Dubai: Blockchain technology enables the UK’s Royal Mint for main advantages for its new RMG bullion-buying product.
These are speed, transparency, reliability and cost, the Mint’s director of business development, Daniel Clegg, told delegates to the Dubai Precious Metals Conference on Sunday.
But the technology, which offers a transparent means of tracking the provenance of an investor’s purchases, also carries challenges, he said.
First, the transparency for which Blockchain is renowned makes anonymous investment difficult. Clegg said the Royal Mint had to develop a new open permission network to create what he called “pseudonymity”.
The Royal Mint is the body permitted to strike British coins.
The Mint also had to ensure there would be a way for purchasers to recover lost security keys, allowing them to access their investments.
New technology
And finally, he said, Blockchain was relatively new technology regarded as “geeky and niche”. He, however said, that “presents a great opportunity to those who are open-minded.”
The Royal Mint’s RMG product, announced last year and due to launch soon, allows investors to use Blockchain to buy and sell one-gramme units of bullion to be stored at in the Mint’s vaults. The Mint says it combines the investment performance of the London Gold Market with the transparency of an exchange-traded security.
