The Case for Tokenised Silver in 2026: Supply Deficit, Green Demand, and Zero Storage Fees

Silver has always had two identities: monetary metal and industrial workhorse. For most of history, those identities pulled in different directions – one benefiting from fear and crisis, the other from economic expansion. In 2026, for perhaps the first time in decades, both are pulling simultaneously in the same direction. 

Supply is structurally short for the sixth consecutive year. Industrial demand from solar, EVs, 5G, and AI data centres is reshaping the demand profile permanently. A medium-term price rally from $26/oz at the start of 2024 to an all-time high of $121.64 on January 29, 2026, is justification of its continued relevance and discovery

Physical silver is among the most operationally burdensome precious metals to own. It is bulky, expensive to store, subject to VAT in major markets, and illiquid at anything other than small retail denominations. These are obstacles, its older sibling gold 

Since 2021, the silver market has consumed more metal than it has produced in every single year. The Silver Institute’s World Silver Survey 2026 places the 2025 deficit at 40.3 million troy ounces, the fifth consecutive annual shortfall. 3 For 2026, the institute forecasts a widening to 46.3 million ounces, the sixth. 4 The cumulative drawdown from above-ground stocks across that six-year period now stands at approximately 762 million ounces. That is roughly 10 months of annual mine supply, drawn down and not replaced. 

Metals Focus managing director Philip Newman, whose consultancy compiled the World Silver Survey data, put it plainly: “The era of virtually unlimited silver liquidity is gone.” 5 The firm described the current environment as one where tightness will not be constant, but where liquidity will generally be thinner, lease rates more volatile, and price moves likely larger than investors have grown used to. There is surging demand for ‘paper silver’ in the form of instruments like Exchange Traded Products (ETPs). 

Mined supply is just a part of the story. Global silver mining output grew 0.9 per cent in 2024 to 819.7 million ounces. 1 The problem is not that supply emissions are falling. It is that demand has structurally outpaced supply, and the gap is not narrowing. Understanding why requires looking at what silver is actually being used for.

The green energy mandate

Silver has a property that makes it indispensable to the clean energy economy: it is the best electrical conductor of any metal on earth. For applications where efficiency and reliability matter more than cost, silver is not a choice. It is the requirement.

That property is embedded in solar panels, electric vehicles, 5G base stations, and AI server racks at a scale that is reshaping the global silver demand profile permanently.

Solar photovoltaics are the largest single industrial consumer of silver. The photovoltaic industry used approximately 197.6 million ounces of silver in 2024 alone – 17 per cent of total global demand. 1 Each solar panel uses silver-based paste to form the electrical contacts that capture and transfer the current generated by sunlight. The trend toward higher-efficiency cell architectures – heterojunction (HJT) and back-contact designs – uses more silver per watt generated than older PERC technology. 9

Electric vehicles use 67 to 79 per cent more silver than conventional combustion-engine cars. 10 Silver appears in the electrical contacts, sensors, battery management systems, and charging circuitry of every EV on the road. The Silver Institute projects automotive silver demand approaching 90 million ounces annually by the mid-2020s, with electric vehicles overtaking combustion vehicles as the primary automotive silver consumer by 2027.

AI data centres are the newest and least quantified component of industrial demand. Server motherboards incorporate 2 to 5 grams of silver each. As hyperscalers – Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta – collectively deploy hundreds of billions of dollars in new computing infrastructure, the silver content scales with it. 

In December 2025, the Silver Institute released a comprehensive report co-authored with Oxford Economics under the title Silver, The Next Generation Metal. 7 A key conclusion it made was that silver is poised to play a pivotal role across the industries critical to the green energy transition and digital transformation over the coming decade.

The structural shift in what silver is used for, from photographic film and jewellery to the hardware of the clean energy economy, is accelerating.

The price story and what the market expects

Silver began 2024 trading at approximately US$26 per ounce. It ended 2025 at roughly US$72. In between, it set an all-time high of $121.64 on January 29, 2026, driven by the convergence of the Iran conflict, a weakening US dollar, and institutional liquidity squeeze. The 2025 annual average of $40.03 per ounce represented a 42 per cent year-on-year increase – the metal’s best annual performance since 1979. 14

The retreat from the January peak to current levels around US$75 reflects a partial normalisation after a period of extreme positioning. It does not reflect a change in the structural supply-demand picture. The silver market enters the second half of 2026 with the same deficit dynamics, the same industrial demand drivers, and the same tightening physical stock that produced the 2025 rally.

The LBMA’s annual Forecast Survey, which polls 26 precious metals analysts, produced a 2026 silver average forecast of $79.57 per ounce – the most bullish consensus in the survey’s history. 15 The sell-side view broadly corroborates that reading:

The weight problem – why physical silver is so expensive to own

There is a number that captures silver’s physical ownership problem better than any other. At current prices of approximately $73 per ounce, a $100,000 position in physical silver weighs roughly 41 kilograms. The equivalent position in gold, at approximately $4,800 per ounce, weighs under 700 grams.

That density gap – silver is approximately 60 times bulkier per dollar of value than gold – cascades through every aspect of physical ownership. Vault space is priced per cubic metre, not per dollar of metal value. BullionVault, one of the world’s largest retail bullion platforms, charges 0.48 per cent per annum to store silver versus 0.12 per cent per annum for gold – exactly four times the rate. 18 Perth Mint’s allocated storage rate for silver runs approximately twice the gold rate. 19 A five-year holding period in a mainstream vault service costs an investor roughly 2.4 per cent of position value in cumulative storage fees on silver, versus 0.6 per cent on gold. That is not a trivial drag when compounded against expected returns.

Tokenisation as the structural solution

The tokenised commodities market currently stands at approximately US$7.3 billion in total market capitalisation. Tokenisation potentially dismantles several physical ownership barriers.  

Storage costs are absorbed into the product structure rather than passed to the investor. A token holder does not rent vault space. The issuer holds the allocated silver; the token holder holds the beneficial ownership right. Storage, insurance, and custody are operational costs of running the product, not line items on an investor’s holding.

Denomination flexibility becomes precise rather than lumpy. Each SilverNZ token represents one troy ounce of physical silver. An investor can acquire, transfer or exit the exact number of ounces their portfolio requires at any given moment. Portfolio rebalancing, dollar-cost averaging, and incremental position-building all become operationally straightforward – as they are for any listed equity or bond.

Transferability operates at blockchain speed. On-chain token transfers settle in minutes, at any hour, on any day of the week, without freight logistics, insurance paperwork or correspondent banking. The physical silver stays in the vault; ownership moves on-chain. For an investor managing a multi-asset portfolio across time zones, that matters.

Programmability opens the asset to uses that physical bars cannot support. Tokenised silver can be used as on-chain collateral in decentralised finance protocols, enabling investors to maintain their silver exposure while generating yield or supporting borrowing. Physical silver earns nothing. A SilverNZ position in a DeFi protocol can.

McKinsey’s June 2024 analysis of the tokenised asset market projected $2 to $4 trillion in tokenised real-world assets by 2030. Gold is the natural lead asset in that trajectory. Silver, with its deeper industrial demand base and more acute physical ownership problem, may ultimately be a more compelling tokenisation story – precisely because the gap between its structural investment case and its operational accessibility is wider.

 SilverNZ and the New Zealand proposition

Techemynt Limited is a New Zealand-registered Financial Service Provider (FSP773214) with over 15 years of blockchain and digital asset experience. 24 In March 2026, it launched SilverNZ alongside GoldNZ – one token per troy ounce of investment-grade precious metal, fully allocated and segregated in Commonwealth Vault’s New Zealand facilities, governed by a bare trust under New Zealand law.

The bare trust structure is the legal foundation that distinguishes SilverNZ from an ETF share or a futures contract. A token holder is the beneficial owner of specifically identified physical silver. Techemynt, as trustee, holds the metal for their benefit and cannot hypothecate, lend or encumber it. If Techemynt ceased to operate, the trust assets would remain the property of beneficial owners, not general creditors. That is a different and stronger legal relationship than holding a share in a fund that holds silver.

Techemynt executive director Fran Strajnar described the product’s thesis at launch: “By combining Commonwealth Vault’s state-of-the-art vaulting solutions with Techemynt’s 15+ years of blockchain expertise, we’re enabling international investors anywhere in the world to access physical gold and silver stored in audited vaults in the Safe Harbour New Zealand jurisdiction.” 23

The New Zealand jurisdiction adds dimensions beyond the GST exemption already described. New Zealand has no general capital gains tax, no estate tax, and no wealth tax. Foreign trusts domiciled in New Zealand pay no tax on offshore-sourced income under New Zealand law – a framework that has made the country one of the world’s most established midshore wealth structuring jurisdictions. 

It ranks consistently in the top three globally on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. Its legal system is based on straightforward English common law. 

The SilverNZ token is available on Ethereum, Polygon, and Base, with the same contract address across all three networks, a multi-chain deployment that eliminates single-network risk and maximises DeFi integration optionality. 

Techemynt’s full product suite – SilverNZ, GoldNZ, and NZDS (New Zealand’s first dollar-backed stablecoin) operates within the same compliance framework. An investor can move between silver exposure, gold exposure, and NZD liquidity on-chain, within a single regulated ecosystem, without leaving the jurisdiction that provides the structural advantages of each.

The convergence

Silver has become an asset with barriers. Structurally important to technologies that will define the next three decades with safe haven appeal, yet operationally inaccessible to most investors who want to own it.

The supply deficit is in its sixth year and widening. 4 Industrial demand from the green energy transition – solar, EVs, 5G, AI data centres, suggests industrial demand will continue to grow in the medium term. The price has re-rated sharply from the levels of two years ago, and the analyst consensus is for further appreciation. The gold-silver ratio is near its long-run average, suggesting the catch-up trade is not over.

Storage costs and other problems have suppressed silver investment for decades. What is new is that a regulated, audited, physically-backed product now exists that removes all three from the equation simultaneously, in a jurisdiction that adds its own structural advantages to the underlying assets.

The Silver Institute research raises key questions. How does an investor participate in the structural tightening of a metal that powers the green economy without being burdened by the operational cost of owning it physically? Techemynt offers a  direct answer. One troy ounce per token. New Zealand bare trust. No storage fees. No purchase tax. On-chain, 24 hours a day.