Gold and central banks: the silent de-dollarisation counted in tonnes

While attention is on rates and inflation, a slower shift is playing out in central banks’ vaults. Since 2022, they have been buying gold at a pace unseen since the end of the Bretton Woods system, and they kept it up in 2025 despite record prices. The metal has quietly overtaken the euro to become the world’s second reserve asset, behind only the dollar. This is not a speculative rush, it is a strategic reallocation, partly driven by the fear of sanctions, and partly invisible. Here is that move put into data, with its figures, its blind spots and its limits.

A central bank holds reserves to defend its currency, settle its trade and guard against shocks. For decades, these reserves were mostly made of currencies, the dollar in the lead, placed in US Treasury bonds. Gold, judged cumbersome and yieldless, had been relegated to the rank of relic. Since the mid-2010s, and abruptly since 2022, this hierarchy is reversing. The metal is becoming a leading monetary asset again, not for its yield, but for what it protects against.

The return of gold to reserves

The scale of the move reads in the annual flows. Between 2010 and 2021, central banks bought on average 473 tonnes of gold a year. Then the pace doubled: 1,136 tonnes in 2022, the highest level since records began in 1950, followed by 1,051 tonnes in 2023 and 1,045 tonnes in 2024, three consecutive years above the thousand-tonne mark. In 2025, purchases slowed to 863 tonnes, down 21% year on year and the lowest since 2021, but this figure remains close to double the average of the previous decade, and is still the fourth-largest annual expansion ever recorded.

This 2025 slowdown is explained mainly by the surge in prices, which made buyers more cautious, without denting their underlying interest. The fourth quarter confirmed it, with a rebound to 230 tonnes. In all, central banks now hold around 36,000 tonnes of gold, a level close to the peak of 38,000 tonnes reached in the mid-1960s, at the apogee of Bretton Woods. The symbol is strong: official vaults are returning toward the highs of an era when the value of currencies was directly backed by the metal.

Who is buying

The move is concentrated, and largely led by emerging economies. In 2025, Poland was the top buyer for the second year running, with 102 tonnes added, taking its reserves to 550 tonnes, about 28% of its total reserves, its governor having mentioned a target of 700 tonnes. Kazakhstan added 52 tonnes, its strongest annual rise since 1993. The Czech Republic bought gold for the thirty-fourth consecutive month, reaching 72 tonnes, with a target of 100 tonnes in 2028. Turkey added 27 tonnes, and Brazil returned to the market with 43 tonnes, taking its reserves to 172 tonnes.

China’s case deserves particular attention. The People’s Bank of China declared a rise of 27 tonnes in 2025, taking its official reserves to 2,306 tonnes, a little under 9% of its total reserves, and its fourteenth consecutive month of declared purchases. But these official figures are widely suspected of understating reality, several independent analyses pointing to far higher holdings. Beyond the biggest buyers, a long tail of institutions kept adding gold in small quantities. The World Gold Council’s annual survey confirms this dynamic: 95% of surveyed central banks expect a rise in global gold reserves over twelve months, a record, and 43% plan to increase their own holdings, against 29% a year earlier, none anticipating a reduction.

Gold, the world’s second reserve asset

The most spectacular shift is one of level, not flow. According to the European Central Bank’s report on the international role of the euro, published in June 2025 on end-2024 data, gold represented about 20% of global official reserves at market value, overtaking the euro for the first time, at about 16%, and sitting just behind the dollar, at about 46%. The trajectory is clear: gold’s share was only 11.6% in 2018. Combined with record prices, the accumulation propelled the metal to the rank of second reserve asset in the world.

A necessary precision imposes itself here, because two measures coexist and are often confused. The ECB statistic covers total reserves, currencies and gold included, and it is in this frame that gold overtakes the euro. The IMF’s COFER base, for its part, measures only the currency composition of FX reserves, excluding gold: in that perimeter, the dollar still weighs around 58%, against nearly 70% in 2000. Both readings say the same underlying trend, the slow erosion of the dollar’s place, but they do not refer to the same denominator. The nuance matters, and it distinguishes a gradual reallocation from a collapse that did not happen.

Why: diversification and geopolitical shield

The engine of this accumulation has changed nature. Historically, the price of gold moved inversely to real rates, rising when inflation ate away at currencies. This relationship broke after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Now, the metal follows the logic of geopolitical risk more than that of inflation alone. The ECB’s survey of central banks confirms it: two-thirds hold gold to diversify, and two-fifths to protect against a geopolitical risk.

The deep reason holds in one word, sanctions. A US Treasury bond can be frozen, access to the interbank payment network can be cut, but a tonne of gold stored in a national vault cannot be confiscated remotely. Gold is an asset with no counterparty and no issuer, independent of any political authority. The ECB notes, moreover, that in five of the ten largest annual rises in gold’s share of a country’s reserves since 1999, that country had been sanctioned in the same year or the previous one. Russia accumulated more than half of the rise in its official gold reserves since 2014, in full de-dollarisation policy after the annexation of Crimea. Turkey, India and China have, between them, added more than 600 tonnes since the end of 2021. Gold has become again an insurance against being cast out of the dollar-dominated financial system.

The blind spot: opaque purchases

All this runs into a measurement problem, and it is precisely this journal’s terrain. A considerable share of purchases escapes official declaration. For 2025, the gap between the estimates of specialist firms and the publicly reported data suggests that about 57% of central-bank purchases stayed opaque. In other words, some institutions add gold to their reserves without declaring it immediately, a recurring practice in recent years, often to avoid disturbing the market or to preserve strategic room.

This opacity has a direct consequence: the real reallocation move toward gold is probably larger than the public figures say, and its mapping remains incomplete. China is the most discussed example, its official declarations looking cautious against independent estimates. Making this hidden share visible is measuring more accurately the real speed of diversification away from the dollar.

The limits of the narrative

The point remains not to over-interpret. The dollar is not dethroned. It still weighs about 46% of total reserves and 58% of FX reserves alone, and it still dominates global trade, debt and the funding markets described in our series on the plumbing of the dollar. Gold, despite its rise, remains a distant second. The buying pace, moreover, slowed 21% in 2025, and prices above $4,000 an ounce could keep tempering demand. The metal pays no yield, costs to store and insure, and the ECB itself notes that its supply could respond elastically to sustained demand, via the stocks already above ground.

This is therefore a gradual diversification, driven by caution and geopolitics, not a sudden monetary shift. It is exactly the nuance we develop in our analysis de-dollarisation, narrative versus numbers, which extends our work on the dollar’s international role and its offshore markets. The right reading is neither the triumphalism of the end of the dollar, nor the denial of a real move. It is a slow shift, massive in cumulative terms, partially invisible, and which says less about a new faith in gold than about a growing distrust of a reserve system that can be frozen with a stroke of the pen.

The lasting lesson is here. When dozens of central banks start, year after year, to prefer a yieldless asset to the debt of the world’s leading power, they are not expressing a market bet, but an insurance premium against political risk. The price of this insurance is counted in tonnes, and much of it is paid in silence.

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Primary sources: World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends, full year 2025 and monthly central-bank statistics (net purchases of 863 tonnes in 2025, 2010-2021 average of 473 tonnes, records of 1,136 tonnes in 2022, 1,051 in 2023 and 1,045 in 2024, unreported share of about 57%, annual central-bank survey); European Central Bank, “The international role of the euro” (June 2025) and the box “Gold demand: the role of the official sector and geopolitics” (gold’s share at about 20% of official reserves end 2024, ahead of the euro, behind the dollar; link between sanctions and accumulation); International Monetary Fund, COFER base (dollar share of FX reserves) and International Financial Statistics; Arslanalp, Eichengreen and Simpson-Bell, “Gold as international reserves: a barbarous relic no more?” (2023). Figures and dates verified one by one; reported data are subject to revision and to a share of unreported purchases.