A new gold backed crypto KAU

Today I read a post by @hatu here about a cryptotoken KAU (Kinesis Gold and maybe KAG later on) on top of an existing digital gold trading layer at company ABX. (ABX stores gold on several places while you are the (digital) owner. Similar to the Canadian Companies we have)

Members and associate members of ABX are large institutional parties only. In that way the company is not suited for (us) smaller fish ..

As I am very sceptical to everything other than holding physical gold and silver in my own vault yet wanna be open minded to new developments I decided to dig a little further just to better understand it. I also found a you tube presentation by the CEO (I prefer General Manager as it is just a start up) .

So first I looked at the management:
This learns me that ABX indeed is the same as Kinesis so the intiatives are made by ABX. ABX is an Australian run and governed company. Could I find an annual report of ABX with some numbers ? No not on their website so I cannot check how big or tiny they really are. As the gold is not theirs and ABX has many liquidity providers (that must be payed) they are depending on fees mainly. So fees is what this business is about ?

So why does ABX need a tokenized crypto currency?

From the interview on YT I learn that the volatility of existing crypto currencies is too high to allow for trading in gold and silver via crypto. I agree with that. So the start-up Kinesis is created to solve this problem as the KAU price is linked to the gold price. Apparently there is a request of their clients to use a low fee crypto payment system? If not they could just stick with USD and EUR and AUD.

What blockchain?

Stellar blockchain is used but that is too technical for me. (Should have been Steem ofcourse.) They added a step rate fee on top of it (read small clients are gonna pay higher fees than the stellar system charges and large clients lower fees). This sounds reasonable too and big clients demand this.

The whole gold backed token issuance:

This part does not interest me one bit. If there is a good business case with ABX/Kinesis there would be no need to ask also individuals to buy tokens. Institutional investors are desperately looking for good return so would solve the issue directly if - as said - there is a good business case. What is the business case ? A part of the future fee will go to the token investors. As said I leave this part to others. I just not understand why they do not finance this themselves or with one bank or wealth manager as these are the clients they work for primarily.

Anyway when you see KAU or Kinesis somewhere you now know a little what it is related to.

Goldrooster