Tokenized US gold could ultimately benefit Bitcoin: NYDIG

An idea to tokenize or track US gold reserves to make their movements transparent on a blockchain won’t work in the same trustless way as Bitcoin does, but doing so could help the cryptocurrency, says a research analyst.

Greg Cipolaro, global head of research at New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG), said in a March 21 note that Trump administration officials, including Elon Musk, have floated using a blockchain to track US gold and government spending — an idea supported by crypto executives.

“Here’s the thing about blockchains. They’re not very smart,” Cipolaro said. “They’re limited in the information they convey. For example, Bitcoin has no idea what the price of Bitcoin is or even the current time.”

He said the tokenization or tracking of gold reserves on a blockchain could help with audits and transparency but would still “rely on trust and coordination with central entities” compared to Bitcoin, which “was designed to explicitly remove centralized entities.”

Cipolaro added that tokenization and blockchain-tracking ideas aren’t competitive with the crypto market and might help to increase awareness of it, which “could ultimately benefit Bitcoin.”

It comes amid calls from some for an independent audit of the United States’ gold reserves.

Republican Senator Rand Paul last month seemingly called on Musk’s federal cost-cutting project to investigate the US government’s gold stash at the Bullion Depository in Fort Knox, which the US Mint says holds around half of the country’s gold. 

The Treasury audits and publishes reports on gold holdings at Fort Knox and other locations across the US every month, but President Donald Trump and Musk have both parrotted decades-old conspiracy theories about the gold and questioned whether it’s all still there.

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They have both pushed for an independent audit of Fort Knox. The vaults were last opened in 2017 for Trump’s then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to view the gold and before that, in 1974 to a congressional delegation and a group of journalists.

The Mint’s website says that no gold has gone in or out of Fort Knox “for many years,” except for “very small quantities” used to test the gold’s purity during audits. 

Trump’s Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said last month that Fort Knox is audited every year and “all the gold is present and accounted for.”

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