They say all that glitters isn’t gold, and that took on a whole new meaning this month when a US fusion startup claimed it had made gold from mercury.
Instead of chemical tricks, Marathon Fusion’s process relies on nuclear transmutation. His research paper describes how high-energy neutrons from a deuterium-tritium fusion reaction can irradiate mercury-198, producing a radioactive isotope that decays into stable gold-197.
So if gold has what some are vocation What will happen to the centuries-old metal so revered for its scarcity? And what, if anything, could this mean for Bitcoin as digital gold, considering its severely limited supply?
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong expects events to work in Bitcoin’s favor, comparing the creation of “net new gold with alchemy” to the lab-grown diamond industry. “But you can’t invent something that increases the supply of Bitcoin,” he said said. “There will only ever be 21 million.”
Perhaps inspired by the popularity of lab-grown diamonds, Marathon co-founder and CEO Kyle Schiller tells the magazine that it has attracted a lot of interest from jewelers.
“We have generated a shocking amount of interest from people who want to make jewelry,” says Schiller. “As with regular gold, I think it will be used primarily as a store of value.”
But before goldbugs start shaking in their boots, Marathon Performance There is still a long way to go to prove that gold can be produced cheaply on a large scale.
Nikos Kavalis, managing director of precious metals research company Metals Focus, tells Magazine: “We are far from being at a point where we can talk about the importance of production.”
“While allusions to alchemical dreams make for great headlines, I think gold diggers will be keeping their jobs for the foreseeable future!”
Can gold ever really be produced on a large scale?
The underlying core process is scientifically plausible, but converting it into an economic industrial process is a whole new ball game.
Related: JPMorgan predicts Bitcoin will outperform US stocks and gold over the next decade
Marathon said it produced stable gold at a rate 10 times faster than the record set by CERN, the European particle physics laboratory where scientists use powerful accelerators to study the basic building blocks of matter.
Nuclear fusion turned mercury into gold. Source: Marathon Fusion
But only CERN’s ALICE experiment produced An estimated 29 picograms of gold cores during its 2015-2018 run, and these cores only existed for fractions of a second before being destroyed in collisions.
The company has not publicly disclosed the exact amount the experiment produced. Marathon research engineer Jake Harter tells the magazine that the amounts are still extremely small, “microscopic at the moment,” but the company hopes to reach “macroscopic milligram amounts in 2027.”
So the much larger numbers in Marathon’s paper are predictions for a future fusion power plant and are not based on today’s performance.
The paper assumes an annual production of about two tons of gold per gigawatt of thermal fusion energy. To put that into context: the World Gold Council says that mines produced 3,672 tons of gold worldwide in 2025, so the output of a single future fusion plant would be modest in comparison.
Even to achieve these goals, Harter says the company would have to increase production of the enriched mercury used to make gold and, of course, build the fusion reactor itself.
“As we continue to develop this technology, we will also work on studies demonstrating material compatibility, mercury mining and gold recovery,” he says.
Could gold follow the playbook for lab-grown diamonds?
It’s hard not to draw parallels like Armstrong’s between Marathon’s atomic gold and lab-grown diamonds. Wholesale prices for lab-grown diamonds have increased fallen by more than 90% since 2018 as production expanded. Unlike older diamond substitutes such as cubic zirconia, the composition of newer lab-grown diamonds is chemically identical to that of mined diamonds and costs a fraction of the price. Could the same thing happen with gold?
Marathon Fusion Research Report. Source: Marathon Fusion
According to Nagham Hassan, a market analyst at investment platform eToro, the comparison to lab-grown diamonds is understandable, but “the economics are completely different.”
While diamond production became cheaper as factories expanded, she said said Producing gold through nuclear fusion “would require a highly complex infrastructure that does not yet exist commercially.”
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A further complication is that the gold produced would be radioactive.
“The gold would have to be stored for a little over a decade before it drops to banana-like (radio)activity levels,” says Harter. However, since most gold is “stored purely as an investment,” he doesn’t see this as a major barrier to earlier commercialization.
A bigger problem is that it is unclear whether the economy will ever be successful.
“There is no evidence that the process is commercially viable,” says Kavalis. “There are theoretical revenue projections, but nothing about what it will cost to operate the reactors.”
Would Bitcoin benefit if gold became less scarce?
Bitcoin is often referred to as digital gold because its supply is limited by protocol rules and capped at 21 million. However, Armstrong argues that no one can find a way to create future coins.
If a future technology like nuclear fusion could create another source of gold supply, this could theoretically put downward pressure on the price.
“For any asset, all other things being equal, a significant increase in available supply would lead to downward pressure on its market price,” Fabian Schär, professor of distributed ledger technology and fintech at the University of Basel, tells Magazine.
“Under the hypothetical assumption of low-cost, large-scale production, gold would be no exception.”
But with the first fusion reactors estimated to be at least a decade away and many questions still remaining about the economics of this new form of alchemy, Bitcoin prices are unlikely to rise any time soon.
Therefore, at least for now, Marathon’s work is more of a fascinating experiment with potentially interesting applications than an immediate threat to the gold market.
Peter Schiff and his buddies can breathe a sigh of relief.
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