Introducing PAX Gold — physical gold on the digital blockchain

Charles Cascarilla
2 min readSep 5, 2019

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We are proud to introduce PAX Gold, the first regulated digital asset backed token that represents premium gold bars. Designed as an ERC-20 token, PAX Gold has the flexibility and accessibility of crypto assets, while representing physical, secure, vaulted gold–without storage fees.

We think this solves the fundamental contradiction in the gold market: simultaneously owning allocated physical gold that is easy to trade, divide, move and leverage. The importance of gold has waned in the global economy, in part because of this existential issue in an increasingly digitized world. While it’s possible to easily trade gold derivatives, ETFs and unallocated gold, these are synthetic representations listed on limited, narrow marketplaces–and none offer titled ownership to actual gold. The underlying gold stays secure in London vaults even while PAX Gold is easily, cheaply and instantaneously transferable 24×7 on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s divisible into miniscule amounts (out to 18 decimal places), making it accessible and useful to broader markets.

How does that work? We partnered with the world’s most secure vaults, Brink’s, where we hold in custody the most trusted gold: 400 oz LBMA-certified London Good Delivery bars. Each PAX Gold token represents a fine troy ounce allocated down to the serial number of a specific bar. When you own PAX Gold, you have ownership of the underlying physical gold.

Very importantly, this is the first regulated gold token. The New York State Department of Financial Services has approved Paxos to offer PAX Gold and will continue to oversee our issuance of the token. Paxos has also engaged Withum, a nationally top-ranking auditing firm, to independently verify on a monthly basis that the entire supply of PAX Gold tokens is consistent with fine troy ounces of gold held in custody on behalf of Paxos Trust Company, LLC (these attestations follow standards established by the AICPA). This third-party oversight gives customers confidence that Paxos is treating their assets as an independent fiduciary.

At Paxos, we are modernizing finance by digitizing and mobilizing financial assets. We want to make it easy to move assets — so that our economy can be frictionless, global and democratized. The current system is outdated with assets — whether money, commodities or securities — moving on decades old legacy technology which is fragile, slow and inefficient. The future is an economy that is 24×7, global and instantaneous–today, we’re proud to bring gold into that future!

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Check out www.paxos.com/paxgold for more information and to buy some PAX Gold. If your purchase is among the first 7000 PAX Gold tokens, you’ll receive a 2% cash rebate. Check out the website for more details and full terms & conditions.

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