Futures trader of the CME Group is teaming up with BitGo and Alphapoint to develop a Blockchain gold solution for the UK’s Royal Mint.
Royal Mint Gold (RMG), a development of which is already in progress, aims to “provide a fast, cost-effective and cryptographically secure method of buying, holding and trading spot gold.”
“An RMG is a digital representation of real gold sitting in the Royal Mint vaults,” Sandra Ro, head of digitization at CME Group, said in a release.
“When you purchase RMGs you will effectively have real gold that is allocated from a direct ownership standpoint that is completely reserved – there is no re-hypothecation, there is no lending on that gold, there will be enough physical gold to represent all the RMGs that are issued.”
As part of the project, the Blockchain security company BitGo will develop the necessary code, while Alphapoint will focus on the trading platform itself.
“When you want to make a transaction, you sign with your own key and then you hand it to the other guy on a completely different system and get them to sign it too,” BitGo CEO Mike Belshe explained.
“This has turned out to be quite effective and is generally regarded by security experts as being the safest way to deal with digital assets.”
BitGo recently threw its weight behind Segregated Witness activation in the Bitcoin scaling debate, the company releasing a post in which it said Bitcoin Unlimited “fails all criteria” for a supportable hard fork.