Online bullion marketplace Onegold announced on Tuesday that its customers can now purchase precious metals with bitcoin cash (BCH) and bitcoin core (BTC). Onegold’s digital silver and gold products are fully allocated physical metals stored at the Royal Canadian Mint and can be redeemed at any time through Apmex.
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Onegold Now Accepts Cryptocurrencies
Cryptocurrency proponents can now purchase digital gold and silver bullion products on the Onegold platform using BCH and BTC. Onegold is a blockchain-based platform that stores precious metals and allows customers to redeem their digital bullion holdings at any time. The concept was created by the precious metals e-retailer Apmex and alternative asset manager Sprott. Their recent decision to support BCH and BTC is due to a partnership with Bitpay which already has a prior relationship with Apmex.
“Bitpay and Apmex have worked together for years, making it easy for Apmex to accept cryptocurrency — When they started Onegold, we were ready to help them accept bitcoin and bitcoin cash through Bitpay,” explained the chief commercial officer at Bitpay, Sonny Singh.
Singh continued:
Cryptocurrency is an ideal payment method for e-commerce and precious metals where the risk of chargebacks, fraud and identity theft with traditional credit cards is high.
International Bullion Buyers Are Interested in Alternative Payment Methods
Ken Lewis, chief executive officer at Onegold, explained that credit card chargebacks were one of the big reasons the company chose to accept BCH and BTC. Because the digital assets act like cash and are a “push transaction” system, users need to pay for products up front, making traditional fraud cases much harder to accomplish. Lewis also detailed that blockchain payments provide greater accountability and some international buyers are more apt to purchase Onegold’s collateralized assets using cryptocurrencies.
“We anticipate a large number of cryptocurrency buyers from international markets, where accepting credit cards is not always practical,” Lewis explained during the announcement. “In addition to helping protect our own interests, adding bitcoin and bitcoin cash to the payment options for Onegold also increases our payment transparency and efficiency.”
Onegold Believes Cryptographically Secured Metals Are Better Than Exchange-Traded Funds
Onegold believes that its digital bullion is far superior to gold-backed paper like exchange-traded funds (ETF), such as the gold trust Comex and LBMA Gold. Both products are similar because they can be electronically traded, but Onegold is cryptographically secured by a distributed ledger and has 100 percent physical metal backing.
Onegold customers can redeem their stored assets with the click of a button, and have physical metals shipped to their door by Apmex. Quite a few gold and silver ETFs cannot be redeemed so quickly and some cannot be traded for physical assets at all, making customers settle for fiat. Onegold believes adding the ability to purchase digital metals with cryptocurrencies was the company’s next logical step.
What do you think about Onegold adding BCH and BTC support for digital bullion purchases? Let us know in the comments section below.
Images via Shutterstock, Onegold, and Pixabay.
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