Timeline of gold

This is a timeline of gold, from its first uses in prehistoric times through the invention of coinage, the rise and collapse of the gold standard, and the great gold rushes. It also covers mining and extraction methods, price records, central bank decisions on where to store gold, and the science of where the metal comes from, alongside the scams, laws, and market institutions that have grown up around gold's role as money, reserve asset, and investment.

Sample questions

The following are some interesting questions that can be answered by reading this timeline:

• How did gold first become part of human life, and how did the ancient world use it before coins existed?
  • Sort the full timeline by "Event type" and look for the group of rows with value "Background".
  • You will see the earliest gold in Spanish caves and in the Varna Necropolis, the role of silver in the Code of Hammurabi, gold in the Amarna letters, the Roman shift from bronze to silver, Mansa Musa's pilgrimage through Cairo, and the shipment of Aztec gold to Spain.
• How have governments and central banks tried to fix, defend, and abandon gold's role as money?
  • Sort the full timeline by "Event type" and look for the group of rows with value "Monetary policy".
  • You will see Rome's first gold coinage and later debasement, Britain's accidental gold standard in 1717, Germany's switch to gold in 1873, the breakdown of the standard from 1914 to 1933, Bretton Woods and the Nixon shock, and the modern debates over where central banks store their gold.
• How did gold coins spread and change from antiquity to the modern era?
  • Sort the full timeline by "Event type" and look for the group of rows with value "Coinage".
  • You will see the first British gold coins, the reintroduction of gold coinage in Europe with the florin and England's gold penny, the English florin and sovereign, and the Doppelkronensache of 1877, which shows how coins could be reduced and still pass weight checks.
• Where has gold been mined, and what have gold rushes and new extraction methods cost and changed?
  • Sort the full timeline by "Event type" and look for the group of rows with value "Mining".
  • You will see mining in Nubia, colonial Hispaniola, and the rushes in North Carolina, California, Australia, Finland, Tierra del Fuego, the Witwatersrand, and the Klondike, as well as the cyanide process, the Baia Mare spill, and reports on child labor and fair mining certification.
• How has the price of gold moved, and which events pushed it to records?
  • Sort the full timeline by "Event type" and look for the group of rows with value "Price".
  • You will see the peak of 1980, the low of 1999, the new records of 2008, 2010, and 2011, and the rise above $4,000 per troy ounce in 2025, each with the event that helped drive it.
• What have scientists learned about gold, and where does it come from?
  • Sort the full timeline by "Event type" and look for the group of rows with value "Science".
  • You will see Scheele's discovery that gold dissolves in cyanide, the failed attempts to extract gold from seawater, the transmutation experiments of 1941 and 1980, and the astronomical work that traces gold to neutron star mergers and magnetar flares.

Big picture

Time period	Development summary	More details
40,000 BCE to 700 BCE	Earliest gold and the Bronze Age	Gold is among the first metals people use. Small amounts of natural gold appear in Spanish caves of the late Paleolithic, the oldest well-dated gold artifacts come from the Varna Necropolis in Bulgaria in the fifth millennium BCE, and gold objects and smelting spread to Egypt and Lower Mesopotamia by the fourth millennium BCE. Gold then becomes a prestige metal of the Bronze Age states, while silver serves as everyday money. Egyptian and Nubian gold mining passes through several technical steps up to the New Kingdom, the Code of Hammurabi sets fines and payments in metal by weight, mostly silver, and in the Amarna letters King Tushratta of the Mitanni describes gold as more plentiful than dirt in Egypt.
610 BCE to 1500	Coinage and the Middle Ages	Lydia, supplied with gold from the Black Sea region, issues what is probably the world's earliest coinage, and Croesus mints gold and silver coins that circulate across Asia Minor. Rome first strikes gold under the strain of the Second Punic War, works Spanish deposits with hydraulic mining, and repeatedly debases its gold coin. After a brief Carolingian emission, silver dominates western Europe until gold coinage is reintroduced in the 13th century with the Florentine florin and England's first gold penny in 1257. The English attempt of 1343 to 1344 fails because gold is undervalued against silver. The pilgrimage of Mansa Musa through Cairo in 1324 depresses the price of gold in Egypt.
1500 to 1872	Colonial gold and gold rushes	Colonial conquest reshapes the gold supply. Gold from Hispaniola's Cibao valley fuels the first Spanish colony, most of the Aztec gold is shipped to Spain, and the Brazilian Gold Rush begins in 1695. Britain slips into a de facto gold standard by accident in 1717. Gold rushes then spread across continents, from North Carolina in 1803 to the California Gold Rush in 1848 and the Australian gold rushes in 1851, and the California rush drives the state's rapid entry to the Union. In 1862 the United States issues inconvertible paper money, and the New York Gold Exchange opens to trade gold against it.
1873 to 1913	The classical gold standard	The gold standard becomes the basis of the international monetary system. Germany adopts a gold currency in 1873, and India and Japan follow with a gold exchange standard and a gold standard in 1893 and 1897. The Witwatersrand Gold Rush of 1886 and the cyanide process, first used at scale in 1890, make South Africa a leading producer, and the Klondike Gold Rush follows in 1896. The New York Gold Exchange stops operating in 1897.
1914 to 1999	Breakdown and end of convertibility	World War I ends the British gold specie standard, Britain returns to a gold bullion standard in 1925, and the banking crisis of 1931 pushes Austria, Germany, and then Britain off gold. The United States leaves gold in 1933 and devalues the dollar in 1934. The Bretton Woods system fixes currencies to the dollar, which is convertible to gold only for central banks, and the Nixon shock ends convertibility in 1971. The price peaks at $850 in January 1980, and Switzerland ends the last link between a currency and gold in 1999.
2000 to 2025	Gold as a market asset	Prices set new records in 2008 and 2011, and gold tops $4,000 per troy ounce in 2025, while China overtakes South Africa as the top producer in 2007. Cyanide spills, child labor in small-scale mines, and fair mining certification bring environmental and human rights issues into focus. Central banks debate where to store their gold: Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and Poland repatriate reserves, Swiss voters reject a forced repatriation in 2014, and Zimbabwe launches a gold-backed currency in 2024. Astronomers meanwhile trace the origin of gold to neutron star mergers and magnetar flares.

Full timeline

Inclusion criteria

We include:

• Monetary and legal actions that changed gold's role as money, such as coinage reforms, adoptions and abandonments of a gold standard, devaluations, convertibility decisions, central bank gold agreements, and gold storage or repatriation decisions (e.g. Germany's 1873 Coinage Act, the 1931 British departure from gold, the 1971 Nixon shock, the 2014 Swiss "Save our Swiss Gold" vote).
• Discoveries, gold rushes, and mining or extraction milestones that shifted the gold supply or how gold is produced (e.g. the 1848 California discovery, the 1886 Witwatersrand discovery, the 1887 MacArthur-Forrest cyanide process).
• Price records and market institutions or events that clearly moved the gold price or its trading (e.g. the January 1980 high, the October 2025 rise above $4,000, the New York Gold Exchange).
• Scientific findings about gold's origin, chemistry, or extraction, including landmark experiments, when a dated paper or report backs them (e.g. the 2017 GW170817 observation, Haber's seawater study, the 1941 mercury transmutation).
• Archaeological and historical evidence of early gold use that marks a "first" or a turning point (e.g. the Varna Necropolis, the first Lydian coinage, Mansa Musa's 1324 pilgrimage).
• Environmental, human rights, and regulatory events tied to gold mining, where a primary report or a legal text documents them (e.g. the 2000 Baia Mare cyanide spill, the 2006 EU extractive waste directive, the 2015 Human Rights Watch report on child labor).
• Critical or revisionist scholarship that corrects a popular story already told in the timeline, with the corrected claim stated in the row (e.g. that Britain's gold standard began by accident in 1717, or that the 1873 German switch to gold was not driven by the French indemnity alone).

We do not include:

• Vague, undated-within-a-period claims with no specific event, document, or source behind them (e.g. a bare "gold became more important in the Middle Ages"); these should either be given a specific citable event or cut.
• Rows sourced only to commercial or low-quality material: bullion dealers' blog posts, marketing pages, self-published articles with no citations of their own, or generic aggregator pages. Prefer the original paper, law, press release, or a scholarly book.
• Isolated statistics from a time series (annual production, reserves by country, a single year's price) unless the row explains why that point matters, for example because it is a record or it triggered a change.
• Product and catalog information: bar sizes, coin specifications, refiner listings, and fund or product launches without lasting significance for gold's history.
• Routine personnel, corporate, or promotional news from mining companies, mints, and dealers.
• Unverified or invented citation details. A reference must actually be checked to say what the row claims before it is added, rather than assumed from a title or an article's own footnote.
• Citation templates not confirmed to render correctly on the wiki; use {{cite web}}, {{cite book}}, {{cite journal}}, {{cite news}}, or {{cite report}} where the underlying template is confirmed.
• Notable-sounding claims without any reference date, or without any citation at all, once alternatives with a real date and source are available.

Year	Event type	Details
c. 2,020,000,000 BCE	Background	The asteroid impact that forms the Vredefort impact structure distorts the Witwatersrand Basin, whose gold-bearing sediments were laid down 700 to 950 million years earlier, and brings the gold-bearing rocks up to the present erosion surface near Johannesburg. Popular accounts credit the asteroid with delivering the gold, but this is now questioned, because the gold-bearing rocks predate the impact. The distortion would make the deposits reachable by miners, and they would yield some 22% of all gold ascertained to exist after their 1886 discovery.	South Africa
40,000 BCE	Background	Small amounts of natural gold are found in Spanish caves used during the late Paleolithic period, representing the earliest known presence of gold in a human context.	Spain
4600 BCE	Background	Gold artifacts from the Varna Necropolis near Lake Varna on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria represent the oldest known well-dated gold artifacts in the world, indicating that gold craftsmanship emerges in southeastern Europe during the fifth millennium BCE.	Bulgaria
4th to 3rd millennium BCE	Mining	A group of German and Georgian archaeologists claims that the Sakdrisi site in southern Georgia may be the world's oldest known gold mine, which would place organized gold mining well before the Bronze Age. The dating is the excavators' own claim, and the Varna graves of Bulgaria, built between 4700 and 4200 BCE, indicate that gold was already being worked and buried by then.	Georgia
3500 BCE	Background	Gold artifacts begin appearing in ancient Egypt at the end of the pre-dynastic period and in Lower Mesopotamia during the early fourth millennium BCE, with smelting techniques developed during this period marking a major advance in gold metallurgy.	Egypt
3000 BCE	Background	The Wadi Qana cave cemetery in the West Bank yields gold artifacts dating to the fourth millennium BCE, representing the earliest known gold objects found in the Levant region.	Levant
c. 1754 BCE	Background	In ancient Babylonia, the Code of Hammurabi sets fines and payments in metal measured by weight, mostly silver rather than gold. It provides some of the oldest surviving written evidence of commodity money practices. Silver would remain the everyday basis of most monetary systems for millennia, with gold used mainly for high-value transactions until well into the modern era.	Babylonia
c. 1550 to 1070 BCE	Mining	During the New Kingdom, gold mining in Nubia expands under Egyptian occupation, and the grinding mill is invented for processing the ore. Earlier periods had already introduced the oval mallet (Old Kingdom) and stone mortars with a new gold-washing technique (Middle Kingdom), so the New Kingdom marks the third technical step in Egyptian and Nubian gold mining.	Egypt
c. 1350 BCE	Background	The Amarna letters, diplomatic correspondence between the Egyptian court and other Near Eastern rulers, mention gold in letters EA 19 and EA 26. In this correspondence King Tushratta of the Mitanni describes gold as more plentiful than dirt in Egypt, which shows how Egypt's gold-producing reputation shapes diplomacy in the 14th century BCE.	Egypt
950 BCE	Background	The Phoenicians become among the first peoples to use gold as a standardized currency, employing it to develop trade networks across the Mediterranean Basin, marking an early step in gold's transition from a decorative and religious material to a medium of commercial exchange.	Phoenicia
705 BCE	Background	Sennacherib, king of Assyria, describes preparing clay molds and pouring molten bronze into them to produce half-shekel coins, providing one of the earliest recorded accounts of a coin-casting process and evidence of standardized metal money production in the ancient Near East.	Assyria
c. 610 BCE	Background	Gold from the southeastern corner of the Black Sea, exploited since the time of Midas, plays a central role in the establishment of what is probably the world's earliest coinage in Lydia. The Lydian coins are a crude mix of gold and silver, and the later refining of the two metals would make possible the bimetallic coinage of Croesus.	Lydia
600 BCE	Monetary policy	King Alyattes of Lydia establishes a fixed value for gold measured in wheat, representing one of the earliest known attempts to anchor the value of gold to a commodity standard, a practice his son Croesus extends by also fixing the value of silver relative to gold, producing a formal bimetallic ratio of one gold coin to ten silver coins.	Lydia
561 BCE	Background	Croesus, king of Lydia, initiates the minting of gold and silver coins that circulate widely across Asia Minor, making Lydia the first civilization known to adopt both gold and silver as struck coinage according to Herodotus.	Lydia
500 BCE	Background	The daric, a gold coin struck during the reign of Darius the Great of Persia, becomes one of the oldest and most famous struck gold coins in history. Made of nearly pure gold and roughly equal in weight to a U.S. five-dollar piece, it bears the image of an archer and serves as a benchmark for ancient gold coinage.	Persia
323 BCE	Background	Following the death of Alexander the Great, the double emission of gold and silver coinage that had operated continuously through his reign comes to an end, marking a turning point in the monetary history of the ancient Greek world.	Greece
300 BCE	Background	In ancient Rome, the bronze as, a unit of commodity money equal to one Roman pound of bronze, begins to be struck and circulates according to its metallic value, marking the beginning of Rome's standardized coinage system that will later give way to gold and silver dominance.	Rome
280 BCE	Background	During the Pyrrhic War, Rome molds its first silver coins — didrachms and their subdivisions — partly using large provisions of silver found in southern Italy after defeating Pyrrhus of Epirus, marking Rome's transition from bronze to silver as its primary monetary metal.	Rome
268 BCE	Background	Silver coinage begins to be officially struck in Rome itself around 268 BCE, with the denarius — meaning "containing ten" — becoming the standard Roman silver coin equivalent to a didrachm and divided into ten asses, laying the monetary foundation upon which Rome's later gold coinage will be built.	Rome
245 BCE	Background	Bronze coinage predominates as the primary monetary medium in Rome from its introduction until around 245 BCE, after which it begins sharing circulation with silver coin, reflecting a gradual shift in Rome's monetary hierarchy toward more precious metals.	Rome
218 BCE	Monetary policy	Under the financial strain of the Second Punic War, Rome strikes gold coinage for the first time, using metal from the public treasury. The coins are based on the scruple, equal to one twenty-fourth of the old Roman ounce or approximately 17½ grains, with denominations of one, two, and three scruples corresponding roughly to one, two, and three pre-1933 U.S. dollars. Officially valued at 20 sesterces per scruple of gold, the high ratio to silver leads some scholars to regard these pieces as symbolic rather than full monetary coins; the emission disappears shortly after.	Rome
217 BCE	Background	From 217 BCE onward, silver increasingly dominates Roman monetary circulation while bronze takes on an ever more subsidiary role, setting the stage for gold's eventual rise as the preeminent standard in the Roman monetary system.	Rome
217 BCE	Background	In Rome, the as is reduced to the measure of one ounce and revalued at 16 to the denarius instead of 10, while the denarius itself is simultaneously devalued, marking the beginning of a long Roman pattern of currency debasement under fiscal pressure.	Rome
206 BCE	Background	During the Second Punic War, gold pieces are struck in ancient Rome, representing an early instance of Roman gold coinage driven by wartime monetary demand.	Rome
200 BCE	Background	Contemporaneously with the circulation of bronze and silver coinage in Rome and other Italian cities, gold circulates by weight in the form of nuggets and foreign coins during the early Republic, representing a primitive parallel gold economy operating alongside the official coinage system.	Rome
150 BCE	Coinage	The Britons strike their first gold coins, modeled on those circulating in Gaul, which were themselves copies of coins of Philip II of Macedon, marking the introduction of gold coinage to the British Isles as part of a broader diffusion of Mediterranean monetary practices northward.	Britain
50 BCE	Background	When Julius Caesar invades Great Britain around the middle of the first century BCE, he finds gold coins already circulating among the Britons alongside bronze pieces, noting that they use both interchangeably and that iron bars of a certain weight also serve as currency.	Britain
25 BCE	Background	Rome introduces hydraulic mining methods for large-scale gold extraction in Hispania, with major operations at Las Médulas in León using seven long aqueducts to sluice alluvial gold deposits, representing one of the most advanced gold mining operations in the ancient world.	Hispania
25	Coinage	Cunobelinus (the Cymbeline of Shakespeare), king of the Britons, strikes gold coins in the first half of the first century CE, representing some of the earliest identifiable native British gold coinage produced under a named ruler.	Britain
43	Monetary policy	Following the Roman conquest of Britain, an imperial edict requires that all money circulating on the island bear the image and legend of the Roman emperor, effectively replacing native British coinage with Roman currency and extending Roman monetary authority across the island until the Roman withdrawal in the fifth century.	Britain
50	Monetary policy	Gold coins circulating in ancient Britain undergo gradual debasement, with their weight declining from 120 to 84 grains over time, providing some of the earliest documented evidence of gold coin devaluation in British monetary history.	Britain
312	Monetary policy	Diocletian orders two reductions in the weight of the aureus, continuing a long pattern of debasement that has kept the Roman Empire's monetary situation in confusion since the reign of Nero.	Rome
312	Monetary policy	Constantine the Great carries out a monetary reform reducing the gold content of the aureus to approximately 70 grains, a devaluation of roughly 38 percent from its weight in the days of Nero, reflecting the chronic fiscal pressures of the late Roman Empire.	Rome
476	Background	With the fall of the Western Roman Empire, gold's relative importance as the preeminent imperial coin continues to grow, as the aureus had served as the empire's gold coin par excellence even while silver and its fractions maintained a high place in everyday commerce.	Western Roman Empire
800	Monetary policy	During the Carolingian period, a temporary emission of gold coinage takes place in western Europe, an exception to the general rule that early medieval minting is limited to silver and copper, reflecting the scarcity of gold and the disruption of Mediterranean trade networks following the fall of Rome.	Western Europe
800	Background	According to the Beowulf epic, Anglo-Saxons of the ninth century use gold and silver rings as a medium of exchange and as a vague measure of value, reflecting a reversion to primitive commodity money in Britain following the collapse of Roman monetary infrastructure.	England
900	Monetary policy	After the ninth century, no gold is coined in England or the other island countries for several centuries, while Byzantine gold bezants and gold coins struck by Arab princes of Sicily during the ninth and tenth centuries circulate in European mercantile transactions but lack legal tender status in England, passing instead as bullion.	England
1066	Background	When William I comes to power, silver coinage is the principal monetary medium in England and continues as such until the beginning of the eighteenth century, with the monetary pound originally weighing one pound of sterling silver divided into twenty shillings each of twelve silver pennies.	England
1252	Coinage	In response to growing demand for higher-value coins needed in the foreign trade of the great Italian cities, Florence strikes gold coins of 48 grains of fine gold content, giving rise to the famous Italian gold florin. Similar coins are later struck in Germany, France, and other Italian cities, making the florin one of the most influential gold coin designs of the medieval period.	Florence
1252	Coinage	Louis IX of France strikes the first series of French gold coins, probably as result of leading the Sixth Crusade five years earlier, as part of a broader simultaneous reintroduction of gold coinage across western Europe that also includes the famous Florentine florin struck in the same year and gold coins emitted by the Republic of Florence in Genoa.	France
1257	Coinage	Henry III orders the striking of the first English gold coin, a gold penny of pure gold weighing 45 grains, equivalent to a Norman penny bearing a star on one of its faces. The reintroduction of gold coinage in England after an eight-century eclipse is linked to the influence of the Crusades, growing trade contacts with Byzantium and gold-producing countries in the East, and the need for a more convenient medium for large mercantile payments than silver.	England
1257	Monetary policy	With the introduction of Henry III's gold penny, England establishes the practice of fixing the value of gold coin relative to the silver coins then in general circulation, making both legal tender at the officially established ratio, with the new gold penny set at 20 silver sterlings, producing a ratio of 10 to 1 between silver and gold. The coin is called a penny because that word is at the time the general term for money in England, equivalent to the French *denier*.	England
1324	Background	Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, passes through Cairo during his hajj to Mecca accompanied by a camel train of thousands of people and nearly a hundred camels, distributing so much gold that he depresses the price of gold in Egypt for over a decade, causing prolonged inflation across the region.	Mali Empire
1324 (July)	Background	Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire from 1312 to 1337, passes through Cairo during his hajj to Mecca, reportedly accompanied by a camel train of thousands of people and nearly a hundred camels. He gives away so much gold that its value in Egypt falls. The contemporary Arab historian Chihab Al-Umari records that before the visit the mithqal never fell below 25 dirhams and was generally above that, while about twelve years later it does not exceed 22 dirhams, and the gold would stay cheap in Egypt for over a decade, causing inflation.	Mali Empire
1343	Coinage	Following consultations with jewelers, merchants, moneyers, and exchange dealers, England introduces a gold florin modeled on the Flemish florin and equivalent to the *petit florin* of Florence, weighing 108 grains at 23 carat 3½ grains fineness, valued at 6 shillings or 1½ solids. The agreement authorizes three denominations: the florin, the half-florin, and the quarter-florin, intended to circulate as the common gold coin of both England and Flanders.	England
1344	Monetary policy	England's second attempt at gold coinage fails when it becomes apparent that gold pieces are being valued at the official rate of 1 to 12.61 against silver — a ratio copied from France — which undervalues gold relative to silver, causing gold coins to be withdrawn from circulation. A proclamation of July 1344 declares that gold pieces will henceforth only be accepted with the free consent of both parties, and a subsequent proclamation limits their acceptance to their simple metallic value.	England
1370–1420	Background	Mining in Europe becomes so intensive that mines are almost emptied, and a scarcity of bullion follows that would become known as the Great Bullion Famine. The shortage follows the return of gold coinage to western Europe in the 13th century and comes shortly before England's first gold sovereign.	Europe
1453	Background	The Eastern Roman Empire falls, ending the continuous circulation of Constantine's gold aureus, from which many medieval and modern European gold coins descend, marking the close of a monetary tradition stretching back over a thousand years.	Byzantine Empire
1489	Coinage	The first gold sovereign is struck under the reign of Henry VII. England had tried gold coinage before, with the gold penny of 1257 and the florin of 1343 to 1344, without lasting success alongside silver. Britain would adopt a de facto gold standard in 1717.	England
1492	Background	Following the European discovery of the Americas, Hernán Cortés leads a Spanish expedition that conquers an immense territory stretching from the southern United States through Mexico to Central America within two years, defeating the Aztecs and plundering their accumulated gold treasure, enriching Spain, Portugal, France, and England through the exploitation of mines formerly worked by indigenous peoples and fundamentally altering the global gold supply.	Americas
1502	Mining	The settlement expedition of Nicolás de Ovando arrives on Hispaniola, beginning the first colonial society on the island, which is focused on searching for and exploiting the gold of the Cibao valley. Immigration is massive until 1510, when the island's gold production peaks. The mining rests on the forced labor of the Taíno, whose numbers collapse, and production would decline with the loss of that labor force and the depletion of the deposits.	Hispaniola
1520	Background	After Moctezuma II is killed, most of the gold of the Aztecs is shipped to Spain. The Aztecs regard gold as the product of the gods, calling it literally "god excrement" (teocuitlatl in Nahuatl), and reports of gold ornaments displayed in great profusion by peoples of Mesoamerica, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia had fueled much of the European exploration of the Americas.	Americas
1695	Mining	The Brazilian Gold Rush begins in Minas Gerais. In the 18th century it would supply significant quantities of gold to Portugal and Britain, which helped Britain extend its gold standard after 1717.	Brazil
1717	Monetary policy	Britain slips into a de facto gold standard when Isaac Newton, master of the Royal Mint, sets the silver price of gold too low. The gold guinea is fixed at 21 shillings, a gold-silver ratio of 15.2 that is higher than prevailing ratios in Continental Europe, so full-weight silver coins go out of circulation. The accident would prove consequential because, as Britain became the world's leading financial and commercial power in the 19th century, other states would increasingly adopt its monetary system.	Britain
1783	Science	Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele reports that gold dissolves in the presence of cyanide ions and oxygen (or air). The reaction would not be exploited commercially until the late 19th century, when it became the basis of the cyanide process.	Sweden
1803	Mining	Gold is documented for the first time in the United States at the Reed Gold Mine near Georgeville, North Carolina. The discovery precedes the 19th-century gold rushes that would follow whenever large deposits were found, starting with the first major US gold strike at Dahlonega, Georgia.	United States
1848	Background	Gold is discovered by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill on the American River near Coloma, California, triggering the California Gold Rush and drawing 40,000 miners to the region within a year, with a further 6,000 covered wagons making the overland journey at the cost of approximately 5,000 lives, fundamentally reshaping the monetary gold supply of the United States.	United States
1849	Mining	The fastest clipper ships cut the travel time from New York to San Francisco from seven months to four months during the California Gold Rush. The shorter voyage lowers the cost of reaching the goldfields and helps draw fortune seekers from around the world.	United States
1850	Background	California is admitted to the Union. The gold rush had brought an influx of miners and new wealth to a sparsely governed land, and the need for new laws led to the state's rapid entry. The rush would drive California's industrialization, as businesses sprang up to serve the larger population and financial and political institutions arose to handle the increased wealth.	United States
1851	Mining	Edward Hargraves, an Australian prospector who had taken part in the California Gold Rush and noticed geological similarities between California and his homeland, discovers gold near Bathurst, New South Wales, starting the Australian gold rushes. The rush draws 357,000 people to Australia in 1852 alone and does much to accelerate the settlement of the continent. The best-known of the rushes would be the Victorian gold rush.	Australia
1852	Background	The discovery of gold by Edward Hargraves, an Australian prospector who had previously participated in the California Gold Rush and noticed geological similarities between California and his homeland, draws 357,000 people to Australia in 1852 alone, doing much to accelerate the settlement of the continent.	Australia
1862	Monetary policy	Paper money is made legal tender in the United States as a fiat currency, not convertible on demand at a fixed rate into gold or silver. The notes, called greenbacks, follow inflationary Civil War finance that had left the government unable to pay obligations in specie. Congress would then aim to restore the pre-war gold price through deflation, and the United States would be effectively on the gold standard by 1879.	United States
1862	Monetary policy	The New York Gold Exchange is established in a basement on New Street, to create an open market for transactions between gold and the government-created paper currency, the greenback. Gold trading had been banned at the New York Stock Exchange, which viewed it as unpatriotic wartime speculation. Confederate victories raised the price of gold relative to the greenback, so the exchange's traders would sing "Dixie" when news of one arrived, and Abraham Lincoln at one point expressed the wish that every gold speculator "had his devilish head shot off". The exchange would close in 1897.	United States
1864 (June)	Monetary policy	Congress, angered by speculation in gold, passes an act on 17 June prohibiting gold trades anywhere except brokers' offices, which briefly shuts down the exchange. Unregulated street trading continues, speculation is not stopped, and the price of gold relative to greenbacks rises, so Congress repeals the law two weeks later. The exchange reopens as the New York Gold Exchange and is incorporated on 14 October 1864, in a facility known as the Gold Room.	United States
1865	Monetary policy	Edward "E. B." Ketchum of Ketchum, Son & Co. forges more than $1.5 million in gold certificates issued against deposits at the Bank of New York and flees. The certificates had been set up by brokers after a series of robberies of gold, and had made the bank the second-largest holder of gold in the country after the federal government. This and similar episodes prompt the creation of a Gold Exchange Bank with daily account reserve statements and other anti-fraud measures. The exchange also becomes part of the New York Stock Exchange this year.	United States
1870	Mining	The Lapland gold rush starts in the valley of the Ivalo River in Finnish Lapland. About 500 prospectors travel hundreds of kilometers by ski, on foot, or by boat during the spring and summer. To regulate the rush, the government of the Grand Duchy of Finland, then part of Imperial Russia, sets up the Kultala Crown Station, where officials issue licenses, buy gold, and keep order. At its largest the station has about 600 people. The rush lasts only a few years and is small next to the major 19th-century rushes, but it has great local significance.	Finland
1872	Background	The largest gold nugget ever discovered up to that time is found in Australia, weighing 160 pounds, emblematic of the extraordinary richness of Australian gold deposits that make the country one of the world's leading gold producers.	Australia
1873 (July)	Monetary policy	The German Empire enacts its Coinage Act of 9 July, making the mark the unit of account of a new gold currency that is to replace the state currencies. It follows a law of 4 December 1871 that had named one tenth of a new imperial gold coin a mark. The reform uses the 5 billion gold francs demanded from France after the Franco-Prussian War, but the indemnity does not by itself explain the choice of gold: German policymakers also feared monetary isolation if France abandoned bimetallism while Germany stayed on silver. France completes payment on 5 September 1873 and the Paris mint limits silver coinage the next day. Germany's switch would prompt other European countries to adopt gold in the 1870s, the Latin Monetary Union suspends unlimited silver 5-franc coinage in 1873, and the gold standard becomes the basis of the international monetary system after 1873.	Germany
1877	Coinage	The Doppelkronensache is discovered in Lübeck. The affected 20-mark coins had been reduced after minting but remain above the legal minimum weight, so they pass the checks used at public cash offices. The case shows how the pass-weight rule, which kept scales and testing devices in constant use under a gold standard with circulating coins, could be evaded.	Germany
1884	Mining	A gold rush begins in Tierra del Fuego after gold is found during the rescue of the French steamship Arctique near Cape Virgenes. Until 1906 it attracts many Chileans, Argentines, and Europeans to the archipelago.	Chile and Argentina
1886	Mining	Prospector George Harrison discovers gold on a farm near what is today Johannesburg, receiving $30 from the landowner in compensation. The discovery launches the Witwatersrand Gold Rush, and Johannesburg is founded as a result. The Witwatersrand deposits would supply a large share of the world's gold from the 1880s onward and would make South Africa a leading producer for more than a century.	South Africa
1887	Mining	John Stewart MacArthur, working with the brothers Robert and William Forrest for the Tennant Company in Glasgow, develops the MacArthur-Forrest process for extracting gold ores. Suspending the crushed ore in a cyanide solution recovers up to 96 percent of the gold. It arrives when the expansion of gold mining in the Witwatersrand had begun to slow, because the new deposits being found tended to be pyritic ores from which gold was difficult to extract.	United Kingdom
1889 (May)	Mining	United States patent 403,202, "Process of Obtaining Gold and Silver from Ores", is published for John Stewart MacArthur and the brothers William and Robert Forrest. It protects the cyanide process they had developed in 1887, which would spread from the Witwatersrand to other goldfields.	United States
1890s	Background	Prescott Jernegan runs a gold-from-seawater swindle in the United States. Claims of economical gold recovery from seawater would keep recurring, as with an English fraudster in the early 1900s, and would prove to be either mistakes or intentional deception.	United States
1890	Mining	The MacArthur-Forrest cyanide process is first used on a large scale at the Witwatersrand, leading to a boom of investment as larger gold mines are opened up. It would replace chlorination, an older process for pyritic ores in which the ore was roasted, treated with chlorine gas, and extracted to give a gold chloride solution.	South Africa
1891	Mining	The pharmacist Gilbert S. Peyton has refined the cyanide process at his Mercur Mine in Utah, which becomes described as the first mining plant in the United States to make a commercial success of the process on gold ores. It shows that the process developed in Scotland and first used at scale in South Africa also works on American ores.	United States
1893	Monetary policy	India implements a gold exchange standard, under which the local currency is not necessarily redeemable in gold but the government or central bank provides foreign remittances in gold at a fixed maximum rate, with reserves kept largely abroad. In his 1913 book Indian Currency and Finance, Keynes would describe the Indian system as widely imitated in Asia and elsewhere, and would call the gold exchange standard the predominant form of the international gold standard before the First World War. He would also cite the Netherlands, which suspended free coinage of silver in 1877, as the first crude attempt at such a standard.	India
1896	Science	The chemist Bodländer confirms that oxygen is necessary for the cyanide process, something that MacArthur had doubted, and discovers that hydrogen peroxide is formed as an intermediate. The work explains the chemistry of a process already in wide industrial use.	Germany
1896	Mining	Gold is discovered in Bonanza Creek, a tributary of the Klondike River (itself a tributary of the Yukon River), by George Carmack and his Indigenous companions Skookum Jim Mason and Tagish Charlie, triggering the Klondike Gold Rush. Some 100,000 prospectors set out for the newly founded town of Dawson, which becomes the largest town in the Yukon at the height of the rush, but only 30,000 to 40,000 arrive, as the Mounties turn back at gunpoint all those without at least a year's supply of food. Prospectors would use placer mining, dredging, and hydraulic mining in the region's streams and riverbeds.	Canada
1896	Background	A gold strike on the Klondike River, a tributary of the Yukon River, triggers the Klondike Gold Rush, with 100,000 prospectors setting out for the newly founded town of Dawson City, of whom only 30,000 to 40,000 arrive, as the North-West Mounted Police turn back at gunpoint all those without at least a year's supply of food.	Canada
1897	Monetary policy	Japan adopts a gold standard, having gained the needed gold reserves after the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894 to 1895. Moving to gold is considered vital to gain access to Western capital markets.	Japan
1897 (January)	Monetary policy	The New York Gold Exchange stops operating on 1 January, after specie resumption. Gold trading had become less profitable as the stock market grew more stable. The exchange had been the site of the Black Friday (1869) panic, when Jay Gould and James Fisk tried to corner the gold market.	United States
c. 1900	Mining	The American metallurgist Charles Washington Merrill and his engineer Thomas Bennett Crowe improve the treatment of the solution left after cyanide leaching by using vacuum and zinc dust. Their method, the Merrill–Crowe process, becomes one of the standard ways of recovering dissolved gold, alongside carbon in pulp and electrowinning.	United States
1909	Mining	The Porcupine Gold Rush begins in the area of Timmins, Ontario. The gold is embedded in the Canadian Shield, so placer mining cannot reach it and larger operations with much more expensive equipment are needed, which sets it apart from most earlier rushes. The camp would become one of the largest gold-producing regions in the world and remain active in the 21st century.	Canada
1911	Mining	Chlorination stops being used to treat pyritic gold ore at the Mount Morgan Mine in Australia, where it had remained in use until this year. The chloride process had become obsolete with the development of the cyanide process.	Australia
1914	Monetary policy	The gold specie standard ends in the United Kingdom and the rest of the British Empire with the outbreak of World War I, when Treasury notes replace the circulation of gold sovereigns and half sovereigns. It is not abolished legally: the Bank of England implements the end through appeals to patriotism, urging citizens not to redeem paper money for gold. The classical gold standard is at its peak at the end of 1913, but the war leads many countries to suspend or abandon it, and it would never return to its previous position.	United Kingdom
1919 (September)	Monetary policy	The Gold Fixing procedure originates in London, providing a daily benchmark price to the gold industry alongside prices set by trading in the gold and derivatives markets. An afternoon fixing would be introduced in 1968 to provide a price when US markets are open.	United Kingdom
1925 (May)	Monetary policy	The Gold Standard Act 1925 receives royal assent on 13 May, introducing the gold bullion standard in Britain and repealing the gold specie standard. Gold coins no longer circulate, and the authorities must sell gold on demand at a fixed price, but only in bars of about 400 troy ounces. Keynes argues against resumption, citing deflationary dangers. By fixing the price to restore the pre-war rate of US$4.86 per pound, Chancellor of the Exchequer Churchill would be argued to have caused depression, unemployment, and the 1926 general strike.	United Kingdom
1927	Science	German chemist Fritz Haber, who had researched extracting gold from seawater to help pay Germany's reparations after World War I, publishes his account of the work. Published values of 2 to 64 parts per billion had made commercial extraction seem possible, but his analysis of 4,000 water samples, averaging 0.004 parts per billion, shows it is not, and he ends the project. Measurements in 1990 would put gold in the Atlantic and Northeast Pacific at 10 to 30 parts per quadrillion, three orders of magnitude below the literature before 1988, indicating that the earlier data were contaminated.	Germany
1930s (early)	Mining	The Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party decides to reinstate the institution of prospectors, who had been banned as antisocialist elements in the second half of the 1920s. By 1933 all plans to put prospectors back to work in the field have been worked out and are implemented as rapidly as possible, which sets off a Soviet gold rush.	Soviet Union
1931 (May)	Monetary policy	A run on Creditanstalt, Austria's largest commercial bank, causes it to fail. The run spreads to Germany, whose central bank also collapses, and the Central European banking crisis leads Germany and Austria to suspend gold convertibility and impose exchange controls that summer. The crisis, together with British budgetary and political difficulties, would destroy confidence in sterling by mid-July.	Austria
1931 (September)	Monetary policy	On 19 September, speculative attacks on the pound lead the Bank of England to abandon the gold standard, ostensibly temporarily. The decision is taken abruptly and unilaterally. Loans of £50 million from American and French central banks are exhausted within weeks by gold outflows across the Atlantic. The departure has unexpectedly positive effects on the economy, since Britain can now use monetary policy to stimulate it, which would lead to greater acceptance of leaving the gold standard.	United Kingdom
1933 (March)	Monetary policy	Upon taking office, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt departs from the gold standard. By the end of 1932 the gold standard had already been abandoned as a global monetary system, and Czechoslovakia, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Switzerland would abandon it in the mid-1930s.	United States
1933 (April)	Monetary policy	After Roosevelt declares a national emergency during the Great Depression, Executive Order 6102 outlaws the "hoarding" of gold by US citizens, and gold certificates stop circulating as money. There would be only one prosecution under the order, and the federal judge John M. Woolsey would rule the order invalid because it was signed by the President, not the Secretary of the Treasury as required. Private gold ownership would be permitted again on 1 January 1975.	United States
1934	Monetary policy	The United States devalues the dollar against gold, setting the price at $35.00 per troy ounce ($0.889 per gram) from the $20.67 per troy ounce ($0.665 per gram) at which the government had long fixed it under the gold standard. The new price would prove hard to defend, and by 1961 US and European banks would act together to hold it.	United States
1941	Science	American physicists R. Sherr, K. T. Bainbridge, and H. H. Anderson report that bombarding mercury with fast neutrons transmutes it into gold, showing that all the gold isotopes produced are radioactive. Transmuting elements into gold, a long-standing aim of alchemy, had become possible only with nuclear physics, but the process would remain far too costly to be practical.	United States
1944	Monetary policy	The Bretton Woods system keeps the gold standard in a limited form, without domestic convertibility. Other countries' currencies are fixed in terms of the dollar, and central banks can exchange dollar holdings for gold at the official $35 per ounce, an option not open to firms or individuals. The International Monetary Fund is established to help with the exchange process and to help nations maintain fixed rates. The system would last until the United States ended dollar convertibility in 1971.	United States
1961	Monetary policy	Because the $35 price is becoming hard to maintain, a pool of US and European banks, the London Gold Pool, agrees to manipulate the market to prevent further currency devaluation against increased gold demand. The arrangement is an attempt to preserve gold-based currency values, and the price would begin to rise sharply only after the 1971 Nixon shock.	Europe
1969	Mining	The heap leaching method is first proposed by the United States Bureau of Mines. It would be in use by the 1970s, and becomes, with dump leaching, the main way of extracting gold from low-grade ore by leaching it with cyanide solution.	United States
1971 (August)	Monetary policy	On 15 August, the Nixon shock ends the direct convertibility of the US dollar to gold, with the United States refusing to redeem its dollars in gold. Other governments would follow in abandoning gold standards, and after the shock the price of gold begins to increase greatly.	United States
1980 (January)	Price	On 21 January, the gold price reaches a high of $850 per troy ounce ($27.33 per gram) in the London Gold Fixing. It is the peak of a period between 1968 and 2000 in which the price ranges widely, and the high would not be exceeded until 3 January 2008.	Global
1980	Science	Glenn Seaborg and colleagues transmute several thousand atoms of bismuth into gold at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. The work is a study of bismuth-209 fragmentation in relativistic nuclear collisions, which would be published in 1981.	United States
1982	Monetary policy	The U.S. Gold Commission considers a return to the gold standard but finds only minority support. Its minority report, written by Ron Paul and Lewis Lehrman, argues the case for gold.	United States
1991	Monetary policy	Confronted with a balance of payments emergency and depleted foreign currency reserves, India physically airlifts 46.91 tonnes of sovereign gold to the vaults of the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan to secure an emergency loan of $400 million. The episode would remain a symbol of economic vulnerability in Indian policy memory, and the Reserve Bank of India would later buy 200 tonnes of gold from the International Monetary Fund in 2009 and move gold back to India in 2024.	India
1997	Mining	The Bre-X scandal shows how a gold mining company with no real reserves can attract investors. Shares in fraudulent mining companies with no gold, or no prospect of finding any, would remain one of the standard scams around gold.	Canada
1999 (April)	Monetary policy	Switzerland, the last country to tie its currency to gold, ends the link when voters narrowly approve a referendum. The vote completes the abandonment of gold standards and direct convertibility that world governments began, led by the US refusal in 1971 to redeem its dollars in gold, leaving fiat currency to fill most monetary roles.	Switzerland
1999 (June)	Price	On 21 June, the gold price falls to a low of $252.90 per troy ounce ($8.13 per gram) in the London Gold Fixing, the low point of the 1968 to 2000 range that had included the 1980 high. Prices would increase rapidly from 2001.	Global
1999 (September)	Monetary policy	The Washington Agreement on Gold is signed, limiting gold sales by its central bank members to fewer than 400 tonnes a year. European central banks, such as the Bank of England and the Swiss National Bank, are the main sellers during the period. It would be renewed in later years, and the article says it was not extended in 2019.	Europe
1999	Monetary policy	European central banks affirm in the first Central Bank Gold Agreement that gold will continue to be an important part of their monetary reserves, and cap gold sales at 400 tonnes per year over the next five years. It comes in the same year that Switzerland ends the last tie between a currency and gold, and shows that central banks would keep holding gold as a reserve asset after the gold standard.	Europe
2000	Mining	The Baia Mare gold mine in northern Romania suffers a tailings spill, the Baia Mare cyanide spill, releasing approximately 100,000 cubic meters of waste water contaminated with heavy metal sludge and up to 120 long tons of cyanide into the Tisza River. The spill shows the danger that cyanide, the dominant chemical used to extract gold from low-grade ore since its introduction in the late 1800s, poses to rivers when it is not properly contained.	Romania
2004	Mining	The "No Dirty Gold" campaign, run by Earthworks with a number of campaigning partners, is established to ensure that gold mining operations respect human rights and the environment, calling for changes in gold mining techniques and processes.	Global
2006 (March)	Mining	The European Parliament and the Council adopt Directive 2006/21/EC on the management of waste from extractive industries, in response to the 2000 Baia Mare cyanide spill. It requires the concentration of weak acid dissociable cyanide in tailings ponds to be reduced to the lowest possible level using best available techniques. Mines started after 1 May 2008 may not discharge waste above 10 ppm of it, while older mines may release up to 50 ppm at first, falling to 25 ppm in 2013 and 10 ppm by 2018. Operators must also provide financial guarantees for cleanup after closure.	European Union
2007	Mining	China, producing 276 tonnes, overtakes South Africa as the world's largest gold producer, the first time since 1905 that South Africa is not the largest.	China
2008 (January)	Price	On 3 January, the gold price sets a new maximum of $865.35 per troy ounce, exceeding the 1980 high for the first time. Another record of $1,023.50 per troy ounce ($32.91 per gram) would follow on 17 March 2008.	Global
2009	Monetary policy	The International Monetary Fund sells 13 million ounces (403 tonnes) of gold from 2009 to 2010, including 200 tonnes to India, 10 tonnes each to Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and 2 tonnes to Mauritius. It follows earlier IMF sales in 1976 to 1980 (50 million ounces) and 1999 to 2000 (14 million ounces). After the sales the IMF holds 2,814.1 tonnes.	Global
2009 (November)	Mining	The Dompoase mine collapse in Ghana kills 18 workers, in what is described as the worst mining disaster in Ghanaian history. Ghana's galamsey miners are estimated at 20,000 to 50,000, and the collapse illustrates the risks faced by artisanal miners, who number an estimated 10 to 15 million worldwide.	Ghana
2010 (May)	Price	Gold futures hit a closing record on 11 May as investors fret over a rescue deal amid the European Union debt crisis, which prompts further purchases of gold as a safe asset.	Europe
2011 (February)	Mining	Dual "Fairtrade" and "Fairmined" certification for gold is launched across the United Kingdom on 14 February, a joint scheme between the Fairtrade Foundation and the Association for Responsible Mining. The Fairmined mark is meant to ensure that the gold has been extracted in a fair and responsible manner, and the scheme is an early market-based response to the human rights and environmental problems of gold mining.	United Kingdom
2011 (March)	Monetary policy	The Utah legislature passes a bill to accept federally issued gold and silver coins as legal tender to pay taxes. The coins were already legal tender for taxes, though the market price of their metal content exceeds their monetary value. Similar legislation is under consideration in other U.S. states, and Arizona would pass a comparable bill in 2013 that the governor vetoed.	United States
2011 (August)	Price	On 23 August, spot gold hits an all-time high of $1,913.50 per troy ounce, having more than quintupled against the US dollar since April 2001. Investor concern over unrest in North Africa and the Middle East during the Arab Spring had already pushed it to a record $1,432.57 on 1 March 2011.	Global
2012 (January)	Monetary policy	Venezuela completes the move of 160 tonnes of gold bars, valued at about $9 billion, back home from banks in the United States, Europe, and Canada. The operation was ordered by President Hugo Chávez in August 2011 and overseen by central bank chair Nelson Merentes. Before it, the central bank held about 211 of its 365 tonnes abroad. The government's later inability to withdraw gold from London would show the risk that offshore custody can carry.	Venezuela
2013 (January)	Monetary policy	The Deutsche Bundesbank announces a plan to repatriate 300 tonnes of gold from the United States and 374 tonnes from France by 2020, so that at least half of its official gold reserves are stored in Frankfurt. The gold in the United States had been acquired by West Germany during trade surpluses before 1970, and was left there largely for fear of a Soviet invasion. The plan would be completed in 2017, three years ahead of schedule.	Germany
2013 (June)	Science	Astronomers report an kilonova powered by the r-process (rapid neutron capture) associated with the short-hard gamma-ray burst GRB 130603B. Supernova nucleosynthesis had long been considered the main source of gold, but the report supports neutron star collisions as producers of significant quantities of gold. Direct spectroscopic confirmation is still missing at this point.	Universe
2014	Monetary policy	The Dutch central bank, De Nederlandsche Bank, returns 122.5 tonnes of gold from New York to Amsterdam, saying that it felt that in times of financial crisis it was better to have the gold near at hand. It is part of a localized movement among several European states in 2014 to bring gold stored abroad back home.	Netherlands
2014 (September)	Mining	Charles Jeannes, CEO of Goldcorp, the world's largest gold miner by market capitalization, states that peak gold will be reached in either 2014 or 2015. Barrick's CEO had made a similar claim in 2009, saying production peaked in 2000. World production would nonetheless keep setting records each year from 2011 through 2015, reaching 3,100 tonnes in 2015 and staying flat in early estimates for 2016, so the claims show how uncertain forecasts of supply are.	Global
2014 (November)	Monetary policy	Swiss voters reject the popular initiative "Save our Swiss Gold" by 77.3 percent on 30 November. The initiative, organized by members of the Swiss People's Party, would have required the Swiss National Bank to hold at least 20 percent of its assets in gold, permanently banned gold sales, and required the repatriation of all gold stored abroad. The bank and the federal government opposed it as a threat to monetary policy independence, and the vote left Switzerland's storage allocation unchanged.	Switzerland
2015 (May)	Monetary policy	Austria's central bank, the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, announces a restructuring of its gold storage policy, citing risk diversification after warnings from the Court of Audit about concentration risk. At the time it holds 80 percent of its 280 tonnes in London, 17 percent in Austria, and 3 percent in Switzerland. The repatriation would begin in October 2015 and be spread over five years.	Austria
2015 (September)	Mining	Human Rights Watch publishes a report on hazardous child labor in small-scale gold mining in the Philippines, on 29 September. It finds thousands of children working in unstable pits about 25 meters deep that could collapse at any moment, mining gold underwater with oxygen tubes in their mouths, and processing it with mercury, with risk of irreversible mercury poisoning.	Philippines
2016	Science	Astronomers report that several stars in the ultra-faint dwarf galaxy Reticulum II are strongly enriched in r-process elements, the family of heavy elements that includes gold. The enrichment points to a single rare event, such as a neutron star merger, rather than the frequent supernovae that had long been considered the main source. The finding would be followed in 2017 by direct observation of heavy elements from a merger.	Universe
2017 (August)	Monetary policy	The Bundesbank announces that it has completed its gold storage plan, moving 674 tonnes to Frankfurt from New York and Paris around three years ahead of schedule. Half of its reserves are now held in Germany, with the rest in custody at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (37 percent) and the Bank of England (13 percent).	Germany
2017 (August)	Science	Electromagnetic observatories directly observe the spectroscopic signatures of heavy elements, including gold, during the GW170817 neutron star merger, detected in gravitational waves by LIGO and Virgo. The observation confirms mergers as a source of gold after years of only indirect detection, and later estimates suggest the event generates between 3 and 13 Earth masses of gold, enough that mergers might account for most of the element in the universe.	Universe
2019 (April)	Monetary policy	The Romanian Parliament passes a bill requiring the National Bank of Romania to keep no more than 5 percent of its gold reserves abroad, which would mean repatriating about 56 tonnes, most of it held at the Bank of England. The governor, Mugur Isărescu, argues that gold in a liquid hub like London supports the country's credit rating and can serve as collateral in a crisis. The Constitutional Court finds the law constitutional in June, but President Klaus Iohannis does not promulgate it, and the gold stays where it was.	Romania
2019	Mining	Reuters publishes an investigation into the smuggling of billions of dollars' worth of gold out of Africa through the United Arab Emirates. It compares UAE import records with the exports declared by African states, and finds that the UAE imported gold worth $15.1 billion from Africa in 2016, some 446 tons, much of it unrecorded by the producing states, so no taxes were paid on it. African industrial mining firms say they exported no gold to the UAE, which indicates that the imports came from other, illegal sources.	Africa
2019 (December)	Monetary policy	News reports reveal that the National Bank of Poland has secretly flown 100 tonnes of gold, some 8,000 bars, from the Bank of England to Warsaw and Wrocław in eight night-time operations since July. Part of the country's 80-tonne reserve had been evacuated across three continents in 1939 to avoid seizure by German forces and later split among the Bank of England, the New York Fed, and the Bank of Canada.	Poland
2020 (August)	Background	Israeli archaeologists discover a trove of 425 rare early Islamic gold coins near the central city of Yavne, dated to the late 9th century and issued under the Abbasid Caliphate, about 1,100 years earlier. The find offers physical evidence of the Islamic gold coinage that circulated while Europe was minting little gold.	Israel
2024 (April)	Monetary policy	Zimbabwe introduces the Zimbabwe Gold (ZiG), backed by US$400 million and 2,522 kg of gold, to tackle inflation. The Zimdollar had crashed from US$1:ZWL2.50 at introduction to an official US$1:ZWL30,672.42 on 5 April 2024. It makes Zimbabwe the first country in the 21st century to back its currency with gold, though the backing is a mix of gold and foreign currency rather than a full gold standard.	Zimbabwe
2024 (May)	Monetary policy	The Reserve Bank of India moves 100 tonnes of gold from the United Kingdom to its vaults in India, in its largest such relocation in modern times. A further transfer of a similar size would be reported later that year. Together they would raise the share of India's gold held domestically to about 77 percent and reverse the 1991 airlift of gold abroad.	India
2025	Monetary policy	Florida passes a law making gold and silver legal tender within the state, which Governor Ron DeSantis presents as giving people "financial freedom".	United States
2025 (April)	Science	Researchers publish an analysis of the 2004 giant flare of the magnetar SGR 1806-20, finding direct evidence of r-process nucleosynthesis in its delayed MeV emission. Neutron star mergers alone could not explain gold in older stars, because mergers occur late in galactic history and about once every 100,000 years, so the finding that giant flares from magnetars also produce heavy elements resolves this timing paradox, since magnetars existed earlier and flare more often.	Universe
2025 (October)	Price	On 7 October, gold rises above $4,000 per troy ounce for the first time. It is up more than 50 percent over the year, which the Wall Street Journal describes as the largest yearly increase since 1979. CME Group attributes the rise to a weakening dollar, rising Treasury yields, stubborn inflation, strong central bank demand, and geopolitical risks.	Global

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