Britain's Royal Mint and leading U.S.-based derivatives exchange CME Group have teamed up to create a blockchain-based digital platform for dealing in gold in a drive to cut the costs involved in trading the precious metal.

The Royal Mint will put gold bars into its on-site secure vault, which will then be digitised to create RMGs whose ownership will be recorded on the blockchain. Traders will then be able to trade in and out of RMGs between themselves.

The platform will operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Unlike the traditional model for investing in gold, with management fees and storage charges, RMGs will offer ownership of the underlying gold with the option for conversion to physical gold by the Royal Mint at zero storage cost.

BitGold Inc. (TSX-V: XAU) (“BitGold”), a platform for savings and payments in gold, announces that it has entered into an Acquisition Agreement to purchase the operating and intellectual property assets of GoldMoney Network Limited (“GoldMoney”), subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. With over CAD 1.5 billion in assets under vault management GoldMoney is among the world’s largest private managers of precious metal assets, renowned for its innovation and integrity in the gold market.

Gold spiked higher in many price feeds overnight and was $270 higher or more than 22% higher to $1,467.50/oz at one stage in what appears to have been some form of computer glitch.

There was speculation that the price spike which came while the COMEX was closed for 30 minutes was due to a series of charting errors or misprints, a bad price feed or a computer glitch. Another example of how technology is a great enabler but can also be a great disabler.

In a fresh possible headache for regulators, including in India, 'gold for bitcoin' trades are emerging as a new fad in the world of anonymous transactions, fuelling further the appetite for virtual currencies.

This comes at a time when the count of virtual currencies available in the market is fast moving closer to the 500-mark, although the price of top-ranked bitcoin has begun showing signs of stability at around USD 500-600 level after remaining highly volatile for most part of its half a decade existence.

According to bitcoin traders, the stabilisation in bitcoin rates is making the case stronger for exchanging them for gold that currently trades at less than USD 1,300 per ounce or about Rs 28,000 per 10 grams in India.