Is Malaysian digital gold legit?
HelloGold Credibility Analysis
This is a Malaysian digital gold platform; allowing app users to invest, send, receive, pay, and redeem their gold — in amounts as little as 1 gram. HelloGold doesn’t appear to be very focused on merchant adoption, but between app users, it would work as a medium of commerce.
Should you use HelloGold?
It’s one of the more legit centralized digital gold offerings. Importantly, their gold reserves are independently audited. According to their website’s FAQ: The gold held at our gold provider, Bullion Star International, is independently audited by Bureau Veritas, which is an LBMA approved auditor, every six months. I looked at their recently updated “bar list” documents, and at the bottom, it clarifies: Independent verification of our listing can be found on the vaulting company’s website at bullionstar.com/myaccount/audit and search for account number 7647. I checked this out and it looks like they have physical gold reserves of about 90 kilograms, as of August 2021.
You must pass KYC to unlock the features of their digital gold and you can start investing in amounts as little as RM1.00 (0.24 USD).
I’m a little confused about whether HelloGold is actually a blockchain project; on their website I can find nothing about blockchain, crypto, or tokenized-gold, but I did find this presentation by their CEO about their HGT ERC-20 token — but at present, it’s not clear what role it plays in the HelloGold ecosystem and its price has performed awfully since it’s launch in 2017. It would seem that they tried to get into the cryptocurrency game back during the height of the ICO craze but then reverted to a non-blockchain digital gold platform.
Around the internet, I found a few reviews of HelloGold, and they have a bunch of reviews, mostly positive, on the Google Play store. They have no reviews on TrustPilot.com
About HelloGold Foundation
Our story
We know how important it is to save for your future. That’s why co-founders Robin Lee and Ridwan Abdullah set out to create a new way for you to save in products that will better secure your finances.HelloGold was established in 2015 as the world’s first Shariah-compliant mobile application that changes the way you buy, save, sell and redeem in physical gold. With over 200,000 users, we aim to help more people take their step towards lifelong financial security.
from hellogold.com
HelloGold has developed and launched a product to enable low to medium income customers to buy and sell gold, anytime, anywhere. The System has customer mobile applications (native Android and iOS) communicating with a backend built with 2 parts, a core Central Web Service (Ruby) and Agent (Go). The current database uses Postgres technology.
Relevant parts of the backend are being migrated to Ethereum smart contracts to improve transparency and security for the customer gold transactions, as well as increasing access to the HelloGold system. HelloGold is using Ethereum as it is currently the most widely accepted platform that offers all the benefits of a blockchain and multiple source language implementations that encourage integration. Ethereum will handle only the parts needing consensus, transparency and accountability. Other services will continue to be provided using existing technology. HelloGold is using blockchain technology with a number of reconfigurable contracts that can be combined to perform the necessary functions in such a way as to allow new capabilities to be added while retaining the integrity of the entire system
From the executive summary of the HelloGold whitepaper
