The hidden ₹7,000-crore engine behind India’s digital gold

Powering this shift is SafeGold, a Mumbai-based startup that provides the infrastructure for gold purchases on apps such as PhonePe, CRED, JioFinance, Amazon, Tanishq, BharatPe, Jupiter and MobiKwik. It claims to process 3.7 million transactions a day and about 1 tonne of gold a month across partner and direct channels.

“Nine years ago, you couldn’t just sit at home and buy or sell gold. What we sought to do was create a way for customers to get the benefit of physical gold savings with the efficiency of a digital layer,” said Rhea Chaterji, co-founder and chief operating officer of SafeGold, in an interview.

SafeGold’s growth mirrors a wider surge in app-based gold buying. Indians had accumulated about 45 tonnes of digital gold worth roughly ₹55,000 crore by 2025, while monthly UPI-linked purchases rose from more than 103 million transactions in September 2025 to nearly 116 million in October, according to a report by a digital bullion platform Augmont.

SafeGold is not just a direct-to-consumer app but largely a business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) infrastructure layer that enables digital gold purchases within other apps via APIs. The founder said such partnerships account for about 90% of its revenue.

However, its growing business—nearly ₹7,000 crore in revenue in 2024-25—in a market dominated by a handful of providers, including its rivals MMTC-PAMP and Augmont, remains outside the Reserve Bank of India and Securities and Exchange Board of India’s investor-protection framework.

Self-regulation protects

While Sebi’s November 2025 caution on digital gold highlighted precisely that long-standing gap, Mint flagged the same earlier, noting in 2022 that digital gold and products built on top of it, such as gold leasing, remained unregulated, leaving investors with limited formal recourse if something went wrong.

SafeGold’s response to this regulatory grey area has been to rely on self-imposed safeguards, including appointing independent trustees and vault operators, and building regular audit processes into the product.

Operationally, Chaterji said, the system treats a micro purchase and a large one the same way. “You could buy ₹100 or ₹1 lakh in digital gold, and it’s the same."

An independent custodian, Brinks, holds the physical metal in its vaults, while an independent trustee, Vistra, controls the customer collection account. Every rupee first lands in the trustee‑controlled bank account; only after Vistra checks daily vault reports from Brinks and reconciles money, transactions and metal does it release funds to SafeGold’s own operating accounts.

Chaterji also said that SafeGold runs a pooled vault model rather than tagging specific bars to each customer. “It’s not that if you hold one gramme, there will be one gramme specifically as a unit with a number that has been allocated to you,” she said. Instead, if customers have transacted 100 kilogrammes cumulatively in a day, there must be at least 100kg in the vault, and each user has a clearly defined entitlement in the ledger.

The company reported ₹6,866.57 crore in revenue from operations in 2024-25, against total expenses of about ₹6,865 crore, leading to a net loss of ₹12.2 crore, compared with ₹8.76 crore a year ago, even as earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (Ebitda) turned positive at about ₹2 crore.

A large part of that expense base came from purchases of stock-in-trade at ₹6,802.03 crore, along with ₹6.66 crore in inventory change. The near-match between revenue and expenses reflects the company’s model: it books the full gold sale value as revenue and the procurement cost as expense because it acts as principal in the transaction.

But it's not a substitute

Lawyers Mint spoke with said the issue is not whether digital-gold platforms have created private safeguards such as trustees and vault custodians, but whether such arrangements can stand in for a formal regulatory framework. Gold, whether bought physically or online, is still largely addressed under consumer law rather than treated as a supervised financial product on the lines of stocks, mutual funds, or debt instruments, leaving a grey zone around digital gold.

Anu Tiwari, partner and head of fintech and financial services regulatory practice at Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas, said gold, “digital or otherwise”, is currently governed under consumer laws and not as a financial-services product regulated by the Sebi or the RBI.

Akshat Pande, managing partner at Alpha Partners, said trustee-led models may offer some comfort, but cannot replace statute-backed oversight.

“A trustee-based model offers a degree of contractual and fiduciary protection, but it is not a substitute for statutory oversight,” he said. “The presence of physical, vaulted gold does mitigate operational risks like misallocation or non-backing, but it does not eliminate legal risks, especially around insolvency, enforceability of beneficial ownership, segregation of customer interests and dispute resolution.”

Pande said the current regime has created an uneven market by drawing a distinction between Sebi-regulated intermediaries and unregulated consumer platforms. In recent years, stockbrokers and Sebi-registered investment advisers have been told not to offer, advise on, or facilitate transactions in unregulated products such as digital gold.

But the same product has continued to scale through payments and fintech platforms such as PhonePe, Paytm, Google Pay, Jar and others that are not distributing it as Sebi-regulated market intermediaries.

On regulation, Pande said India could either classify digital gold as a security, regulate it as a commodity-backed product, or create a bespoke regime. “The most pragmatic path would be a hybrid or standalone framework that addresses custody, audit, redemption, disclosure and platform accountability, essentially regulating the wrapper rather than just the underlying asset,” he said.