At a symposium of the London Bullion Market Association last week, Paxos founder and CEO Charles Cascarilla discussed the growth of PAXG (PAXG is a gold-backed ERC-20 token launched by Paxos) and a wider range of asset tokens Future. This future is likely to involve Paxos’s recently announced integration with financial giant PayPal.
Speaking with Raghav Chawla, director of product management at Fidelity Labs and Sakhila Mirza of LBMA, Cascarilla told the audience that tokens backed by gold naturally fit Paxos’ vision:
“Given what we are trying to do at Paxos, it is indeed very logical for us to issue gold tokens. Gold tokens will become the infrastructure of a blockchain-based financial system. We believe that from now on A more open financial system is being realized.”
He mentioned various shortcomings, including limited transaction time and high frictional costs inherent in exchanging physical gold and silver, which limit the exchange of physical gold and gold assets in the traditional market.
Due to the outstanding liquidity, transferability and availability of tokenized assets in the all-day market, Cascarilla believes that tokenized gold and other assets are the future.
When talking about commodities on the chain, he said: “I think this is indeed an inevitable trend about where assets will be.”
However, one of the main obstacles is the establishment of “channels” for adoption.
To date, Paxos has tokenized $75 million (37,000 ounces) of gold, which represents only a small portion of the global gold market (estimated at $7.3 trillion). Cascarilla pointed out that the prerequisite steps have reduced the speed of widespread adoption: you must first choose to adopt the blockchain, and then choose gold as an asset for on-chain transactions.
But he believes that if the scale of asset management grows by 5 to 10 times, the entire tokenized gold market will reach more than $1 billion, which makes the tokenized asset market truly “hot”.
In addition, Cascarilla believes that the tokenized asset market may soon become hot:
“Some of the partnerships we are about to establish will be able to bring digital gold to hundreds of millions or even billions of people in the next 18 months… I think these two blockchain-based assets (but especially gold) The adoption prospects are very, very bright. This is the future direction.”
Although Cascarilla did not mention PayPal as one of its partners, commentators speculated that the Paxos/Paypal integration of cryptocurrencies may open the door to mass adoption of cryptocurrencies. If corporate giants like PayPal provide access to tokenized assets, they may be another door that is about to open.
Moreover, although gold investors like Peter Schiff have been championing gold, Cascarilla believes that assets, especially gold, must be digitized in order to compete with Bitcoin.
“In today’s world, physical assets don’t have many uses.”
