Central banks bought a net 41 tonnes of gold in May 2026, led by Poland’s 18 tonnes and China’s 10 tonnes, with China now holding 2,331 tonnes and 89% of surveyed reserve managers expecting global official gold holdings to rise further. In China’s domestic market, the Huaan Yifu Gold ETF has become the country’s largest ETF at about 90 billion yuan, overtaking the Huatai-PineBridge CSI 300 equity fund on 83 billion amid weak equities and constrained capital outflows. In London, Citi has joined HSBC, ICBC Standard Bank, JPMorgan and UBS as the fifth clearing member of London Precious Metals Clearing Limited, gaining Loco London settlement access to the roughly $160‑billion‑a‑day OTC bullion market.

Copper tailings reprocessing is framed as a near‑term supply solution, with S&P Global projecting demand rising from 28 million tonnes in 2025 to 42 million tonnes by 2040 while new copper mines take an average 17.9 years to reach production and are expected to meet only about 70% of 2035 demand. Andrew Dennan, CEO of Halo Minerals, points to advances in flotation, leaching and fine‑particle recovery and to projects such as Halo’s Playa Verde in Chile, where 250 million tonnes of historic Potrerillos and El Salvador tailings at Chañaral could be reworked. With an estimated 282 billion tonnes of tailings globally, he argues that above‑ground material, already blasted and crushed, can be rapidly mobilised using existing infrastructure while also remediating legacy arsenic‑rich pollution.

New drilling at Dakota Gold’s Richmond Hill project in South Dakota has returned high-grade intercepts inside the planned open pit, including 26 metres at 11.36 g/t gold and 14.92 g/t silver from ~75 metres in hole RH26C-432 and 38 metres at 2.89 g/t gold and 8.18 g/t silver from ~145 metres in RH26C-437. The 2026 programme totalled 17,273 metres across 112 infill, expansion and geotechnical holes, with assays from 350+ holes feeding a prefeasibility study due by 31 December and long-lead items such as an electrical substation already queued with Black Hills Energy. Richmond Hill, a large oxide gold system amenable to open-pit and heap leach, carries 244.7 Mt measured and indicated at 0.46 g/t Au and 4.83 g/t Ag (3.6 Moz Au, 38 Moz Ag), with an S-K 1300 Initial Assessment outlining 2.6–3.9 Moz Au production over 28 years and a post-tax NPV of $1.6–2.1 billion at a 55–59% IRR.