A United States fusion startup claims it has produced gold from mercury — a development that has reignited debate over the scarcity that underpins the precious metal’s value and, by extension, Bitcoin’s standing as “digital gold.”

The process developed by Marathon Fusion does not rely on chemical sleight of hand but on nuclear transmutation — the physics of turning one element into another. According to the company’s research paper, high-energy neutrons from a deuterium-tritium fusion reaction irradiate mercury-198, producing a radioactive isotope that decays into stable gold-197. Deuterium and tritium are heavy isotopes of hydrogen, and fusing them is the reaction around which most experimental fusion energy projects are built.

The announcement, shared by Marathon Fusion on X, has led some observers to describe gold as carrying an “infinite mint bug,” a phrase that gained traction on X in the days following the claim. In crypto, an “infinite mint” bug describes a software flaw that lets an attacker create unlimited new tokens — a frame now being borrowed to ask whether gold, too, can be minted at will. If new gold can be manufactured, what becomes of a metal prized for centuries for its scarcity? And what, if anything, could that mean for Bitcoin, whose supply is hard-capped by protocol?

Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong argued the development plays in Bitcoin’s favor, comparing 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 on X. “There will only ever be 21M.”

Marathon co-founder and chief executive Kyle Schiller told Cointelegraph Magazine that he has been fielding significant interest from jewelers, perhaps inspired by the popularity of lab-grown diamonds.

“We have gotten a shocking amount of interest from people who want to do jewelry,” Schiller said. “As with regular gold, I think it’ll be mostly used as a store of value.”

Still, before gold holders grow alarmed, Marathon’s achievement remains a long way from proving that gold can be produced cheaply at scale.

“We are nowhere near a stage where we can talk about production significance,” Nikos Kavalis, managing director at precious metals research firm Metals Focus, told Cointelegraph Magazine. “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 be manufactured at scale?

The underlying nuclear process is scientifically plausible, but turning it into an economical industrial process is an entirely different challenge.

Marathon said it produced stable gold at a rate 10 times CERN’s record. CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, uses powerful accelerators to study the fundamental building blocks of matter. Yet CERN’s ALICE experiment produced an estimated 29 picograms of gold nuclei during its 2015-2018 run, and those nuclei existed only for fractions of a second before being destroyed in collisions. Marathon has not publicly stated the exact quantity its own experiment produced.

Marathon research engineer Jake Harter told Cointelegraph Magazine that the quantities remain extremely small — “right now still microscopic” — though the company hopes to reach “macroscopic milligram quantities in 2027.”

The much larger figures in Marathon’s paper are therefore projections for a future fusion power plant, not a reflection of today’s output. The paper models production of roughly two tonnes of gold per gigawatt of thermal fusion power annually. For context, the World Gold Council reports that mines worldwide produced 3,672 tonnes of gold in 2025 — meaning a single future fusion plant’s output would be modest by comparison.

Reaching even those targets would require the company to scale production of the enriched mercury used to create the gold and, of course, 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,” Harter said.

Could gold follow the lab-grown diamond playbook?

Armstrong’s comparison to lab-grown diamonds is easy to understand. Wholesale prices for lab-grown diamonds have fallen by more than 90% since 2018 as production scaled up. Unlike older substitutes such as cubic zirconia, modern lab-grown diamonds are chemically identical to mined diamonds at a fraction of the price. Could the same happen to gold?

Nagham Hassan, a market analyst at investment platform eToro, said the comparison is understandable but that “the economics are completely different.” While diamond production became cheaper as factories scaled up, she noted that producing gold through nuclear fusion “would require highly complex infrastructure that does not yet exist commercially.”

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 said, adding that because most gold is “just stored as an investment,” he does not consider that a major barrier to earlier commercialization. Bananas carry a faint natural radioactivity from the potassium they contain, which makes them a common informal yardstick for trivial doses of radiation.

A bigger obstacle is whether the economics will ever add up.

“There is no demonstration that the process is commercially viable,” Kavalis said. “There are theoretical revenue projections, but nothing about what it will cost to run the reactors.”

Would Bitcoin benefit if gold became less scarce?

Bitcoin is often described as digital gold because its supply is limited by protocol rules and capped at 21 million coins. New coins enter circulation only through a fixed issuance schedule paid to miners, and altering that schedule would require broad consensus among network participants — not a reactor experiment. Armstrong argues that no one can invent a way to fabricate additional coins.

In theory, if a technology such as nuclear fusion created a new source of gold supply, it could place downward pressure on the metal’s price.

“For any asset, a substantial increase in available supply would, other things being equal, put downward pressure on its market price,” Fabian Schär, professor of distributed ledger technology and fintech at the University of Basel, told Cointelegraph Magazine. “Under the hypothetical assumption of inexpensive production at scale, gold would be no exception.”

With the first fusion reactors estimated to be at least a decade away and substantial questions remaining over the economic viability of this new form of alchemy, the breakthrough is unlikely to move Bitcoin or gold markets any time soon. For now, Marathon’s work stands as a fascinating experiment with potentially interesting applications rather than an imminent threat to the gold market — a reassurance for prominent gold advocates such as Peter Schiff.

This article is based on reporting by Cointelegraph Magazine.