGM production never enters a declared channel. Swissaid's trade-gap research estimates 321 to 474 t of undeclared African ASM gold per year, and 435 t (about US$30.7bn) smuggled out of Africa in 2022, 80 to 85% of it to the United Arab Emirates. Those figures are modelled from trade mirrors and are attributed to Swissaid; no registry counts them.
That is the tension this Hub documents: informal production is unregistered by definition, so every share and flow is an estimate, while the accountability systems (standards, regulation, market-access schemes, traceability tech) concentrate on the narrow refining gate. The directories map those systems; the Numbers page shows every figure as a spread rather than a single number.
The Numbers page shows every published reading for each figure on this page, tagged by how it was produced, never averaged.