Investment
It starts with a decision: Entry ($50), Standard ($500), or Premium ($5,000). You fund it via MTN Mobile Money, a GCB bank transfer, or a Visa card, and choose which open pool to join from the Pool Explorer.
Your capital doesn't buy an abstract share — it buys a claim on a specific quantity of gold that a specific pool is about to procure.
Pool Funding
Your investment joins a pool with other investors, all funding the same procurement run. The pool's Funding Progress bar — visible on its Pool Explorer page — ticks up in real time as more capital arrives.
Once a pool reaches 90% of its target, it triggers: the investor roster locks, and PRC Group begins executing procurement against the raised capital.
Procurement
PRC Group buys gold directly from GoldBod-licensed artisanal small-scale mining (ASM) operators in the pool's designated region — Ashanti, Western, or Central. Every supplier's GoldBod licence tier and MinCom concession ID is verified before the first gram changes hands.
This is the step that makes GoldPool different from a paper gold product: real capital buys real, freshly-mined gold from a named, licensed, auditable source.
Transport
Procured gold is weighed and sealed on-site, then moved under documented chain-of-custody from the concession area to a GoldBod-approved assay centre. Every handoff is logged — supplier, weight, seal number, timestamp.
This is the least glamorous stage and the most important one for traceability: it's the paper (and digital) trail that lets an Entry Pool investor in $50 verify their gold's origin as rigorously as a Premium Pool investor in $5,000.
GoldBod Assay
At the assay centre, the gold is tested for purity and precisely weighed. This determines the actual value of what was procured — the number that everything downstream (returns, holdings, certificates) is built on.
A GoldBod assay certificate is issued and attached to the pool's record — the same certificate you can view from that pool's page in the Pool Explorer.
Refining & Smelting
Assayed gold is smelted into standardised bar form — the shape it needs to be in to be resold wholesale or physically redeemed. Premium Pool gold is smelted exclusively from mercury-free, MIIF SSMIP-certified "Gold Katcha" processing sources.
From this point, the pool's individual supplier batches become a single, homogenous bar — though the batch-level procurement records remain on file for the pool's full audit trail.
Vault
Smelted bars move into secure custody. This is where your gold physically sits while you decide whether to hold, resell, or redeem — and it's the stage that generates the platform's $12/month vaulting fee.
Founding Members (the platform's first 100 investors) receive 3 months of free vaulting as part of their welcome benefits.
Holding Certificate
Your ownership share of the vaulted gold is recorded as a token on GoldPool's Hyperledger Fabric blockchain — an immutable, timestamped record of exactly how many grams you own and when that ownership was established.
This token is what generates your digital holding certificate, visible in the Investor Portal under Certificates.
Portfolio Update
The moment your holding certificate is issued, your Investor Portal dashboard updates — Current Holdings, Portfolio Value, and Gold Holdings (in grams) all reflect the new position, alongside real-time XAU/USD pricing.
This is the step where the physical journey and the digital experience reconnect: everything before this point happened in the real world, and everything from here is what you actually see and interact with.
Resale & Redemption
At maturity, you choose: resell your share on the wholesale gold market for a cash payout, or elect physical redemption and take delivery of the gold itself. Either way, the platform's 2% transaction fee applies, and payout is distributed within 5 business days.
Resale proceeds and redemption elections both close the loop back to stage one — most investors reinvest at least part of a completed pool's return into a new one.