Tokenizing assets is the start.

The real power of tokenization, and HardFi, is composability, which allows users to borrow against those assets and loop them.

As ＠syrupsid said recently when we talked to him:

"The real power of DeFi is composability. Once you tokenize something like gold — or other precious metals — you can use it as collateral for borrowing and looping, as we've seen with STRATO.

Or you can build secondary markets around it to increase liquidity and enable price discovery. You can also build derivatives around it, the way Hyperliquid has with its perps markets on oil."

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Why gold and silver as the base collateral instead of just more crypto?

Half the world already save using them
They're the most trusted assets in the world
There's $30T in above-ground gold with barely 0.02% tokenized.

There's a lot of need, and it's barely gotten started. We are early in the age of HardFi.

"But of late, we're doing what we've been calling HardFi — basically bringing hard assets, in particular precious metals (gold and silver are the biggest for us), into the DeFi world.

The way we do this: we find that our customers primarily want to borrow against assets they already have. Gold and silver in particular are excellent collateral, in a way that's counter-cyclical with what crypto does."

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Your checking account pays you nothing to hold dollars, then lends those dollars out at 7% and keeps the spread.

The bank's whole business is the gap between what your deposit earns them and what it pays you.

$USDST from STRATO closes that gap. Hold the dollar, deposit it in saveUSDST, and the earnings from the system's borrowers land with you instead of a bank.

Get started at https://t.co/CaZsoWmJEi

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Is your gold just sleeping under your mattress?

Wouldn't you rather put it to work for you on STRATO?

"A lot of the gold that exists in the world is what I'd call mattress gold. The largest category of holders are Indian households — this is mostly wedding gift gold. Chinese households are also a very big holder."

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Gold and silver now outweigh US Treasuries as the reserve asset central banks actually hold.

Think about it: the people whose entire job is knowing where the world is going have already made their move.

STRATO exists so it doesn't have to be a central-bank-only trade. Own the same asset they're quietly stacking, on-chain, with yield attached. As ＠kjameslubin has said:

"Gold and silver actually exceed treasuries in market cap as the central bank reserve asset.

Central bankers — we may not love them, but they're not dumb people. They've quietly changed the composition, and you can see from them where the world is going. It's definitely the moment to think about gold coming back.

These are inflationary times, and commodities tend to do well in inflation."

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A house has cost about 100 ounces of gold for a century, even as its dollar price climbed and climbed.

That's a comment, not on housing, but on our currency. Gold holds its value. Dollars don't.

It's also why we built https://t.co/sxsrZThCbu: to allow you to hold gold and borrow dollars against it rather than being forced to sell the gold to participate in DeFi and investing or pay bills.

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Why put gold and silver on-chain?

Stablecoins proved the model: take something valuable, put it on-chain, watch usage compound. But tokenizing gold and silver has key advantages over tokenizing cash and treasuries:

Everyone trusts them
They're inflation-resistant
They're super inconvenient in physical form

No one transacts in gold and silver. Buying them, storing them, and selling them are all expensive and difficult. Gold and silver are superior money to fiat, and they gain a lot more from tokenization than cash does.

There's $30T in above-ground gold. Only 0.02% is tokenized. There's a lot of room to grow.
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