SoylentNews

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

Blockchain - or distributed ledger - technology keeps track of and authenticates a continuously growing list of transaction data, which is secured by a global network of computers and is virtually impossible to be tampered with or revised.

The gold would still physically reside with the Mint but could be converted to a physical delivery later. This is fairly standard practice. The Bank Of England used to just wheel a pallet from one side of a vault to another when it changed ownership. The idea seems to be to lower the cost of trading gold which has traditional involved a lot of middle layers who add margins and push up the price.