How It All Began

Our journey began with a real-world business need to link legacy print newspapers to new online media using devices such as QR codes. The idea was to better evaluate and increase advertising response rates for newspaper ads.

This idea expanded into wanting to serve advertisers, many of whom are small companies with limited technology investments, by offering digital versions of their coupons, gift certificates, and store credit. Such credit could even be linked directly to newspaper ads through QR codes.

The desire to tokenize store credit in digital format led to the discovery of the Stellar crypto network. Stellar was specifically designed to be a very fast, reliable, and low-cost payment system that could transmit tokenized representations of real-world values as a form of currency.

MoneyGram^TM, Circle^TM, Stripe^TM, and a host of other money businesses began serving as anchors, the on and off ramps for the network. Circle^TM, for example, issues USDC, a collateralized stablecoin, which is directly exchangeable for United States Dollars.

Minimizing Gold Counterparty Risk
The Stellar anchor concept provides a unique opportunity to anchor precious metals. Rather than have a single company or vault as a counterparty, it would be possible to create a franchise that can be joined by pawn brokers, jewelers, and bullion dealers.

All of these types of companies already deal in precious metals and have distribution channels and inventory. Counterparty risk is distributed across tens of thousands of businesses around the world, rather than having one company hold it all in a single or small number of vaults.

This allows some exciting possibilities, such as being able to deposit a gold coin with a local anchor and then send a tokenized representation of it to a distant broker who will redeem it and allow your recipient to withdraw the same type of coin as you deposited.

We're developing a series of tools to specifically enable anchoring of precious metals via participating retail and wholesale businesses in the pawn, jewelry, and bullion industries.

Each participating retail or wholesale business will be a member of the cooperative and will host a full Stellar network node with a customized version of the Horizon API, integrated with our web platform. These will provide continuity of business in the event of a temporary Internet outage.

The tech stack will also increase the size and security of our network and the Stellar network through increased decentralization.

Precious metals counterparty risk will have been distributed across a vast number of industry participants, simply mirroring the current situation yet adding the benefits, convenience and efficiency that comes with Stellar.