Gold is the universal asset for all financial markets. The tokenization of gold will unleash stored liquidity through efficient on-chain exchange and act as a safe intermediary asset.

Gold has been a universal store of value since time immemorial. A hardy, shiny metal that in every harbour and market was accepted as payment, which was scarce and robust enough to serve as a unit signifier of wealth and power.

As a currency, it is timeless. As a status symbol, it endures. Viking’s lords used to hand out rings of gold to their thanes in exchange for loyalty until death (the etymological root of Lord of Rings Nazgul). Mansa Musa possessed a continent spanning (and economy crashing) entourage, such was the productivity of his mines. Gold, indestructible as it is, has been central to culture and power as soon as history began.
Gold and Banking

With the advent of paper money, these dynamics began to shift. The Chinese invented paper money way back in the 7th century to save merchant’s mules from blowing their knees hauling stacks of copper from town to town. But it was the Medici’s operating in Florence during the advent of the Renaissance that truly began to use these notional paper signifiers of gold to create a banking system that looks like the one we had today. It was a shift that exploded wealth across the continent as was a key driver behind the rise of Europe on the world stage.

As banking evolved (with ‘banking’ effectively being the storage of gold and silver and the issuance of promissory notes for it), so did gold. Nowadays, gold is a highly integrated part of the financial markets we see today. Central banks hold roughly 17% of the global supply, ETFs, bars and coins make up roughly 21%. Jewellery – gold’s OG use case – still makes up 46% of the market. Gold’s market cap (as of today’s prices) sits at just over $13 trillion, with a T – 10 times that of the entire crypto market.
Gold as Financial Instrument

It is traded by every major financial institution in the world, and held by most as a diversification tranche of their portfolio. It’s offered to retail investors regularly in consumer-facing asset mixes, while its liquidity and steady availability makes it a useful vessel for derivatives and futures contracts. It’s also often used as a go-between asset when trading industrial-scale baskets of commodities.

Gold has been financially instrumentalized at every stage of history, such is its lynchpin positioning at the centre of our human ideas of wealth. With the advent of blockchain, and the slow march by institutional markets towards tokenization of assets on-chain, the need for a liquid on-chain gold asset for these novel financial markets is obvious. The crypto market right now is swelling with the news that the first Bitcoin ETF could soon be launched. If crypto is coming to TradFi, TradFi is certainly coming to the blockchain. And nothing is more TradFi than gold.
How Tokenized Gold Benefits Web3

Gold-backed crypto tokens will be a powerful way to unleash the liquidity of vaulted gold and create an inroad for gold into markets such as DeFi, NFTs, gaming, stablecoins, foreign exchange, international remittance, and anything else crypto’s creative composable markets come up with. Buying crypto backed by gold via Ethereum, for example, will be a much easier, smoother and safer experience for a retail investor to get involved in gold speculation or to simply diversify their current on-chain assets. Gold, although it does experience price swings, is alongside land history’s most stable asset.

As crypto begins its latest period of uptrending volatility, the need for stable assets to trade into and out of – especially for institutions – will be paramount. There have been serious questions raised about the true nature of Tether’s, the world’ stablecoin provider, reserves. Most stablecoins, even those notionally backed by reserves, have suffered de-pegs and failures of redemption. A stablecoin backed by redeemable gold, however, takes us back to the promissory notes of old, one’s stored as indestructible as gold on the immutable shared ledger of the blockchain.
Kinka’s Liquid On-Chain Gold

Kinka is a $XNK token pegged to the gold price and is backed by over 99.99% pure gold bullion.
The gold bullion is handled by UNBANKED, INC., a listed Japanese company, and is the world’s highest quality premium Japanese gold bullion that complies with LBMA standards and is certified by the Osaka Exchange, Inc.

With a purity of 99.99%, this bullion is fully compliant with all Japanese and international legal standards, making it an excellent choice for individuals, businesses, and financial institutions seeking exposure to both gold and the currency in which they trade. It’s the perfect tool. On Web3. This is particularly useful for the Japanese market, where stablecoins backed by the national currency are not yet available.

Kinka’s on-chain gold is simply the next evolution of humanity’s long journey to make gold simpler, more liquid, safer to store, and easier to transact with. Unlike bank notes promising to pay bearers gold, $XNK inherits all blockchain’s decentralised, trustless, permissionless, and security features, melding the two to create a powerful new unit of finance. As banks, institutions and traders increasingly explore Web3s potential use cases and financial alchemy, gold will remain at the centre of modern finance, and with Kinka – it’ll move faster than it ever has before.