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The World Gold Council’s (WGC) head of global sales and regional CEO, Joe Cavatoni, explained on Friday that he believes the gold industry will integrate with blockchain technology to “help the industry standardize reporting.” Cavatoni spoke about the London Bullion Market Association’s (LBMA) and WGC’s Gold Bar Integrity Program (GBI) which aims to methodize “an international system of gold bar integrity, chain of custody and provenance.”
Joe Cavatoni, the World Gold Council’s (WGC) head of global sales and regional managing director, discussed the gold markets in a recent interview published on Friday. Cavatoni talked about how gold is used in various products, which helps to increase the demand for the precious yellow metal.
He highlighted that one of gold’s industrial use cases includes cancer treatment and gold is an ingredient in products such as iPhones and iPads. Gold nanoparticles are also utilized in photothermal therapy which is often used to kill cancer cells.
Cavatoni also spoke about the WGC’s Gold Bar Integrity Program (GBI), a distributed ledger concept supported by the WGC and the LBMA. Officially announced in March 2022, GBI intends to leverage blockchain technology created by distributed ledger companies Axedras and Peer Ledger.
Cavatoni believes the GBI technology will help monitor gold transactions, gold quality, chain of custody and procurement. Cavatoni expects to have a “type of blockchain database construct in place to help the industry standardize reporting, [in order to] track and trace the integrity of bullion and take it all the way back to purchasing so you can feel good and comfortable knowing where the gold is coming from.”
While the GBI project is an LBMA and WGC effort, Cavatoni noted that a “group of organizations” plan to use the GBI program and tools. When the blockchain program was first announced, LBMA CEO Ruth Crowell explained that international trade in wholesale, “physical gold depends on trust.”
Crowell insisted that the Gold Bar Integrity initiative was a watershed moment for the precious metals sector. “This is a major step forward in promoting transparency for the common good of the gold industry,” Crowell said at the time. Cavatoni noted during his interview on Friday that “[gold] the industry needs to be trusted by people who want to be a part of it.”
“If trust is an obstacle to greater use in gold, because some people feel that being offline is a better way than being online, we’d rather embrace trust and transparency and grow the industry legitimately and do better ,” Cavatoni said. “None of what we do is going to stop anyone from just taking [a] physical delivery of gold,” added the WGC head of global sales and regional managing director.
In March, the LBMA and WGC said the initial phase will see both Axedras and Peer Ledger demonstrate their technologies. The Axedras website shows that the company has a proprietary blockchain called Bullion Integrity Ledger (BIL).
The BIL network is a “member-based platform for peer-to-peer interaction”, and claims to be decentralized and secure. “[BIL] enables members to share information according to this unified data standard and to record the results of business transactions in an immutable and auditable manner, says Axedra’s web portal.
Peer Ledger’s website says it uses “blockchain technology to solve environmental, social and governance issues in global supply chains.” The company offers MIMOSI Connect which “gives companies a reliable, immutable view of transactions, documents and metrics across the entire supply chain to support responsible supply chain management and due diligence.”
Besides Cavatoni’s recent comment this past week about a group of organizations using GBI, the LBMA and WGC have already listed a number of participating GBI companies. Firms mentioned include CME Group, Barrick Gold Corporation, Brinks, Centerra Gold Inc., Argor Heraeus SA, Asahi, Aura Minerals Inc., Perth Mint, Pro Aurum, Rand Refinery, Royal Canadian Mint and Standard Chartered.
What do you think of the LBMA and WGC Gold Bar Integrity Programme? Let us know what you think about this topic in the comments section below.
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