Annette Fortner of Liquid Noble Explains Why Gold-Backed Digital Currencies Are the Future of Finance

Liquid Noble's Annette Fortner spoke to CoinGeek Backstage at the London Blockchain Conference 2024 on why she's interested in gold, what makes it compelling as an asset

Liquid Noble’s Annette Fortner spoke to CoinGeek Backstage at the London Blockchain Conference 2024 on why she’s interested in gold, what makes it compelling as an asset, and how blockchain makes precious metals accessible to anyone.

Despite the simplicity of the market and commodities themselves, gold and precious metals aren’t always seen as accessible investments for the average person. Many don’t want the risks or burdens associated with keeping their physical stash, and it’s often seen as a luxury investment for the already wealthy.

However, it needn’s be that way. A fast, scalable blockchain that can digitally tokenize physical assets opens up the precious metals market to anybody. There’s no need to head for alternatives like mining stocks or ETFs. Tokenized metals on a blockchain exist in secure physical vaults, with the digital token as proof of ownership.

“I really believe in gold and precious metals,” Fortner says. “I’ve been in that industry for the last three years, working mainly for just bigger players… as somebody who’s developing all of the research about gold and why it’s a powerful hedger of volatility and hedger of inflation, I figured this is something that is more important for everybody.”

“It’s not just something for the ultra-wealthy. It’s something that anybody should have in their portfolio,” she adds.

Liquid Noble can also arrange for physical metals to be delivered to their owners, but those satisfied with the tokenized version can keep their assets vaulted and trade the tokens easily for as long as they like.

The company launched for residents in its native market of Australia in August 2024. Liquid Noble is licensed by AUSTRAC and fully complies with financial and security regulations there. The plan is to expand internationally once the company can satisfy the exact requirements in other countries.

Customers deposit local (fiat) currencies by transferring from a bank account. Those amounts are then tokenized on Liquid Noble’s trading platform, which uses the Tokenized digital asset protocol on the BSV blockchain. Once there, they can be traded for units of precious metals. Users can trade in/out of metals as frequently as they like, “cash out” in their local currency, or take physical delivery of the metals (provided they have enough for a deliverable amount).

Fortner hinted that tokenized precious metal assets in blockchain wallets could function as gold-backed spending currencies in the long term. Blockchain records are already adequate for this purpose, but to be useful as currency, merchants would have to accept them as payments.

“So my grandma maybe, or my mom, for example, she’s going to be able to one day have a gold-backed digital savings account where she goes to Starbucks, and she’s able to use a gold-backed currency to transact in that,” she says.

Many of Bitcoin’s earliest adopters were attracted to the “sound money” principles of commodity-backed money, where supply was limited and not influenced by government policies or central banks. Despite numerous attempts at creating digital gold-backed currencies, however, there hasn’t yet been one that achieved widespread use.

The fragmentation of the blockchain market itself is partly responsible for that, and blockchains other than BSV often suffer from scaling/technical limitations. But as Fortner says: “At the end of the day, (BSV) is fast, it’s scalable, and it’s cheap.”

Watch: Streaming with NFTs changes the idea of ownership