Here is something most Americans have never thought about.
Every ounce of gold and silver held in approved storage vaults for U.S. futures market delivery is located in one place. Not one company. One geography. The Greater New York metropolitan area.
Nevada is the largest gold-producing state in the country. Idaho is a major silver producer. Alaska has some of the most significant precious metals deposits on earth. The American West sits on top of the metal that underpins the global precious metals market.
And every single ounce of it, once it enters the regulated futures delivery system, has to be stored in New York.
That arrangement has been in place since the 1970s, when trading floors, clearinghouses, and settlement operations all needed to be in the same room. Today, when trades execute electronically in milliseconds and markets operate around the clock from anywhere on earth, the physical gold still has to make the trip east.
Congress has finally noticed. And it is trying to do something about it.
The Bill Nobody Outside the Industry Is Talking About
On May 21, Senators Jim Risch of Idaho and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada introduced the bipartisan System Integrity through Licensed Vault Expansion and Resilience Act. The acronym is SILVER Act, and the name is not an accident — both senators represent states that produce significant quantities of precious metals and have watched their industries ship product to New York for half a century.
A companion bill had already passed through the House in March. The CFTC Chairman publicly praised the legislation at a congressional hearing and pledged to work with Congress to advance it. A broad coalition of depositories, mints, dealers, refiners, miners, banks, and insurers has formally endorsed it in a letter to Congress.
The bill is simple. It would require the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to ensure that at least two approved depositories exist in each of the four continental U.S. time zones. Eastern. Central. Mountain. Pacific. That single requirement would break open a storage network that has been locked to one corner of one state for more than five decades.
Why This Is Actually a National Security Story
The instinct is to read this as a mundane regulatory fix. It is not.
The Iran war made that clear. When the Strait of Hormuz was blockaded in late February, global supply chains fractured in ways that policymakers had not fully anticipated. Congress drew an uncomfortable parallel to domestic precious metals infrastructure. If a single geopolitical event could strand oil shipments across the entire world, what would a regional disruption in New York do to gold and silver delivery across America?
The answer, under the current system, is significant damage. A cyberattack targeting the Northeast. A major storm. A sustained power outage. A transportation disruption. Any of those events affecting a single region could simultaneously disrupt physical settlement and storage for the entire U.S. precious metals futures market. Every approved vault. Every regulated delivery facility. Gone from service at once.
The Dodd-Frank Act created the SIFMU framework — Systemically Important Financial Market Utilities — specifically to prevent this kind of single-point vulnerability in critical financial infrastructure. The precious metals storage system operates in direct contradiction to that principle. Every other major commodity contract uses geographically distributed storage. Gold and silver never made the transition.
“The current system creates unnecessary vulnerabilities for the nation’s precious metals markets and supply chains,” said Stefan Gleason, CEO of Money Metals, one of the bill’s industry supporters. “The SILVER Act would promote resiliency, improve competition, lower costs for investors and commercial users, and strengthen America’s financial and critical minerals infrastructure.”
The Mismatch That Has Bothered the Industry for Years
Beyond the national security angle, the current system creates a practical absurdity that has frustrated precious metals producers and dealers for decades.
Most of America’s gold and silver comes out of the ground in Nevada, Idaho, Alaska, and other western states. It is mined there, refined there, and in many cases purchased by investors who live there. Then, if it enters the regulated futures delivery system, it travels thousands of miles to New York — not because New York needs it, not because New York produces it, but because the exchange rules written in 1970 said so and nobody updated them.
That journey adds transportation costs, insurance costs, and logistical complexity that gets priced into the market and ultimately passed along to buyers. Qualified vault operators in Texas, Nevada, Idaho, and Arizona have been unable to compete for exchange-approved storage business not because they lack the security standards or the facilities, but because the rules simply do not allow it.
Senator Risch put it plainly: “The concentration of precious metal depositories in a single region has left Idahoans at a disadvantage. My SILVER Act broadens the geographic locations of these facilities, which will reduce costs, strengthen our national security, and allow Idahoans to store precious metals closer to home.”
What It Means for Investors
For anyone who holds physical gold or silver — through a precious metals IRA, through a custodial account, or through direct purchase — the SILVER Act carries practical implications that are worth understanding.
More approved vaults means more competition for storage business. More competition tends to produce lower fees, better service, and more options for investors and custodians. Storage and insurance costs for physical precious metals, which have remained elevated partly because of the constrained competitive landscape, could decline over time as new approved facilities enter the market.
Those cost reductions are not guaranteed and would not happen overnight. Any new depository would still need to satisfy strict regulatory standards and build an operational track record before competing meaningfully for business. But the direction is clear. A market that has operated with limited competition for fifty years tends to produce better outcomes for the end user when that competition is introduced.
There is also a more direct benefit for investors who prefer their precious metals stored closer to home. A Gold IRA held at an approved depository in Texas, Nevada, or Idaho is still fully insured, fully audited, and fully compliant with IRS requirements. The only thing that changes under the SILVER Act is that the geography of approved storage becomes far less arbitrary.
The Bigger Signal Worth Paying Attention To
Congress does not introduce national security legislation to modernize the storage infrastructure of irrelevant assets.
The SILVER Act is being introduced because gold and silver have become important enough, and strategically significant enough, that their physical storage network now warrants the same kind of national security analysis that applies to oil pipelines, semiconductor supply chains, and data centers. The same Iran war that prompted lawmakers to examine precious metals storage vulnerabilities also sent gold toward record highs and pushed central banks to accumulate physical metal at the fastest pace in decades.
The same geopolitical fracturing that is restructuring global trade flows is pushing nations to bring their gold home rather than leave it in foreign custody — France completed the repatriation of all its gold from U.S. vaults earlier this year, making a $15 billion profit in the process. Germany faces mounting pressure to do the same with its 1,236 tonnes currently held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The SILVER Act sits inside all of that context. It is a domestic policy acknowledgment of the same reality that is driving central banks, sovereign wealth funds, and institutional investors toward physical gold at a historic pace: that precious metals are not a relic of a bygone financial era. They are assets serious enough that their physical infrastructure has become a matter of national policy.
Where the Bill Stands
The SILVER Act has to survive committee review, floor votes, and conference negotiations before it becomes law. The legislative timeline is uncertain, as it is for most legislation in the current congressional environment.
But the signals are unusually strong for a piece of commodity market legislation. Bipartisan Senate sponsorship. A House companion bill already through committee. Active CFTC support at the chairman level. A broad industry coalition spanning the entire precious metals supply chain. And a geopolitical backdrop that has made the bill’s core argument about concentration risk concrete and politically urgent.
Bipartisan is a word that does not mean much in Washington these days. An Idaho Republican and a Nevada Democrat introducing the same bill on the same day, for the same reasons, backed by the same industry coalition, with regulatory support already in place — that is as close to a genuine bipartisan moment as the current Congress is likely to produce.
For anyone who owns gold and silver, or holds a precious metals IRA, the SILVER Act is the kind of legislation worth watching. Not because it changes what gold is or why it matters. But because it is the clearest signal yet that the people responsible for regulating America’s financial infrastructure have started treating precious metals with the seriousness they deserve.
Sources:
- Sens. Risch and Cortez Masto Introduce Bipartisan SILVER Act to Derisk U.S. Precious Metals Market Infrastructure | Morningstar
- U.S. Senators introduce bipartisan SILVER Act to expand precious metals vault network | Kitco News
- Risch, Cortez Masto Introduce Bill to Boost Access to Precious Metal Depositories
- Cortez Masto, Risch Introduce Bill to Boost Access to Precious Metal Depositories
- Text – S.4621 – 119th Congress (2025-2026): SILVER Act
- U.S. Senators File National Security Amendment Targeting Dangerous Gold Market Concentration | Newswire
- Sens. Risch and Cortez Masto Introduce Bipartisan SILVER Act to Derisk U.S. Precious Metals Market Infrastructure
