Midas Rezerv, issues ‘gold-backed token’

Midas Rezerv (MR) is not a company but an ecosystem and platform for trade and payments in physical gold. The "Blockchain Development and Crypto 2.0 R&D Company" behind the platform, Amilabs Ltd  is registered with the Board of Investment of Thailand as a Software Development Company. “Midas Rezerv’s main system design feature is to be and remain decentralized, meaning there is no single entity who controls the whole process,” said Alexi Lane, Founder of Midas Rezerv. Lane discovered it could be difficult to buy and store physical gold with overseas dealers and vaults.

“The hassle and inconvenience of this process combined with losses from paying high premiums, currency exchange rates, wire transfer fees, storage, and insurance fees made me think of a better more efficient solution,”
— – Alexi Lane, Founder and CEO at Midas Rezerv

According to a Lane the private investment gold market is worth $500 Billion. Midas Rezerv intends to enhance the private investment gold market by offering a decentralized trading and gold distribution ecosystem on the bitcoin blockchain. “Current physical gold investing has high premiums to buy, discounts to sell, along with storage and insurance fees,” said Lane.

“Midas Rezerv offers individuals a cost-effective and secure solution to own, trade, and pay with physical gold in a new fashion, based on decentralized bitcoin blockchain design.”
— – Lane

The ideas of bitcoin and blockchain technology are becoming more widespread, and Lane has decided to leverage them to solve the problems he encountered in storing and buying physical gold.

Each Midas Rezerv Coin (MRCoin) is backed by 1 gram of real investment gold bullion. MRCoins are auditable in real time, and digitally marked to specify the location of the phtsical gold. “MRCoin works as a bearer-bond coin and is the perfect safe haven to preserve and transfer value, use as trading asset, or as a method of payment. It is redeemable for gold or cash through authorized dealers and bitcoin exchanges,” states the recent announcement.

“MRCoin is issued on the blockchain in the form of a digital cryptoasset. The coin has no value unless Midas Rezerv proves and maintains that there is something of value standing behind the coin. In our case it’s 1 gold gram, but the same way it can be a silver ounce, diamond, real estate, share of stock, and so forth.”
— – Lane

If a MRCoin is stored in an Amsterdam vault the signature has an AM, if it is Dubai it will have a DB. “We do it to make verification of backing assets easier for a public,” said Lane. Any person at any time will be able to compare the total number of gold grams stored in any particular vault, with the number of coins issued by that vault.

“We can’t issue new coins without multisignature confirmations from the custodian vault and trustee, who actually control physical gold. MR provides technical and marketing solutions to promote the system, and we earn a small transaction fee in return.”
— – Lane

To enhance transparency investors can see how many coins were initially in a vault by looking at an initial blockchain transaction. The transaction provides a link pointing to documents that are scanned and stored in the form of a digital cryptodigest.

“These documents contain vault contract, storage receipt, invoice of fees paid, gold bar certificates along with serial numbers, and even photographs of the bars,” said Lane. The documents are encrypted and time stamped on the blockchain, and as a result there is no way they can be altered or modified. “Now, each time there is an audit inspection in the vault, such a report is also published in the same way. In our opinion this is the best we can do to assure the permanent custody of the gold holdings,” said Lane

According to Lane, physical gold is a general commodity and is often subject to taxation when moved between countries. Midas Rezerv utilize Free Trade Zones (FTZs) which are tax-free regions in major industrial and financial world hubs, where precious metals and other good are not subject to a tax when imported. “FTZs are mostly located near the major airports and the most popular zones are in Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, Amsterdam, and more,” said Lane

“Doing business in FTZ has no correlation with blockchain technology, it’s just a common business sense to use FTZ when dealing with commodities.”
— – Lane

The Midas Rezerve system was built using the Counterparty platform that sits on top of the blockchain. “Therefore we needed an exchange that supports assets issued on Counterparty.” said Lane. The recent press release advises, “Initial trading of MRCoins vaulted in Amsterdam (MRCAM), has commenced on Master Exchange.” Lane advises Midas Rezerv are happy collaborating with MasterXchange and they intend to add exchanges in the future.