Hey — We’re doing an ICO about gold!!!

or the golden elephants in the vault.

If you’ve been keeping up, HelloGold helps people in countries with ̶w̶e̶a̶k̶e̶r volatile currencies put some of their savings into something more stable than their home currency may be. We also want our savers to have easy access to credit at a fair price on fair terms.

Quite a few of us at HelloGold remember the effect on the economy of Black Friday in the 80’s, the Asian Financial Crisis in the nineties and the world Financial Crisis in 2009 and how many countries in the region were affected, so we are planning to expand to those markets as soon as possible.

When our CEO Robin Lee was planning HelloGold, the first thing he did was to approach blockchain companies because he wanted as much transparency as possible.

As anybody who has been in product development knows, in the early stages your product changes from minute to minute as you test new features which customers either love or hate. It was obvious that it would take mammoth planning (and a huge amount of luck) to predict exactly the features that we would need, so we started developing using a traditional development environment.

The first cut product launched with a central server designed in Ruby on Rails, satellite micro-services in Go with customer facing wallets on the Android and IOS platforms. The secret was that all the while we were designing the system to fit into an ethereum based architecture when we had hammered out the requirements.

So while our awesome dev team have been hammering out what seems, so far, to be a hit product, we had started looking at issuing gold on the public blockchain in order to make a similar offering to the crypto world — a stable coin at times of volatility. And, of course, we started planning an ICO to fund our expansion which we finally announced on Wednesday.

We weren’t exactly been keeping it a secret. If you google HelloGold ICO we were advertising online for people who would help us with the ICO but, on the advice of our lawyers, we did not shout it from the rooftops until we were sure that it was properly structured.

So, here we are, about to launch an ICO with a bunch of documentation written and revised by a group who are so detail oriented that the word “whitepaper” does not do them justice. There are projections and all kinds of stuff that the business people love.

And technical stuff that will make crypto folks say “hang on a minute!”

Elephant Number One — a private blockchain.

The HGT and GBT tokens that HelloGold foundation are launching will, of course, be on the public ethereum blockchain but the existing HelloGold business will be run on a private blockchain.

To many in the crypto world, a private blockchain is anathema.
A big STOP sign. A sin punishable by exile. To us however it is a necessity.

• Cost: a simple ethereum transaction now costs about US$ 0.50
  If your transaction carries a value of, say, US$ 5,000 the fee may be trivial but when you allow a customer to buy as little as RM1 ($0.23) the value transfer would be swamped by the transaction fees.
• Privacy: tokens and crypto currencies are, by the nature of the blockchain, traceable. Once you can trace them you can find out the amount sitting in somebody’s account.
  If all I had to do was to make a gift of, say, 0.1g of gold to somebody in order to find out their balance, it would not go down well with data protection laws to start with and the consumer community in general.
• Competing parties: The argument against private blockchains is that the central party can rewrite history. More accurately they can delete history because they still cannot forge records without the requisite private keys. Competing parties make a blockchain’s consensus mechanism honest.
  We have a group of businesses involved, all with competing interests, all needing to keep everybody else honest as a result, a private blockchain should not really be an issue.

Elephant Number Two — Digix Global and the other Gold Coins.

There are a number of people in the Digital Gold space each with their own take on what a gold backed token requires.

A few of these are outright scams and I will neither name them nor include them here, but most of them are genuine offerings and Digix Global are probably the first name to come to mind.

Digix have proved themselves to be a well run, progressive company with excellent technology. The business model and emphasis is quite different and they have a lot of community support.

How will we counter them?

The answer to this “elephant question” is simple. We won’t.

I know that some of our guys have prepared info sheets of differences between us and Digix and other gold backed tokens just in case we are asked but we believe that the space is growing and there is enough room for a number of offerings as long as they are honest and not copycats.

We have great respect for the guys at Digix and many of the other gold products out there. We will be happy, when the dust settles, to work with anybody with whom we share mutual interests where it furthers our aim of bringing stability to the Asian economies.

You can find more information on the hellogold.org website.