Nexo, a player in the crypto lending space, is adding the NYDFS-regulated PAX Gold as a collateral option for its signature Instant Crypto Credit Lines, bringing gold-backed lending to the blockchain.
With PAX Gold, a digital token on the Ethereum blockchain, representing a physical amount of gold held in the vaults of London-based Brink, Nexo now offers gold investors instant access to their gold wealth in over 45 fiat currencies via same/next day transfers and across 200+ jurisdictions.
True to its innovative DNA, Nexo will be adding PAX Gold for its ‘Earn Interest’ product that will pay up to 8% per year of interest on gold, debunking the century-old stigma that “gold does not pay dividends”. This value proposition makes Nexo the only financial institution in the world to pay interest on gold in kind. “There’s a lot of overlap in the mentality between the crypto world and those who hold gold,” said Paxos’ CEO Chad Cascarilla. “What you know have is the liquidity, divisibility, and transferability of crypto, while owning gold.”
While Kosta Kantchev, co-founder of Nexo, commented: “Gold bugs proliferate the crypto community and the Nexo-Paxos offering now enables them to do what until now was only available to high-net-worth individuals via Lombard credits on large quantities of physical gold – accessing the value of gold without selling it”.
He added that for generations now, the ultra-wealthy were purchasing large quantities of physical gold, which was used as collateral for credit lines. The proceeds were then used to buy even more gold and/or diversify into other asset classes, essentially leveraging physical gold position and accessing its value without selling.
Now with PAX Gold allowing fractional ownership of gold in а frictionless manner via blockchain technology, the same concept is available for as little as a few hundred dollars. Nexo accepting the digital representation of gold as collateral makes what was previously reserved to the privileged ones available en mass to all.
This is a bold move in a larger disruptive trend of tokenizing the world that will see commodities, stocks and bonds, real estate, fine art, and any other asset class being brought on-chain to be owned, traded, exchanged and borrowed against.
Apart from unlocking the value of previously idle assets such as Picassos and Monets, the tokenization of the world enables large scale fractional ownership. This, in turn, ensures social inclusion and participation in Western-like wealth creation to even the remotest corners of the world, constituting the second paradigm-shifting use case of blockchain technology after the transformation of money by Satoshi Nakamoto’s whitepaper in 2009.
