The diamond industry offers a warning about what can happen when something built around scarcity becomes easier to manufacture. Natural one-carat diamond prices have fallen from roughly $8,00
The diamond industry offers a warning about what can happen when something built around scarcity becomes easier to manufacture.
Natural one-carat diamond prices have fallen from roughly $8,007 in 2021 to about $3,898 in 2026, a decline of 51%. Lab-grown diamonds have played a role alongside excess supply and weaker demand, with De Beers reporting that wholesale prices for synthetic diamonds have fallen about 93% since 2020.
Now there is an unusual question for gold investors.
Could the same thing eventually happen to gold?
San Francisco-based Marathon Fusion has developed a method that it says could use fusion neutrons to convert mercury-198 into stable gold-197.
Its research paper estimates that a commercial fusion plant could potentially produce around two tonnes of gold per gigawatt of thermal power each year.
The idea is real enough to have attracted serious investors.
In 2024, Marathon raised a $5.9 million seed round led by 1517 Fund and Anglo American, the mining group that owns most of De Beers. De Beers itself was not the investor.
That connection is interesting given what happened in diamonds, but the technology is nowhere close to replacing mined gold.
IS GOLD NEXT?
Natural diamond prices have CRASHED 51% since their 2021 peak.
Now, De Beers’ parent company is BACKING a U.S. startup exploring lab-made GOLD.
De Beers, the company behind “A Diamond Is Forever,” once controlled 85% of global rough diamond supply.
But DIAMOND prices have PLUMMETED.
- Natural diamonds fell from an average of $8,007 per 1-carat stone in 2021 to $3,898 in 2026, according to CNBC.
- Lab-grown diamonds saw wholesale prices plunge 90%–95% since 2015, according to Euronews.
- De Beers suffered as parent company Anglo American recorded $6.8 BILLION in write-downs between 2023 and 2025.
Anglo American, which owns 85% of De Beers, invested in Marathon Fusion’s $5.9 MILLION funding round in 2024. De Beers itself was NOT the investor.
Marathon Fusion claims it has successfully converted mercury into STABLE GOLD.
But major challenges remain, per FT:
- Artificial gold could require 14–18 YEARS of storage due to radioactive impurities.
- Commercial-scale fusion production remains unproven.
- Marathon itself expects the gold market could absorb future production without significantly affecting prices.
The breakthrough also remains independently UNVERIFIED.
Lab-grown diamonds disrupted an industry built on scarcity.
Diamonds weren’t forever. Could GOLD eventually face the same disruption?— Coin Bureau (@coinbureau) October 25, 2026
Marathon’s own proposal still depends on commercial-scale fusion power, which itself remains a developing industry.
There is also a practical problem with the product.
The company’s paper says newly produced gold could contain radioactive impurities. Depending on the safety threshold used, the material could need years of cooling. Under the most conservative standard in the paper, it would take about 17.7 years before the radioactivity fell below the level of a banana equivalent per troy ounce.
Read also: Gold Price Today: Why $4,000 Is the Level Everyone Is Watching
Probably not anytime soon.
The numbers explain why.
Marathon’s proposed output is around two tonnes per GWth per year. Global gold mines produced roughly 3,672 tonnes in 2025, and more than 220,000 tonnes of gold already existed above ground by 2026.
So even if the technology works exactly as planned, early production would be tiny compared with the existing gold market.
The more interesting question is what happens decades from now if fusion becomes commercial and gold production scales with it.
Gold’s investment appeal partly depends on scarcity. If technology eventually makes new supply much easier to create, that scarcity argument could weaken.
This is where the diamond comparison becomes useful.
Lab-grown diamonds did not destroy natural diamonds overnight. They changed the economics gradually by creating a cheaper substitute and altering how consumers thought about scarcity.
Gold could face a similar debate if fusion-made gold ever reaches meaningful scale.
But there is one big difference.
Gold is not only jewelry. It is also held by central banks, investors and institutions as a monetary and reserve asset. That gives it a much broader demand base than diamonds.
For now, fusion-made gold is more of a fascinating long-term risk to watch than a threat to today’s gold price.
The technology still needs commercial fusion, scalable production and a solution to the radioactive cooldown problem.
But if those hurdles are ever solved, the idea that gold supply is permanently limited may become a little harder to defend.
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The post Could Lab-Grown Gold Crash Prices Like Lab-Grown Diamonds Did? appeared first on CaptainAltcoin.
