A US fusion startup says it has turned mercury into gold. Could a potential increase in the gold supply strengthen Bitcoin’s claim to be a better form of digital gold?

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.

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