Every year, an estimated $35 billion worth of gold leaves Africa without a single document attached to it. No record. No name. No chain of custody. By the time that gold reaches a refinery in Dubai or Mumbai, it has changed hands four or five times. At each step, someone adds a layer of paperwork. By the final step, the paperwork looks legitimate. The gold looks clean. Nobody lied. Nobody verified either. This is the problem the industry has spent two decades trying to solve — from the top down. Refineries built compliance departments. Traders signed responsible sourcing pledges. Certification schemes were created, audited, and updated. And still, the gold keeps moving without a trail. The break does not happen at the refinery. It happens at the first transaction. The moment a miner hands over gold with nothing but a handshake. That is where the record should start. That is where it never does. Every system built to fix this has been designed for the institutions at the top of the chain — refineries, banks, regulators. None of them have been built for the person at the bottom — the miner who dug it out of the ground. The result is predictable. Compliance gets retrofitted onto a chain that was never designed for it. It looks good on paper. It does not work in practice. The infrastructure gap is not at the top of the gold supply chain. It is at the base. Until that changes, the problem does not change. Bhavik Korat is the CEO of Gold Orbit — building gold supply chain infrastructure across Africa, India, UAE, and LATAM. From Mines to Miles.