While economist Peter Schiff has renewed his criticism of Bitcoin (BTC), he has also announced that he is working on launching a tokenized gold application. What is this all about?
Peter Schiff develops his tokenized gold application
On Wednesday, speaking to ThreadGuy for CounterParty TV, American economist Peter Schiff, a long-time critic of Bitcoin, announced that he was working on the creation of a tokenized gold application:
You will be able to buy gold via a mobile app. The gold will be stored in a vault, and you will then be able to easily transfer ownership of your gold to your acquaintances or exchange it for physical gold.
In short, he lists all the features that the platform could offer, including a payment card backed by this tokenized gold or the possibility of redeeming it for real gold.
Reacting to the announcement, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the founder of Binance, took a critical view of the idea:
It’s obvious. Most people “in” the cryptocurrency world know this, but most people “outside this world” may not yet understand it. Tokenized gold is NOT “on-chain” gold. It is a symbol that you trust a third party to give you gold at a later date, even after a change in management, perhaps decades later, during a war, etc. It is a sign of “trust me, bro.” That is why no “gold coin” has really taken off.
In short, tokenized gold has similar advantages and disadvantages to an ETF on this precious metal. As such, it is true that particular attention should be paid to how the financial vehicle is collateralized by the underlying asset and any guarantees in the event of a problem.
In addition, tax issues may arise depending on the jurisdiction, particularly in France, where several tax regimes are possible, depending on whether gold is considered jewelry, paper gold, or whether the real capital gains regime is applied.
To date, the capitalization of gold-backed stablecoins is $3.87 billion, the vast majority of which is represented by Tether’s XAUT and Paxos’ PAXG:
For its part, an ounce of gold is trading at $4,116, after reaching an all-time high of over $4,380 on Monday.
Returning to Peter Schiff, it should be noted that the economist also took a dig at BTC, for which he still predicts an inevitable fall:
I still think it will eventually be worthless, so I don’t think I was wrong about that. What I was wrong about was underestimating the public’s credulity in buying it.
Before joining the abyss that many detractors predict for it, BTC is still trading at $109,400 at the time of writing, up 1.2% over the last 24 hours.
