With an increasing importance of green technologies, todays world relies on an increasing supply of minerals and their contained metals. As the discovery of large deposits of precious metalssuch as copper and goldis becoming rare, explorers now focus on the deepsea to ensure demand is met. We have known for decades that large copper, silver and gold-rich volcanic-hosted massive sulphide (VMS) deposits are associated with seafloor arc volcanism. Therefore, understanding arc volcanism and in particular the source and transport of copper, silver and gold in arc lavas is critical in understanding how, when, and why these deposits form.Although researchers have come a long way in understanding where and how seafloor VMS deposits form, key aspects about the source of metals remains poorly understood. This includes determining how thickness, composition, and amount of fluids released from the subducting slab affects metal budgets in seafloor massive sulphides. With increasing ability to produce high-precision analyses in fresh seafloor volcanic glass of key strategic metals, such as silver and gold, we are just beginning to understand where these metals are sourced from beneath volcanic arcs and how they are transported to the surface. Volcanic rocks that form at submarine intra-oceanic arcs ascend through typically much thinner oceanic crust than continental crust. In addition, compositional similarities of the oceanic crust and newly erupted lavas, compared to much diversified continental crust, provides a rare opportunity to see through the crust and identify the composition of the mantle that hosts both: a) a geochemical signature from the subducting slab (sediments, altered oceanic crust and serpentinised lithosphere; e.g., Elliot et al., 1997; Ruepke et al., 2004), and b) pre-existing mantle heterogeneities. This information is important in understanding the processes that lead to regional magma enrichment in strategic metals. This has important implications on availability of these metals in magmas, which is prerequisite to ore deposit formation. As a case study, we will use major and trace element and strategic metal compositions from selected submarine Kermadec arc volcanic glasses spanning ~1300 km of arc volcanic front. CITATION: Timm, C, Hannington, M, Portnyagin, M, de Ronde, C E J, Leybourne, M and Arculus, R J, 2019. GoldTrace: tracking the origin of precious metals in seafloor arc lavas, in Proceedings PACRIM 2019, pp 21922 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).