Lohko, a digital asset wallet provider, has joined hands with London-based tech company Mattereum to unveil non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that are entirely backed by gold and come with attachments of carbon offsets.
In a May 26 announcement, the new tokens will represent ownership over physical gold bars stored in a Singapore vault and managed by partner Bullionstar. Every NFT is set to represent an underlying gold bar, with the physical gold bar and the token floated in the market sharing a unique serial number for identification. Notably, these tokens come with a warranty guaranteeing that the NFT’s owner “has full legal rights to redeem the physical gold bar.”
The gold-backed NFTs have been listed on the famous Ethereum-based NFT marketplace OpenSea and each of them represents an ounce of gold, 10 grams of gold, or 100 grams of gold. Interestingly, one of the 100 gram NFTs also features 3D digital art showing an animated bull standing on a gold bar. Another version of this token seems to have been first listed on OpenSea for 7 Ethers around three months ago.
When announcing the launch of the new NFTs, Antti Saarnio, Lohko’s CEO, insisted on the boosted utility of tokenized gold over its underlying physical bars, saying:
“Gold’s main limitation as an investment category has been that its ownership is difficult to transfer […] NFT gold owners can sell their gold anywhere and to anyone in any blockchain marketplace. This is a huge benefit for gold investors providing them with better liquidity and higher sales margin.”
Lohko is not the first entity that has tokenized the precious metal. The Perth Mint Gold Token alleges that it was the first token that was backed by “government-guaranteed gold” to launch on a public blockchain in October 2019. On the other hand, asset manager CoinShares together with wallet provider Blockchain joined hands to unleash a Swiss gold-backed token powered by a private Bitcoin sidechain during the same month.
In May last year, Celsius, a centralized crypto-asset lending platform, introduced its yield product meant for Tether’s XAUT gold token.
