The World Gold Council has launched “Gold as a Service”, an open, shared infrastructure concept co-developed with Boston Consulting Group to link vaulted physical custody directly with digital issuance and management of gold-backed products. The proposed platform standardises custody coordination, reconciliation, compliance and redemption to support scalable, interoperable tokens and other digital gold instruments that can plug into modern trading, clearing and recordkeeping systems. WGC is inviting banks, fintechs, custodians and other market participants to help design the “trusted rails” needed to operate digital gold at market scale without compromising bar-level integrity.

Australian researchers led by CSIRO have built the world’s first proof‑of‑concept quantum battery, using entangled quantum states to charge multiple cells collectively rather than individually. The lab‑scale device, fabricated in CSIRO’s clean quantum battery engineering lab, is designed to scale to solid‑state architectures compatible with grid‑scale storage and electric vehicles. If commercialised, the technology could sharply increase demand for high‑purity critical minerals such as lithium, nickel, cobalt and rare earth elements, with tighter specifications on impurity control and crystal defect behaviour.

Legrand is now supplying cable management systems made with 34% green steel, targeting high‑demand data centre projects that can require hundreds or thousands of kilometres of cabling. The green steel uses at least 75% scrap in electric arc furnaces powered by certified renewable electricity, cutting embodied carbon from about 2.38t CO2e to as little as 799kg CO2e per tonne of finished cold‑rolled steel, a 70% reduction versus blast furnaces. This shift is already lowering Legrand’s Scope 3 supply‑chain emissions and offers contractors a straightforward route to reduce project embodied carbon.