BitGold enjoying rapid growth as users put gold to work in unlikely ways – by Peter Koven (Financial Post – April 30, 2016)

http://business.financialpost.com/

Roy Sebag and Josh Crumb never dreamed of all the ways customers would use their gold payment and savings platform.

There’s the guy who bought a car using gold. There’s the guy saving for his wedding in gold. There’s the Argentinian kid using gold as his savings account because his family has been devastated by currency crashes. There’s the Canadian who transfers funds to his college-age children offshore using gold, thereby avoiding foreign exchange conversion fees and actually making a profit because gold prices rose after his initial deposit.

Sebag describes the platform called BitGold as a “canvas” where everyone paints their own picture. “Gold is a currency,” said Sebag, chief executive of Toronto-based GoldMoney Inc. “And once you start letting it behave like a currency, different people will have different utility for it at different times. That’s what we’re seeing.”

Gold is one of the oldest and most antiquated mediums of exchange in the world. Perhaps for that reason, no one thought to incorporate it into the digital finance universe before BitGold. But now that it’s here, people are beginning to realize gold has untapped potential that they never thought about.

Sebag and Crumb launched BitGold roughly a year ago. There were naysayers early on who thought it was just another type of gold exchange-traded fund or trendy fintech software that would never catch on (the Bitcoin allusion in the name might have added fuel to the fire).

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