The thirst for gold is ever-present in human history. Wherever gold is, humans go. As the primary medium of exchange and wealth storage throughout history, gold is unimpeachable in its crystallization of all humanity’s dreams of avarice.

Many ships have sailed, flags been raised, and endeavors sunk in search of the world’s local currency. And nowhere is this more apparent than in a gold rush, where new deposits and new discoveries cause people from every corner of the world to come in hope of holding gold in their hands. And in doing so, change the history of nations.

In the modern era, these gold rushes of yore have been replaced by gold rushes in the markets, where macroeconomic conditions, tightening supply or increased demand lead to a surge in the price of gold.

We are living in a gold rush right now. The era of tokenized gold is upon us. And the world is racing to get their hands on tokens that are truly backed by gold, representing efficient and malleable storage of the underlying collateral. It’s only the latest resurgence in a long history of evolution for the world’s legacy asset. Here are some of the gold rushes and price surges of history!

Famous Historical Gold Rushes

California Gold Rush

Possibly the most famous gold rush in history, the California Gold Rush not only redrew the future of the state, it reimagined the future of the American nation, then a rising but still small power on the global stage. The Gold Rush came to tweak the realization that the vast wealth of the New World remained completely untapped, and that anyone, and everyone, could make their fortune in the land of opportunity.

In 1848 gold was discovered by James W. Marshall. In 1849, 300,000 people raced to California to grab their share of the immense profusion of gold found in the riverbeds and streams and mines of the sunshine state. With its diverse population growing rapidly and fuelled by daily discoveries of gold, the economy boomed instantly, making the state rich, and creating the conditions for California’s current status as the world’s 5th largest economy all by itself.

Australian Gold Rush 

Australia was not much more than a backwater until significant gold discoveries starting in 1850 made everyone realize that the Oceania nation had near-unlimited future potential as a state. Once word got out of gold in New South Wales, thousands of settlers from Europe, North America and China raced to settle it, in turn bringing systems and wealth that evolved Australia from colonial oversight to major growing nation. The wealth created and settlers that came eventually pushed for independence and the formation of the commonwealth of Australia, and major Australian cities including Melbourne owe their existence to their site as a gold rush.

South African Gold Rush

When gold was discovered in South Africa in 1886, the entire nation changed forever. As with other gold rushes, thousands of prospectors raced into lands previously mainly inhabited by indigenous people, causing major conflict and upheaval for southern Africa. The gold deposits found by George Harrison, an Australian prospector, were the most extensive and rich ever found. An estimated 40% of gold ever extracted comes from South Africa. The huge desire to extract this wealth led to South Africa’s massive industrialisation and fast rise of Johannesburg as both the cultural and political capital of the newly emerging South African nation.

Gold Price Surges of Recent History

As globalization dawned, markets matured, and gold increasingly at the center of mediated exchange with countries, the price naturally continued to rise. Eventually, the US and other major world parties established Bretton Woods System, in part to create a stable global order for intentional trade, and fixed the price of gold at $35 dollars an ounce, committing to buy and sell gold on the international markets at these rates, and in doing so putting the US at the center of world economics at a time nations were rebuilding their countries after the second world war.

This fixed price didn’t last. Eventually, the US struggled to cover the dollar supply with its gold reserves, and what once helped bring global security and domestic stability to the US was causing strain to the unfettered growth of its fiat markets. In 1971, Richard Nixon suspended the convertibility, leading to the Nixon shock, where gold switched from a fixed to a floating exchange rate, as it evolved from being a structural underpinning for global finance and into a commodity driven by market forces. You may expect that, with coming off the gold standard, the price of gold would collapse. And that it was the end of gold’s history. At the time, many traders thought the same. The reality couldn’t be more different.

Since 1971, the price of gold has surged as more and more fiat was printed to fund and cover debts of nations and governments. It hasn’t been a straight line up, but over the past 50 years gold has cemented its status and the time-honored hedge against inflation and, in many, many moments of historical instability gold’s price has rocketed in response. Whether that’s fears of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Financial Crisis of 2008, the European Debt Crisis of 2010, or even the Covid Pandemic of our all too recent history. Gold continues its stable and steady accumulation of wealth.

The New Tokenized Gold Rush

And now a new gold rush is upon us with tokenized gold, bringing the enormous efficiency and malleability of on-chain economies and unleashing gold’s liquidity throughout a brand new market with it. Tokenized gold can act as a stablecoin, returning us to the roots of our antiquity when Phoenicians exchange Syracuse Dekadrachms on the shores of the Mediterranean.

In that spirit, Kinka Gold, issued by a subsidiary of UNBANKED, INC., is tokenized gold which is 100% reserve-backed by premium Japanese gold and which is regulated by the Japanese Financial Services Authority. It’s designed to offer users the most stable, flexible, redeemable, and secure gold-backed token anywhere, and create a new rush for gold. Not in California, Australia or South Africa, not in the accounts of money managers in ivory towers, but everywhere, and for everyone, across DeFi.