Gold extraction has a centuries-long history in Madagascar, and today between 750,000 and two million Malagasy earn their livelihoods through ASGM. This chapter considers the sector’s past and present to elaborate the particular ways in which the global gold production system has crystallized in the country’s diggings. I begin by providing a broad accounting of developments in gold mining from the 1800s to the present day. Next, I trace the sector’s trajectory in Betsiaka, one of the island’s best-known mining regions. Throughout the chapter, I work to illustrate how particular frontier dynamics—the preponderance of informal production processes; the fragmented and contested nature of authority; and a resistance to technological complexification and labor rigidification—have emerged and persisted. Moreover, despite repeated attempts by state and corporate actors to exert greater control over the sector and realize industrial-scale exploitation, I show how ASGM operators and the commercial networks with which they engage have continued to dominate the island’s gold economy. These phenomena are the product of particular socio-natural, political-economic conditions including the geological character of deposits and the crystallization of ASGM as a strongly-embedded site of flexible livelihood production.