Ubuntu Tribe, a digital investment and business management company said the platform is set to leverage gold tokenization to create more wealth and hedge against currency devaluation in Nigeria through its Utribe technology.
The company at the unveiling of its Gold International Fungible Token Gift in Lagos said the technology will provide an opportunity for any Nigerian with a mobile phone to buy gold assets with ease, as low as five cents and also hedge against currency devaluation.
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Mamadou Toure, CEO of Ubuntu Group said, “We basically provide the opportunity for anyone in Nigeria and in Africa and around the world to be able to buy gold from as low as 5 cents from their mobile phone. Our model basically allows us to have this not only as a savings instrument but also as an investment to be able to trade and also preserve against currency depreciation.”
The CEO explained that despite the fact that the Naira has lost a lot of its value to the dollar, the dollar has also lost value to gold.
“Just last year, gold gained 15 percent to the dollar. And over the past 20 years, gold gained 500 percent to the dollar. Our currency keeps on depreciating, and people are losing purchasing power, but we’re sitting on so many resources. So my background being in the tech industry, I was familiar with blockchain and artificial intelligence. So I said, why don’t we tokenize gold knowing that Africa is sitting at 48 percent of the global gold deposit and the whole idea was effectively to issue, and that’s what we do,” Toure said.
Oscar Onyema, GMD, Nigerian Stock Exchange Group speaking at the launch of gold-backed token highlights the advantages of tokenization, including immutability, traceability, global accessibility, and fractionalization.
According to him, asset tokenization also has the potential to accelerate economic development in Nigeria by improving access to financing and new asset classes.
“Asset tokenization has the potential to accelerate the economic development of Nigeria. Take, for example, financing for real estate, if you’re able to put real estate on the blockchain and tokenize and fractionalize, you can crowd in investments in that space. For example, I’m just using real estate as an asset class, so definitely, it has the opportunity to accelerate the access to financing, access to new forms of asset classes that did not exist before,” Onyema said.
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Meanwhile, the company explained that the GIFT Token is not a cryptocurrency but a digital asset which ultimately means a digital certificate of gold ownership.
“Because it’s digital, it’s transferable. Your gold doesn’t move but you have ownership of it and you can transfer it. The thing of tokenization is the ability to fractionalize an asset and securitize it, and using blockchain technology to certify the ownership, the accuracy, the comprehensiveness of that particular asset.”
