I do love it when people do things that make no economic or technical sense whatsoever

You already have an intricate system of ownership for commodities and long financial history of dealing with them. No need to put "precious metals on the blockchain!"

Mining and technology groups are developing crypto tokens linked to metals including gold, copper and uranium, as executives look to capitalise on ballooning metals prices and fuse investor excitement about the crypto and minerals worlds.

Yes, yes. Pre-revenue IPOs are the best; maybe some rugpulling, too. Would be a shame if that gold went missing!

Investors can already bet on gold without the storage costs and other issues of physical ownership by using gold-backed exchange traded funds. Such funds had a combined market value of $530bn last month, according to industry body the World Gold Council, backed by more than 4,000 tonnes of bullion. But while owning shares in an ETF offers exposure to movements in the price of gold, it does not equate to ownership of the metal itself. For that, proponents say, investors should turn to tokenised gold.

Yeah, no: IT DOESN'T. The gold is physical, it exists in a warehouse somewhere (or in the ground, if you just ignored extracting it and all you wanna do is play around with fictitious legal claims).

"Owning" it, NFT style, is a "trust-me-bruh" token that whoever wields or manages the tokenized asset program faithfully hand over the gold on demand.
Like, you know, a bank -- or, say, an ETF (with in-kind redemption). Fucking idiots.

Trading platform Metals.io has issued uranium, nickel and cobalt tokens that holders can redeem for physical metal if they have the right approvals. No buyers have so far taken delivery of uranium, which is highly regulated.

The largest gold-backed crypto tokens are Tether Gold, from the issuer of the world’s largest stablecoin, and Pax Gold, from blockchain payments and blockchain infrastructure company Paxos. With both, each token represents one troy ounce of bullion that holders can redeem for physical gold. Yet they have so far achieved only a fraction of the uptake of gold-backed ETFs, with market values of about $2.7bn and $1.9bn, respectively.

ZAP ME SCUDOS!

Yeah, if you don't know this joke... I dunno. It's meta commentary on zapping and the death of bitcoin and the win of tokenized gold at the same time.

I know I joked about "gold in the ground" above but no, someone had to do it...

Then there are more esoteric ideas. Nasdaq-listed gold miner Blue Gold promises to deliver the metal “from the mine to your [crypto] wallet”. To help fund its operations it has issued “thousands” of tokens, according to chair and chief executive Andrew Cavaghan. However, it is currently looking for new long-term prospects while locked in a dispute with the Ghanaian government, which revoked the licence for its only mine in 2024. Nasdaq-listed Datavault AI plans to tokenise metals such as copper and antimony — used in missiles, batteries and flame retardants — while they are still in the ground to fund their extraction.
Blue Gold said its tokens were currently only available on its app, rather than on third-party exchanges. Datavault said its planned rollout would start with trading on the UpsideOnly platform run by fintech group Perpetuals.com. Metals.io’s uranium token is traded on exchanges including Kraken, Gate and KuCoin.

Oh, trading on "UpsideOnly." What could possibly go wrong?!

The last moron isn't born yet.

https://archive.md/NVPV6