UBS offers retail and Swiss wealth customers the possibility of making fractional gold investments via its gold product UBS Key4. It is managed using an authorized blockchain, the UBS Gold Network, but now the bank wants to explore the provision of the offer outside of Switzerland. Consequently, he performed proof of concept (POC) using Zksync, the Ethereum Layer 2 solution.
The objective was to explore the scalability, confidentiality and potential for the interoperability of Zksync.
“While tokenized titles have a lot of potential to provide new solutions to our customers, scalability, confidentiality and interoperability remain key challenges to be overcome,” said Christoph Puhr, digital assets lead for UBS Group. “Our POC with Zksync has shown that layer 2 networks and ZK technology have the potential to solve them.”
The news came from Zksync, but we were not confirmed direct from UBS at the time of publication.
UBS has been working with Ethereum Technologies for some time. A year ago, he issued a mandate as a token on the public blockchain Ethereum to the owner of the exchange of Hong Kong Osl. Towards the end of the year, he launched the UBS USD Money Market Investment Fund (Umint) token, also on Ethereum. The Singapore fund is only available via authorized distributors, starting with Digift.
Meanwhile, there have been many tokenized gold offers, both the cryptographic community and institutions. While HSBC drew significant attention by putting tokenized gold available to Hong Kong customers, organizations such as Mitsui Japan already made similar offers. In addition, the blockchain is used for various wholesale gold applications, in particular by Euroclear in a test, and by the London Lingots market.
