Just recently on January 13, 2020, an online marketplace for purchasing and selling gold and precious metals called OneGold, announced a partnership with BitPay.
With OneGold users can buy, sell and redeem precious metals like gold and silver. Now with the help of the BitPay payment service, the company can integrate cryptocurrency payments in their new mobile app and website. They will accept payments in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and a few stablecoins. The application is available for Android and iOS users. However, BitPay customers who will choose to use OneGold services on its website will save 2%.
“Cryptocurrency holders are a natural fit as precious metals investors and can utilize OneGold to balance their investment portfolio. Using BitPay, cryptocurrency holders can quickly buy gold or silver at institutional pricing, save 2%, and create a nice balanced mix of gold, silver, and cryptocurrencies,” explained OneGold CEO Kenneth Lewis.
He believes that this partnership with BitPay will help make wealth preservation for people more available than ever “at the lowest cost of ownership on the market”.
Currently, around 30,000 merchants in the world use the BitPay Bitcoin payment services. Among them are such giants as Microsoft and Avnet.
Paxos Was Here First
Speaking about holding gold, there is another option on how to do it digitally. The Paxos stablecoin operator recently in September 2019 created a gold-backed ERC-20 token PAX Gold (PAXG) that users can also redeem to actual physical gold. According to a report by the New York State Department of Financial Services, the token will be backed by “one fine troy ounce of London Good Delivery gold”.
“By releasing a regulated product that makes it easy to own or trade gold, we’re using blockchain technology to democratize access to a multi-trillion-dollar market and bring gold into the digital future,” said Paxos CEO Charles Cascarilla.
Cascarilla notes that the Pax Gold token solves some of the fundamental challenges and is easily tradeable just like the Bitcoin and the ETFs. He further adds that trading gold has never been so easy. As they are entirely democratizing access to gold by putting it on a blockchain network. The PAXG token will be available to both – institutional and individual traders.
However, while PAX Gold was the first in the market, OneGold could have a slight advantage when entering it. OneGold is founded by a precious metal dealer APMEX and another alternative asset management company called Sprott. Sprott has millions of global clients holding gold and other precious metals digitally. With OneGold and APMEX users, who want to redeem and convert their digital metals to physical ones, they can receive their holdings within the same business day. And now with the help of BitPay, crypto users can also “hop on board”.
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