Blockchain platform Lohko has teamed up with London-based tech firm Mattereum to launch a new ownership model of physical goods that will enable verifiable gold non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to be traded on the blockchain and attached to carbon offsets.
Blockchain platform Lohko has teamed up with London-based tech firm Mattereum to launch a new ownership model of physical goods that will enable verifiable gold non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to be traded on the blockchain and attached to carbon offsets.
Using the Lohko Wallet, a digital wallet that secures blockchain-based financial assets, investors can now for the first time safely hold, buy, sell or transfer ownership of physical gold bars rather than just owning an IOU. Mattereum’s Asset Passports bind each individually numbered gold bar to an NFT with legally enforceable smart contracts publicly available on the blockchain.
This new ownership model pioneered by Lohko and Mattereum offers a lens into the sustainable and equitable virtual economy of the future. Verifiable digital identities, authentication and provenance of each gold bar creates transparent inventory information, allowing owners to see whether their assets meet ethical environmental and social standards and automatically invest in carbon-offsets.
“Gold’s main limitation as an investment category has been that its ownership is difficult to transfer,” says Dr Antti Saarnio, Lohko’s CEO. “Typically gold buyers don’t have access to secondary markets – NFT gold in blockchain does not have this limitation. NFT gold owners are able to sell their gold anywhere and to anyone in any blockchain marketplace. This is a huge benefit for gold investors providing them better liquidity and higher sales margin.”
Vinay Gupta, founder and CEO of Mattereum, says: “Once you can do gold, the world’s most ancient asset class, you can do anything. Putting gold on the blockchain in a way which provides such excellent protections for the rights of bar owners, across a wide range of possible scenarios, has taken immense effort and will be a real gamechanger. We hope you will feel able to trust the product of our collaboration completely.”
Verifiable gold NFTs will also enable artists to bind premium editions of their digital work to physical gold, collectors to buy and sell securely across marketplaces, and investors to have direct digital-physical ownership. The gold bars held in Lohko Wallets are stored in secure vaults maintained by a Singapore-based gold exchange.
The Mattereum Asset Passport is a third-party verified digital identity for physical assets, stored on the blockchain. They can be assigned to a diverse range of asset classes including fine art, collectibles, luxury goods, aviation parts, consumer electronics, and many more.
The Mattereum Asset Passport bundles legal and digital agreements which denote true ownership of an object while providing secure digital provenance, certificates of authenticity, insurance frameworks, and dispute resolution. These smart legal agreements are cryptographically signed and secured on-chain and stored in distributed storage networks such as IPFS.
Gold NFTs are a new type of non-fungible token for physical assets, or digital twins, that are blockchain tokens denoting digital ownership of a tangible good stored on an immutable ledger.
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