When a group of Chinese investigators entered the home of an official suspected of corruption, they couldn't believe their eyes.
Upon hearing the expression “a mountain of gold”, what you probably imagine is simply a lot of money. However, the Chinese official's basement contained literally that – a mountain of gold. The employees of the National Supervisory Commission (the highest anti-corruption authority in the PRC), found a treasure that many banks could only dream of. Almost 13 tons of gold in bars (for comparison – this is 1/8 of all gold purchased by Poland in 2019), plus hundreds of millions of dollars in cash. To put this into perspective, the current value of those gold bars is estimated at circa $650 million.
The 57-year old Zhang Qi also turned out to own several luxurious houses, of over a thousand square meters each. The official, who could even be richer than Bill Gates himself, set a new world record in corruption. He couldn't provide any explanation of where the money had come from. According to experts, the fortune found in his basement would be enough to save Greece from default – two times over.
Chinese media reports that Zhang Qi – a member of the Communist Standing Committee in Hainan province, was suspected of serious breaches of the law and was arrested for corruption on the 6th of September.
Since Xi Jinping began a major corruption crackdown, 254 officials have been stripped of their positions. They range from village officials to national-level figures, including the ex-mayor of the city of Luliang in the Shanxi province, Zhang Zhongsheng. He was suspected of having taken more than 1 billion yuan-worth of bribes.
Why would you store 13 tons of gold at home?
We can't know for sure what pushed the corrupt official to accumulate so much gold. Two reasons seem to make sense so far:
He simply loved gold – and thus wanted to amass as much of it as possible, like Scrooge McDuck;
He thought that gold was a much safer investment, as opposed to the Chinese yuan or US dollars – plus, he wouldn't be able to take that much cash out of the country.
In the end, the official was stripped of his gold and will most likely face a death penalty in accordance with the severe Chinese laws. As you can see, storing physical gold at home has serious risks – not only because it can get stolen, but also because you can lose your freedom or life because of it.
Is there an alternative?
Until recently, there was simply no alternative. However, the rapid development of the crypto industry is now disrupting the gold market too. The issues that seemed intractable yesterday have now become easy to resolve.
The Digital Gold company has recently announced a new token named GOLD, which is equivalent to 1 gram of 99.99% pure physical gold. The tokens are issued in strict accordance with the amount of physical gold owned by the company and stored in a vault belonging to BullionStar – a major provider of precious metal storage solutions based in Singapore. The presence of the gold in the vault is confirmed by the 24/7 audit conducted by BullionStar. This is a much stronger guarantee than the bank accounts that supposedly back fiat-pegged stablecoins.
Imagine that instead of stockpiling gold in his basement, our Chinese official bought GOLD tokens. At least he wouldn't have had to deal with the issue of physical storage. On the other hand, the fully anonymous character of this investment wouldn't allow the authorities to link the tokens to his name.
Corruption is an evil that governments worldwide must fight. However, the circumstances of the official also apply to millions of honest people across the globe. Buying physical gold with your hard-earned cash carries not only storage risks but also, more importantly, the risks of theft, armed robbery, or worse.
Investing in digital gold allows you to forget about these risks once and for all. The world is changing rapidly – and the gold market is evolving in front of our eyes, too.
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Whitepaper: https://gold.storage/wp.pdf
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