They say all that glitters is not gold, and that took on a completely different meaning this month when a US fusion startup claimed it had produced gold from mercury.
Rather than chemical trickery, Marathon Fusion’s process relies on nuclear transmutation. Its 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 calling an “infinite mint bug,” what will happen to the centuries-old metal so revered for its scarcity? And what, if anything, could that mean for Bitcoin as digital gold given it has a hard-capped supply?
Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong sees events playing out in Bitcoin’s favor, and compared the creation of “net-new gold with alchemy” to the lab-grown diamond industry. “But you can’t invent anything that will increase Bitcoin supply,” he said. “There will only ever be 21M.”
Perhaps inspired by the popularity of lab-grown diamonds, Marathon co-founder and chief executive Kyle Schiller tells Magazine he’s been fielding a lot of interest from jewelers.
“We have gotten a shocking amount of interest from people who want to do jewelry,” Schiller says. “As with regular gold, I think it’ll be mostly used as a store of value.”
But before gold bugs start quaking in their boots, Marathon’s achievement is still a long way from proving gold can be produced cheaply at scale.
Nikos Kavalis, managing director at precious metals research firm Metals Focus, tells Magazine, “We are nowhere near a stage where we can talk about production significance.”
“While allusions to alchemical dreams make for great headlines, I think gold miners will get to keep their jobs for the foreseeable future!”
Can gold ever really be manufactured at scale?
The underlying nuclear process is scientifically plausible, but turning it into an economical industrial process is a whole new ball game.
Related: JPMorgan projects Bitcoin to outperform US stocks and gold over next decade
Marathon said it had produced stable gold at a rate 10 times CERN’s record, the European particle physics laboratory where scientists use powerful accelerators to study the fundamental building blocks of matter.
Nuclear fusion turned mercury into gold. Source: Marathon Fusion
But CERN’s ALICE experiment only produced an estimated 29 picograms of gold nuclei during its 2015-2018 run, and those nuclei only existed for fractions of a second before they were destroyed in collisions.
The company hasn’t publicly stated the exact quantity the experiment produced. Marathon research engineer Jake Harter tells Magazine the quantities remain extremely small, “right now still microscopic,” but the company hopes to reach “macroscopic milligram quantities in 2027.”
So the much larger numbers in Marathon’s paper are projections for a future fusion power plant, not based on output today.
The paper models production of about two tonnes of gold per gigawatt of thermal fusion power annually. To put that into context, the World Gold Council says that globally, mines produced 3,672 tonnes of gold in 2025, so a single future fusion plant’s output would be modest in comparison.
Even to reach those targets, Harter says the company would have to scale production of the enriched mercury used to produce gold, and of course it would need to build the fusion reactor itself.
“In the process of maturing this technology, we’ll also be working on studies demonstrating materials compatibility, mercury pumping and gold extraction,” he says.
Could gold follow the lab-grown diamond playbook?
It’s hard not to draw parallels like Armstrong’s between Marathon’s nuclear gold and lab-grown diamonds. Wholesale prices for lab-grown diamonds have fallen by more than 90% since 2018 as production has scaled up. Unlike older diamond substitutes like cubic zirconias, the composition of the newer lab grown diamonds is chemically identical to mined diamonds for a fraction of the price. Could the same thing happen to gold?
Marathon Fusion research paper. Source: Marathon Fusion
According to Nagham Hassan, a market analyst at investment platform eToro, the comparison with lab-grown diamonds is understandable, but “the economics are completely different.”
While diamond production became cheaper as factories scaled up, she said producing gold through nuclear fusion “would require highly complex infrastructure that does not yet exist commercially.”
Related: Bitcoin will become ‘less volatile’ and larger than gold: ‘The Bitcoin Standard’ author
Another complication is that the gold produced would be radioactive.
“The gold would need to be stored for a bit over a decade before dropping to banana-levels of [radio]activity,” Harter says, although, since most gold is “just stored as an investment,” he doesn’t see that as a major barrier to earlier commercialization.
A bigger…
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