The States Putting Gold Back to Work as Money
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At a glance
• In about fourteen months, six U.S. states have passed laws treating gold and silver as money, and more are following.
• A dollar saved in January 2020 now buys only about what 77 cents then, and cash savers lose the most.
• The measure had bipartisan support, passing the Florida Senate 38–0.
• Tens of thousands of Americans already use Glint every month to buy, save or spend gold.
• The new laws add recognition in law, rules that prove the metal is really there, and a stronger case for taxing gold like money.
Somewhere in America today, someone will pay for lunch with gold. They tap a card or phone, and the café gets dollars. No one weighs a coin beside the sandwich. In a growing number of states, the law now also recognizes gold and silver as money the café itself could choose to accept.
That scene sits behind an idea moving fast through America’s statehouses. Between April 2025 and June 2026, Texas, Florida, Utah, Louisiana, Arkansas and Missouri all passed laws giving gold and silver a bigger role in payments, each in its own way. Some states recognize gold and silver as legal tender between people who agree to use them. Usually, legal tender means a creditor must accept it to settle a debt, but most of these laws say creditors may accept gold and silver. Despite their differences, they point the same way. States across America are using the monetary room the Constitution leaves them to put gold and silver alongside the dollar. This gives people a way to protect their savings from inflation and provides a backup if the financial system has problems.
Why now
From January 2020 to August 2026, US consumer prices rose nearly 30%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Something that cost $100 before the pandemic now costs about $130. But inflation does more than push up prices. It moves wealth from some people to others.
Nearly three centuries ago, an Irish-born banker named Richard Cantillon noticed that new money never reaches everyone at once. Those closest to where it enters the economy get to spend it before prices rise. By the time it reaches everyone else, prices have already moved. Today, new money usually enters through the financial system. Quantitative easing, or QE, is when a central bank creates money to buy financial assets such as government bonds, and it tends to lift the price of those assets first. Homeowners and shareholders gain. People who save in cash see their savings quietly shrink.
The numbers since 2020 fit that pattern. While consumer prices rose by about 30%, US home prices rose by nearly 60%, according to the S&P Case-Shiller index. Over a longer span, the Federal Reserve’s own figures show the middle of the country losing ground. In 1989, the middle 40% of American households, between the poorest half and the richest tenth, held well over a third of the nation’s wealth, and the top 1% held under a quarter. Today the top 1% holds more than the entire middle 40%. Economists argue about how much of that shift originates from money creation rather than globalization or technology. But the direction is hard to miss, and it helps explain why, as we have written before, being middle class isn’t what it was. Kevin Freeman, a member of Utah’s precious metals workgroup, calls this a matter of economic justice: when the dollar loses value, the people hit hardest are those who save in cash and have no easy way to hold anything else.
Gold sits outside that chain. No central bank can create more of it, and over decades it has historically preserved its purchasing power, which helps explain why people and lawmakers are taking a fresh look at using it to save and pay. Its price can still fall over shorter periods.
The newer ingredient is the payment rail, and it already exists. A large bar can stay in a vault while a ledger records ownership in small fractions, and a card or phone can spend that ownership wherever cards are accepted. It is what we built Glint to do. Our customers own allocated physical gold and silver and spend the value of their gold by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay. Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide have registered, and tens of thousands in the US use Glint every month, independently of any state program. Gold itself has not changed much. The infrastructure around it has.
There is also an older American thread. The Constitution’s response to the paper-money chaos of the Revolution was blunt. Article I, Section 10 bars states from coining money or issuing bills of credit, the paper IOUs that had lost most of their value during the war. Then it adds one exception: states may not make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts. Read one way, the framers shut the door on a tangle of competing state paper currencies and left a single emergency pull cord hanging beside it. No framer used those words, but the design fits them. The cord is still there, and several states are now putting it to work electronically.
These laws have won support across party lines, often by overwhelming margins. Florida, the third most populous state in the country, passed its law 112 to 1 in the House and 38 to 0 in the Senate. Louisiana’s Bayou Gold bill passed the state House 101 to 0 and the Senate 26 to 2. In Utah, Republican Representative Ken Ivory led the latest measure, with Democratic Representative Jennifer Dailey-Provost among its cosponsors. Lawmakers tend to describe the cause as one of choice. “It is important for Utah citizens and businesses to have a variety of options for storing and exchanging the value of their labors,” Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz said in the state treasurer’s 2024 precious metals study.
Six states, six paths to gold and silver payments
Texas began with a state bullion depository, operating since 2018. Its 2025 House Bill 1056 makes qualifying gold and silver voluntary legal tender from September 1, 2026, and its definition is strikingly plain: metal stamped only with its weight, purity and refiner, with US coins left out. An electronic payment system backed by the depository is authorized from May 1, 2027.
Florida puts consumer protection at the center. It licenses the custodians who hold gold and silver that can be transferred electronically, and detailed rules on records, disclosures and chain of custody took effect in July 2026.
Utah wants a provider to run a precious-metals-backed electronic system that the state itself could use. Arkansas’s law reads almost like a description of the technology: an account backed by bullion in an accredited vault that lets holders “buy, sell, save, or spend bullion as a form of currency.”
Louisiana’s Bayou Gold law certifies the private platforms behind payments rather than running anything itself. The program starts once lawmakers approve money for the state treasury to administer it. The treasury will then keep a public register of approved services and may license a Bayou Gold mark, but it is barred from running a vault or payment processor.
Missouri focuses on the handoff. When electronic gold or silver settles a covered public debt, the intermediary must pass the payment on in US dollars. The payer can start with metal while the government finishes with dollars.
What the laws add
Anyone who hands over their savings wants to know two things: that the money is really there, and that the business holding it is honest. Guarding against fraud is one job almost everyone, including the most committed free-marketeer, agrees the law should do. Dollar payments already come with protections against fraud and money laundering. When gold and silver are used to make payments, rather than simply stored, these laws extend the same kind of protection to the metal behind each payment.
The first thing they add is proof. Every one of these laws insists that a gold or silver payment be backed by real, physical metal, and most go further, making clear that the metal belongs to the customer. Florida requires custodians to hold it on a “fully allocated” basis, giving each owner a direct legal claim to their share, insured for its full value and audited every year. Missouri says an electronic balance must reflect the exact amount of physical metal in the account. Arkansas describes it as metal transferred by its owner and fully redeemable. Louisiana spells out what ownership means: the metal stays the customer’s sole property, off the platform’s balance sheet and beyond its creditors’ reach, never lent or pledged, and redeemable as physical metal within five business days. Utah adds that any provider must comply with all applicable state and federal law. For providers like Glint already working this way, the laws turn a private promise into a public standard.
Some critics claim that dollars already move instantly and using gold just adds extra costs. The laws address this directly. People are not required to stop using dollars. Arkansas’s law lets a vendor take bullion or dollars without paying extra for the choice, and Utah makes clear that transaction costs fall on the person using the system. With a card or phone, spending gold is as easy as spending dollars.
The laws also bring in the state itself as a user. Utah will pay contractors who choose to be paid this way. Missouri’s public bodies must accept electronic gold and silver for covered debts. Arkansas lets state and local governments take taxes and fees in gold and silver when they agree to. Each time a government takes gold and silver as payment, the case that they are money, not collectibles, gets stronger. That matters most when it comes to tax.
The last barrier
There is one cost no state can remove on its own. The tax code puts gold and silver, in bars or coins, in the same “collectibles” category as art, antiques and stamps. If your gold has grown in value, as over long periods it usually has, spending it counts as selling it, and the gain can be taxed at up to 28%. Much of that “gain” is simply the dollar buying less. The states have gone about as far as they can. Missouri no longer taxes individuals’ capital gains at all. Arkansas addresses the principle directly: its law says gold and silver specie shall not be treated as personal property for tax purposes. Texas and Florida have no state income tax to begin with. Utah’s state treasurer has sketched how the federal tax might be challenged: citizens paying under protest, a lawsuit by the attorney general, or asking Congress to exempt small payments, much as it already ignores gains of up to $200 on foreign currency spent on personal purchases. None of these routes is a sure thing, but the case has never had this much behind it: laws on the books in several states and a state treasurer who has mapped out how to press it.
States are supporting payment systems because that is how gold and silver can be used in today’s economy. These systems would also have another effect. Every time gold is used to buy something, it adds to the record of real transactions supporting the idea that it should be taxed like money, not like art or collectibles.
And more states are following. In May, Alaska made gold and silver legal tender, passing its bill 40 to 0 in the House and 19 to 1 in the Senate, a first step that does not yet include payment provisions. We have met lawmakers from 13 other states working on similar bills. In 2026, Georgia’s passed its state Senate and Arizona’s fell just short on the House floor, 26 to 28, while Iowa, Oklahoma and Mississippi saw first attempts. Many of these sponsors plan to try again in 2027.
For a growing number of Americans, paying with gold is already part of an ordinary month. The technology came first, built by private firms. What these states add is what money has always needed beyond technology: recognition in law, rules that prove the metal is really there, and governments willing to use it. That is how gold earns its place alongside the dollar. Many of these sponsors plan to try again in 2027. There is growing grassroots legislative movement across America facilitated by the Transactional Gold Coalition. To learn what’s happening in your state, visit transactionalgold.com.
Sources
• US Bureau of Labor Statistics, historical Consumer Price Index table
• S&P Cotality Case-Shiller US National Home Price Index (via FRED)
• Richard Cantillon, Essay on the Nature of Trade in General (1755), Online Library of Liberty
• Glint blog, Being middle class isn’t what it was (2023)
• World Gold Council, Gold as a strategic asset: 2025 edition
• National Archives, US Constitution transcript
• National Archives, Articles of Confederation background
• Texas Legislature, HB 1056 enrolled bill
• Florida Statutes, Section 215.986, legal tender and electronic transfer
• Florida Statutes, Section 560.103, definition of a gold or silver custodian
• Florida Statutes, Section 560.214, custodians
• Florida Senate, HB 999 (2025) bill history and votes
• Florida Administrative Code, Chapter 69V-560, gold and silver coin rules effective July 1, 2026
• Utah, enrolled HB 195 of 2026
• Utah Office of State Treasurer, 2024 Precious Metals Study
• Louisiana, Act 841 of 2026 (HB 797)
• Louisiana Legislature, HB 797 (2026) bill history and votes
• Arkansas General Assembly, Act 810 of 2025
• Arkansas Code, Section 4-56-106, specie or legal tender (via Justia)
• Missouri Revisor of Statutes, Section 408.010
• Missouri Revisor of Statutes, Section 143.121, capital gains subtraction
• Alaska State Legislature, HB 1 (2026), specie as legal tender, bill history and votes
• Arizona HB 2123 (2026), bill history and votes (LegiScan)
• Georgia SB 424 (2025–26), bill history and votes (LegiScan)
• US Code, Title 26, Section 408(m), collectibles defined (Legal Information Institute)
• US Code, Title 26, Section 1(h), collectibles tax rate (Legal Information Institute)
• Glint US, product and custody description
For UK clients: At Glint, we make every effort to demonstrate a balanced conversation between gold, silver, crypto and fiat currencies when it comes to purchasing power and, while we strongly believe that gold is the fairest and most reliable currency on the planet, we need to point out that it isn’t 100% risk free. While we have seen a steady increase over time, the value of gold can fall, which means that its purchasing power can also decline.
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• Not insured by the FDIC.
• Not a deposit or other obligation of, or guaranteed by, Sutton Bank.
• Subject to investment risks, including the possible risk of loss of the principal amount invested.
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