
Gold savings on the blockchain
Anybody got a road map?
When we started planning HelloGold back in November 2015 I started writing a set of smart contracts to implement the product. Within a couple of weeks it became clear that we were not going to iron out a concrete specification because we were designing a real world product for real consumers. I soon gave up and we built our MVP with Android and IOS mobile apps, Ruby web services and admin panels and a load of Go micro services.
Let’s start by explaining that HelloGold is NOT a blockchain company, at least not at the protocol layer. Rather we are a company with a product that we feel could benefit from being implemented on the ethereum blockchain.
Our core business is allowing ordinary people in Asian economies (who do not have access to good savings products) put part of their savings in gold as a hedge against the kind of currency fluctuations that savaged Asia in the late nineties. To make that happen we use the things that they understand, a mobile phone, an app and online banking. AND AN IN-HOUSE CALL CENTRE !!!
The core product mutated, as every real world product does, based on focus groups, user feedback and the partnerships that were formed with other organisations.
True we had a pretty good idea of what we were going to build but the devil is, as always, in the details. Building a product for the real world requires coming up with something and iterating for a while before setting it in stone.
As an example, we knew that Malaysians had difficulty to get access to loans and often resorted to using pawnbrokers. So we built a partnership with AEON credit to give our clients access to competitive loans by locking the gold savings as collateral. The agreement ensures that the gold would be released when the loan is fully serviced or partially redeemed if the client was unable to meet all the repayments.
At this point we have built a pretty stable product. In the past few months we have started to get great traction in the market with many customers becoming repeat buyers quite quickly.
As we were building the initial product we kept tweaking the smart contracts to try to keep pace with the product iterations. It wasn’t always possible, especially as we started reacting to market demands, so it is now our aim to review and complete that prototype before the end of 2017.
HelloGold is a consumer app for non tech savvy people. It uses a private blockchain because we need to maintain consumers’ privacy due to data protection laws. The use of a private blockchain has been discussed before.
When this is done, we will build a bridge to allow gold to be transferred between the HelloGold product and GBT tokens run by the HelloGold Foundation.
Let that sink in for a moment. Our users will be able to convert their gold savings into ERC20 tokens, and our token holders could convert their tokens to gold holdings that can be sold.
We will still have bits in Ruby which has proved to be pretty good for the API and management panels, Go for the dozens of little micro-services that it is so good for, but now we will have a Go server passing on signed transactions to geth or parity nodes on a private ethereum network.
We will have a custom built oracle that passes transaction between the private and public networks and a whole lot more.
It seems like twenty years have passed since Robin Lee sold me on the dream of Hello Gold on that day in 2015. We’ve done pretty well so far…

