Hmmmm... this was a bit of interesting news that appeared a couple of weeks ago on my feed. When I was in Europe, the Perth Mint had launched a bit of an interesting pilot project that had expanded on their existing Goldpass program. Goldpass was a digital program that allowed people to trade and hold gold and silver within an app and have those "credits' be redeemable for physical gold and silver at the Perth Mint. It was a fully centralised digital ledger, and as such it served more like a digital repository for IOUs... which is pretty much what most people want anyway. Especially if you aren't really that comfortable with the concept of securing your own physical precious metals.

Of course, there were limitations on the centralised model... namely, the limited market. In that you could only buy and sell against the Perth Mint as the market maker. There could be no third party marketplaces, and you could not trade with other people in a worldwide market. Again, not a huge problem as long as the market maker remained solvent and liquid... and it is the Perth Mint, so there would have to be HUGE systemic economic problems in Australia for that to be not a good assumption. And lets not kid ourselves, we mostly want that to remain a good assumption as the alternative is pretty damn bleak!

That said... we can't always be looking to the past. And the this centralised model is essentially the digital equivalent of running a physical storefront.... and just saving the costs on hiring staff and rent. In fact, many banks and retailers have applied a similar model to the "digitalisation"... with our famed CEOs of cost-cutting selling digitalisation as such in their supreme but handsomely rewarded idiocy. Little do they know that instead of saving costs, digitalisation will eventually upend their business models... but they don't care, they still get paid obscene amounts for doing the equivalent of "eenie-meenie-miny-mo..."!

So, enter Trovio (Infigold), and the PMGT ERC20 token which represents a claim on physical gold from the Perth Mint vaults! Wow, when this had launched, I was still a little bit sceptical. After all, wouldn't it be better to have physical gold (as long as it wasn't a burdensome amount) instead of a claim on gold... of course, if you are more like a trader and wanted access to worldwide always-on markets for gold, then that would be a different matter. A decentralised token (albeit centrally issued, with the trust chain at the issuance and IOU-backing) would be a great idea! Especially if you were going to be trading large amount, or a large volume!

Well... I had viewed it with interest, but with no intention to buy any PMGT... but as it turned out, I won a contest which gifted me a bit of PMGT. And so, now I was the prud owner of a claim on Perth Mint gold! That was what got me interested into looking into GoldPass and the PMGT thing anyway... but in the end, I thought that the "claim" on gold wasn't really what I wanted anyway... and I ended up selling the PMGT tokens instead. After all, what is the point of a claim on physical gold that is held in a vault on the other side of the planet... and even thought I'm not back in Australia, Perth is still on the other side of the continent!

Fast forward to today (well, a couple of weeks back)... and PMGT (and possibly GoldPass) is going through an "orderly wind-down"... well, that is still a lot better than the most of the scam/hype tokens that launched during the bull market! The market maker will buy back claims at market value... so, that is a plus for those who have the token but can't actually physically claim the token... but in the end, the total market cap was relatively small... on the order of millions.

I do wonder what the catalyst for the discontinuation was... one would be quick to jump at the general anti-crypto vibe... but I think it isn't just that (after all, the GoldPass app is shutting down as well, and that doesn't have anything to do with crypto). It might be due to the Perth Mint having been caught out selling "diluted" gold to China... or maybe, the use case and market for digitalised gold and silver just isn't there at the moment? After all, if I had some misgivings about the whole thing then I don't think I would have been the only one! And I am someone who would be more inclined to favour the larger potential of a decentralised and always on marketplace for previous metals trading! But in the end, the IOU trust aspect just didn't make enough sense to me... but it was a glimpse of the potential future of stocks and commodities trading!

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