Xaurum and Hello Gold - Semi-Anachronistic Gold Based Blockchain Projects

Believe it or not, despite my strong support for our collective foray into distributed-ledger (blockchain) technology, I'm quite the fan of gold.

No, not that Gold.

Gold has a 6000+ year history of reliability. Never once has it completely, or even close to completely, wiped out holders. It is bar none the best form of generational wealth transfer across humanity's short history of economic savvy. Simply nothing else has reliably worked as a storage of wealth for more than a generation or two, ever.

See, the permanent attacks on Gold's legitimacy are why we can't have nice things.

On top of all these "exciting, ledger-like properties", Gold is also extremely difficult to counterfeit. All the crooked governments and banks hate it, to the point where they spent thousands of years trying to find ways to undermine and attack it. From shaving and remelting diluted coins going back to pre-Babylonia, to endless fiat printing from the Federal Reserve, it's all the same old scam to prevent the use or a proper accounting method that does not rely on trust.

In case you hadn't noticed the parallel, a lot of these are also the reasons we love Bitcoin so much. So, as oddly anachronistic as we may seem, combining gold with reputable blockchain products as an audited backing source may still be a very viable way of increasing trust, particularly in the East where gold remains more culturally and financially relevant (owing to the lack of a controlling cartel (COMEX/London Gold Fix, no doubt.)

As it turns out, there are a lot more of these products than I realized.

This is a concerning development, given the natural temptation to misuse such an investment.

Today I'll briefly explain a pair of these projects that appear to be the most stable with the lowest risk of the bunch. That still makes this a lottery, though - do your own due diligence.

HelloGold is a Malaysia based outfit that allows users to purchase and sell gold instantly via their application, in the type of small amounts anyone can afford. They already have over 15,000 KYC'd customers and an operational business, so to some extant, this is a less risky investment. However, the focus on Shariah compliancy and low-income clients is not something I'm a fan of.

Spreads and management fees are a little high, but this means profits for investors if customers pay. I'd almost call it a rip-off, but I don't know the normal spreads in that part of the world. The HelloGold token also pays a dividend in the form of ERC20 token GOLDX, which is (supposed) to be reliably exchangeable for a fixed weight of gold in grams. It's difficult to get any sense of the ROI on this for holding, however.

HelloGold was recently funded via traditional Venture Capital for $25m. That's a good sign, given VC are more selective than your average alt-coin investor.

Xaurum is an odd duck. For starters, you're going to see few crypto charts weirder than this one, wherein Xaurum was once worth 3 Bitcoin each:

This was less interesting than it might initially appear. Large speculative demand for Xaurum made the coin too expensive at the time for trading, given the low supply. Xaurum performed an 8000:1 split, giving all XAU holders 8000 XAUR, solving this problem. The increasing market cap afterwards demonstrates this clearly.

You'll also immediately notice this is no spring chicken of a project, in crypto terms. It's one of the oldest chains around.

What I don't like about Xaurum is that, other than working with Loomis (a spin-off of dishonest Wells Fargo), they store all of their gold in Slovenia, and God forbid, Turkey.

I can think of few places in the world I would less want to store my Gold than Turkey. Hell, I'd rather store it with Chase Bank than in a lawless, rapidly third-worlding country where an emerging dictatorial lunatic with a strong subscription to the death-cult-for-idiots has just made himself effectively president for life. Here's a sampling of his fascist political views:

"Democracy is like a train and when you get where you want, you get off" - Erdogan

In case you can't tell, I suggest staying away from all this stuff. Gold's main advantage is the ability to hold direct physical custody. Every one of these projects appears to completely shit on this indisputable fact.

There are many more of these projects, as illustrated above (GoldMint, GoldCrypto, OneGram, etc) so be careful. This industry is a hotbed for scams. Blockchain and gold may not be a great combination, given the completely opposite markets. Be careful what, if any, you invest.

Disclosure: I do not own any of these projects. This is not financial advice.

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Sources: Google, Wikipedia, HelloGold, OneGram, ColdCrypto, GoldMoney, Xaurum, Medium, ZH
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