'Superior form of money': Why Glint is launching a Gold-based Mastercard
As the U.S.-China trade war drags on, markets face continued uncertainty — but Gold (GC=F) continues to remain a steady bet and is up nearly 8% year-to-date.
U.K. Fintech company Glint hopes to capitalize on Gold’s relative stability with the launch of its new gold-based Mastercard in the United States.
“Gold of course holds its value — it’s a superior form of money we are bringing to the world really,” Jason Cozens, Glint CEO, tells Yahoo Finance’s YFi AM. He called gold “kind of money’s new standard to speak.”
Glint lets users buy, sell, save, and spend their physical gold through the card or its app. It launched in the U.K. back in February of 2018 and to-date the app has 49,860 downloads and has seen $43.7 million in transacted volume. Cozens believes people of all ages, ranging from “18 year-olds to 80-year-olds,” will continue to turn to gold amid ongoing market volatility.
“We saw it in the last financial crisis, banks aren’t necessarily safe deposit of money,” Cozen shares, “and money depreciates over time.”
Gold alternative, in comparison to bitcoin
Investors are looking to alternative assets like gold, silver, and bitcoin as safe havens amid market volatility.
“The whole cryptocurrency phenomenon demonstrates this thirst for an alternative. The original [gold] is here, it’s always been here,” Cozens tells Yahoo Finance. “But it hasn’t been very good in electronic payment, so we’ve enabled it to do that.”
Glint charges its users a 0.5% fee when buying or selling in foreign currencies, but there is no fee when making a USD or gold-backed purchase in the USA.
Cozens makes a good point when he says gold has “always been here.” The U.S. and other countries once tied the value of their currencies to the price of gold — but the U.S. abandoned the gold standard in 1933, and now no government uses it.
Brooke DiPalma is a producer for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter @brookedipalma.
READ MORE:
Cisco, Global Citizen announce multimillion-dollar partnership to help end poverty
How McDonald's is using technology to tell you what you want to eat
Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard, LinkedIn, YouTube, and reddit.
