Most things you buy have a price that someone writes on a label. A metal that trades on several continents at once works differently. Banks, refiners, miners and traders buy and sell it every hour, and each trade nudges the number a little. What you see on a screen is the latest reading of that crowd, taken at one place and one moment.
That makes the question of who sets the price harder than it sounds. A bullion dealer, a futures exchange, a bank's daily benchmark and a Chinese exchange can each show a slightly different figure for the same ounce. On a fast day the gap can run to dollars. If you hold a position, the figure your account uses decides your profit, your loss and, with leverage, whether the position survives.
The answer is several linked markets rather than a single referee. Futures exchanges trade contracts on the metal almost around the clock, and wholesale dealers in London trade the bars themselves. Once each working day, an auction turns that activity into an official reference price that contracts and funds can settle against.
For silver, those markets are New York's COMEX, London's bullion market and Shanghai, and BloFin's XAGUSDT Perpetual follows an index price for the metal. Knowing which market a number comes from tells you what it measures and why it can differ from the next screen.
Who sets the silver price?
No single body sets the silver price. Constant trading in two big markets finds it: futures on COMEX in New York and the over-the-counter bar market in London. Once a day, the LBMA Silver Price auction in London fixes an official benchmark. The spot price on most websites tends to follow COMEX trading.
The Silver Institute, the industry body behind the annual World Silver Survey, says London remains the center of the physical silver trade for most of the world. It names the COMEX division of the New York Mercantile Exchange as the most significant market for paper contracts, and it says silver's spot price is determined by COMEX (source: Silver Institute, silver price). Paper contracts here means futures, agreements to buy or sell silver at a set price on a later date.
Each market answers a different need. A miner hedging next year's output sells futures, and a bank settling metal for a client moves bars in London. A fund that values its holdings once a day uses the auction price. Their prices stay close because traders buy wherever silver is cheap and sell wherever it is dear, so a lasting gap between New York and London is rare. When one opens, metal is usually short in one city.
Underneath all three sits the physical balance of the market. Global mine output rose 3% to 846.6 million ounces in 2025. Demand still exceeded supply for the fifth year in a row, a gap known as the market deficit, which keeps drawing down the silver stocks held above ground (source: Silver Institute, World Silver Survey 2026). Supply and demand set the level over months and years, while the markets set the price minute by minute. What moves the silver price takes the longer-run drivers one by one.
Gold is priced through a very similar set of markets, and how the gold price is determined shows the shared pieces from gold's side. Silver has its own quirks, starting with how much of the price is made in New York.
How COMEX futures drive the quoted price
COMEX futures drive the silver price most people see, because they carry the most silver trading. A futures contract fixes a price today for metal delivered later, and price feeds follow the most active contract. CME Group, which owns COMEX, reported a record $50 billion of silver futures traded on an average day in the first half of 2026 (source: Reuters via Kitco, August 11, 2026).
That figure came from CME in August, when it announced round-the-clock trading for its smaller 100-ounce silver contract from September (source: Reuters via Kitco, August 11, 2026). In the same report, CME describes the 5,000-ounce COMEX contract as the global benchmark, and the 100-ounce contract settles in cash against its daily settlement price. Even CME's 100-ounce contract takes its final price from the big contract.
Volume matters for price discovery because a price is only as good as the trading behind it. When contracts change hands every few seconds, each new trade carries fresh information, from a jobs report to a mine strike, and the price adjusts almost at once. That is why the spot figure on a dealer's website keeps moving through the US session even when no bar has changed owner. The screen tends to follow the futures market.
Say a website shows spot silver at $49.02 and a futures chart shows $49.40 for a contract that expires two months later. Both figures are right. The futures price includes the cost of storing and financing the metal until delivery. The gap between the two is called the basis, and spot silver and the futures basis explains with live examples.
The futures market has rules of its own, including contract sizes, expiry dates, delivery and margin, and how COMEX silver futures work goes through them. For price discovery, the point is simpler: COMEX carries the most futures trading, and London is the center of the physical trade.
London's bullion market and loco London silver
London is where the world's wholesale silver bars change owners. Banks and dealers trade directly with each other, with no exchange in between, and the metal settles across accounts held in London vaults. Silver traded this way is called loco London, and London's clearing banks settle well over 100 million ounces of it on an average day (source: LBMA clearing data).
The London Bullion Market Association, or LBMA, describes a market where trade is carried out directly between two counterparties, with the bullion settling physically across accounts held in London (source: LBMA, about loco London). The bars that change hands are Good Delivery bars, made to LBMA's quality standard. The same page notes that precious metals trade on a 24-hour basis, either for immediate delivery, known as spot, or for a date in the future.
The clearing figures show the scale. LBMA publishes them monthly as daily averages. In September 2026, the four banks that run London's clearing system settled 145.2 million ounces of silver a day, worth $8.8 billion, across 1,659 transfers (source: LBMA clearing data). Set against the 846.6 million ounces mined in 2025 (source: Silver Institute, World Silver Survey 2026), London clears the equivalent of a whole year's mine output in about 5.8 trading days.
That gap between trading and mining is normal for a metal held as an investment. Many of the ounces cleared in London are the same bars changing owner, often without leaving the vault. When the link between London and New York strains, it shows up as a squeeze. The Silver Institute traces the record prices of 2025 partly to a dramatic shift of metal into CME vaults. Together with falling inventories and heavy buying, that shift caused a severe liquidity squeeze in October 2025 (source: Silver Institute, World Silver Survey 2026).
How the LBMA Silver Price auction works
The LBMA Silver Price is the daily benchmark for silver held in London, set in an electronic auction starting at 12PM London time each working day (source: ICE, LBMA Silver Price). Banks and dealers enter how much they want to buy and sell, and the price moves round by round until the two sides roughly balance. The final dollar price is that day's benchmark.
ICE Benchmark Administration (IBA) runs the auctions for spot, unallocated loco London silver and forms the price in US dollars (source: ICE, LBMA Silver Price). Unallocated means a claim on a share of a bank's silver pool rather than on numbered bars, the usual form for wholesale trades. In winter, 12PM London is 12PM UTC, and during British Summer Time it is 11AM UTC.
Each round lasts 30 seconds. Orders are expressed in lakhs of 100,000 ounces, with a minimum order of 1,000 ounces, and the opening price is likely to sit close to the spot price (source: LBMA Silver Price FAQ). If buy and sell orders differ by more than the tolerance of five lakhs, the price changes and the auction restarts (source: IBA Silver Auction Specification, January 2026). Once the gap is inside that tolerance, the price is set. Thirteen banks and trading firms are on-boarded as direct participants, among them Citibank, HSBC, JP Morgan and Standard Chartered. Every participant must follow a code of conduct (source: LBMA Silver Price).
A worked round makes the rule concrete. Say the auction opens at $49.00 with bids for 2.6 million ounces against offers of 1.9 million. The 700,000-ounce gap is wider than the 500,000-ounce tolerance, so buyers outnumber sellers at that price and the next round starts higher. If the second round shows 2.1 million bid against 1.95 million offered, the 150,000-ounce gap is inside tolerance and that price becomes the benchmark. At the October 30, 2026 late-session spot price of $49.015, the 500,000-ounce tolerance was worth about $24.5 million.
From the London Silver Fix to IBA
The auction replaced an older method. The London Silver Fix was discontinued on August 14, 2014. The LBMA chose an electronic auction run by CME Group and Thomson Reuters to replace it (source: SEC filing, ETFS prospectus supplement, October 2, 2017). IBA took over the administration on October 2, 2017, and the same filing records seven direct participants on August 1, 2017, against the thirteen listed today.
The old fix and the new auction share one core idea, adjusting a single price until buy and sell orders match (source: SEC filing, ETFS prospectus supplement, October 2, 2017). The auction is electronic and can be audited, and physical settlement stayed loco London silver. The International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) confirmed that the new price would replace the old fixing in derivatives contracts (source: LBMA Silver Price FAQ).
Who uses the benchmark
According to IBA, producers, refiners, banks, central banks, jewelers and other buyers trade in its silver auctions or use the result as a reference price. The benchmark underpins spot deals, monthly averaging, cash settlement, location swaps and options (source: ICE, LBMA Silver Price). A miner might sell its output at the monthly average of the daily benchmark, and a fund that holds bars can value them at the day's auction price.
That is why the benchmark matters even if you never trade in London. When a contract or a fund follows the LBMA Silver Price, its value is set by one auction at one moment each working day. A sharp move in the New York afternoon reaches that price only at the next day's auction.
Shanghai's silver prices and why regions split
Shanghai is the third center of silver pricing. The Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE) runs a daily silver benchmark auction in yuan per kilogram, and the Shanghai Futures Exchange (SHFE) lists silver futures with daily price limits. Shanghai prices can sit above or below London and New York for weeks, and that gap shows how tight metal is in China.
The SGE's benchmark works much like London's auction, with its own members and thresholds. Its notice of November 15, 2024 admitted CITIC as a Shanghai Silver Fixing Member and cut the execution threshold from 9,000 kilograms to 7,500 kilograms. That threshold is the buy-sell imbalance at or below which the price is set, and above it the price steps by 2 to 16 yuan per kilogram per round (source: Shanghai Gold Exchange notice). Converted at 32.15 troy ounces per kilogram (source: NIST conversion factors for precious metals), 7,500 kilograms is about 241,000 ounces, or roughly half of London's 500,000-ounce tolerance.
Shanghai's futures market also limits how far prices can move. In a notice of May 13, 2026, SHFE set a daily price limit of 17% either side of the previous day's settlement for the AG2705 silver contract. The same notice set its trading margin for general positions at 19% of the contract value (source: Shanghai Futures Exchange notice via Mondo Visione). A limit like that can hold the Shanghai price at its floor while London and New York keep falling. The difference then shows up as a premium or a discount to Western prices.
In India, dealer premiums over official domestic prices fell to $0.45 an ounce on October 22, 2026, as more import licenses eased physical tightness, and Heraeus says permits cover around 6,500 tonnes of imports over six months (source: Kitco, Heraeus note, November 2, 2026).
A premium like that is the cost of getting metal into one market quickly, and it fades once supply can reach the buyers. Silver tariffs and trade rules covers the policy side, and COMEX, London and Shanghai inventories follows the stockpiles that drive these premiums.
Who sets the price at the weekend?
There is no LBMA benchmark at the weekend, because the London auction runs only on working days. Since September 2026, CME's 100-ounce silver contract has traded around the clock, weekends included (source: Kitco, September 14, 2026). Weekend prices come from far thinner trading than a weekday price, and Monday's open can jump.
CME said 2,387 contracts of the 100-ounce silver future traded during its inaugural weekend of 24/7 trading, worth more than $15 million in notional value (source: Kitco, September 14, 2026). Set against the $50 billion average day of the first half (source: Reuters via Kitco, August 11, 2026), that whole weekend came to about 0.03% of one weekday's silver futures trading.
The October 30 to November 2, 2026 weekend shows how weekend news lands on the next weekday price. On Friday, spot silver traded near $49.015 late in the US session, down 6.06%, as a technology-led sell-off in shares intensified liquidation pressure across precious metals (source: Kitco PM report, October 30, 2026). In US trading on Monday, spot silver was near $50.800, up $1.800, or 3.67%, on the session, after reports of progress toward talks between Washington and Tehran sent oil prices down more than 7% (source: Kitco PM report, November 2, 2026).
News that breaks on a Saturday reaches the London auction only on Monday, so the first weekday prices absorb it all at once. A silver price determined on a thinly traded weekend contract is a guide to where trading may resume, and the weekday markets have the final word. The wider October fall has its own explainer, and each market's sessions and weekend windows are listed separately.
On BloFin, the XAGUSDT Perpetual kept trading through that weekend, and its funding kept settling every four hours (source: BloFin XAG funding rate history).
You can follow the live mark price and funding rate on the XAGUSDT Perpetual page.
How the XAG-USDT perpetual follows these prices
The XAGUSDT Perpetual follows silver through an index price, and BloFin uses that index as the anchor for its order price limits (source: BloFin XAG contract details). BloFin values an open position and sets its liquidation point from the mark price, while the latest trade only shows where the market last dealt (source: BloFin index, mark and last price FAQ).
BloFin caps how far a buy order can sit above the index and a sell order below it at 3%, and a two-minute average premium can pull either limit closer to the index (source: BloFin XAG contract details).
For a perpetual, the mark price is the silver price that matters most, and it can drift apart from the last price on a fast day. Funding settles six times a day, once every four hours starting from 12AM UTC (source: BloFin XAG contract details). The silver perpetual funding rate explains who pays whom and why the rate moves.
BloFin lists no silver spot pair, so the perpetual is the way to trade silver's price on BloFin, and the XAG-USDT perpetual explained covers every contract term. For the wider picture of silver as an asset and the ways to hold it, start with what silver is and how to get exposure.
Looking to trade silver? To get started, you'll need to first create a BloFin account, fund your account with cryptocurrency, and navigate to the XAGUSDT Perpetual trading page.
Frequently asked questions
Where can you see the LBMA silver price?
LBMA publishes the price shortly after 12PM London, once the auction ends, and data vendors carry it in real time (source: LBMA Silver Price FAQ). IBA's intraday data becomes available four hours after publication, and its delayed data at midnight London time (source: ICE, LBMA Silver Price).
Can a private investor take part in the LBMA silver auction?
Direct participants and the clients they sponsor enter orders in the auction itself, but you can trade at the auction price through a bank or broker that takes part. LBMA tells clients to check with their bank or broker first (source: LBMA Silver Price FAQ).
Is the silver price set in dollars or pounds?
The LBMA Silver Price is formed in US dollars per troy ounce. IBA also publishes sterling and euro versions, but those cannot be traded directly through the auction (source: ICE, LBMA Silver Price). LBMA describes them as indicative prices for settlement only (source: LBMA Silver Price FAQ).
Who regulates the LBMA silver price?
The UK Financial Conduct Authority has regulated the LBMA Silver Price since April 1, 2015 (source: SEC filing, ETFS prospectus supplement, October 2, 2017). IBA runs the auction in line with the benchmark principles of the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO). Its Precious Metals Oversight Committee, with broad representation from the gold and silver markets, oversees how the price is defined and worked out (source: LBMA Silver Price).
Do you need a license to use the LBMA silver price?
Yes, if you use it for valuation and pricing, or in transactions and financial products. Any party using the LBMA Silver Price that way needs a usage license from IBA (source: LBMA Silver Price). IBA licenses the use and redistribution of the benchmark on a commercial and reasonable basis (source: ICE, LBMA Silver Price), and LBMA directs anyone who needs a market-data license to contact IBA (source: LBMA Silver Price FAQ).
Researched and written by the BloFin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. All facts independently verified. Primary sources include ICE Benchmark Administration and its January 2026 silver auction specification, the LBMA, the Silver Institute, the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the Shanghai Gold Exchange, the Shanghai Futures Exchange, NIST, Reuters, Kitco and BloFin's XAG contract details and funding rate pages and its mark price help page, current as of November 4, 2026.
Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold silver in any form. The price you see depends on the market and the moment it was read, and a sharp move in New York or a gap after the weekend can change a position's value before London's next auction. On the XAGUSDT Perpetual, unrealized profit, loss and liquidation follow the mark price, funding is paid or charged every four hours, and high leverage can wipe out your margin on a move of a few percent. Past performance does not indicate future results. Do your own research and consider your risk tolerance before you trade on BloFin.