Strato Makes Gold Crypto-Native via HardFi

There's a magic trick hiding inside DeFi right now: put physical gold in a vault, and what comes back out is a liquid, tradable token you can swap or borrow against in seconds, without ever selling the gold itself.

That single mechanic is quietly turning gold into a "crypto-native" asset.

STRATO accelerated this by creating a custom-built network for HardFi with low fees so gold and silver can become usable money to anyone in just a couple of clicks.

"The magic of going from putting gold in the vault to getting liquid, tradable tokens back. You don't have to physically move the gold, and you can swap them for cash or borrow cash. That's the big driver, and it's happening."

"...gold does fairly well — XAUT and PAXG, the big ones, maybe we're fifth or something, I'm not quite sure as far as gold tokens go. There's a good handful of them.

Interestingly, PAXG at first had transfer fees — if you moved it, you'd slowly erode value. Then they got rid of those, and it started to work better in DeFi for that reason. Try to do a swap on something with a transfer fee, on Uniswap or wherever you're swapping will usually tell you, 'hey, you're about to lose some of your principal.' They don't trade as much, and then it's hard to build lending markets around them.

So gold is actually starting to do a decent job as a DeFi asset, kind of beyond tokenized treasuries. Treasuries are typically very liquid and transferable — there was a time hedge funds would take some treasuries, borrow against them, and loop to like twenty-X leverage to try to crank the yields to infinity. They maybe still do that. You'd think you'd be able to do something like that in crypto, because crypto people love looping, and you kind of can't right now.

Stocks are closer; the feeling is more crypto-native, where there's starting to be some DeFi infrastructure where you can borrow against them, definitely swap for them, where the secondary-market side kind of works.

So I'd expect more market cap out of gold, but it's coming. I'd expect treasuries to feel more like crypto, and they largely don't just yet, and where they do, they're indirectly expressed — maybe supporting the yield for some crypto-native token, but they themselves aren't all that tradable on-chain. Stocks have weirdness too — sometimes they're super illiquid out of market hours, huge spreads, no quotes back from aggregators — but they're kind of starting to feel like crypto too. It's a nuanced story, and in this sense I don't actually feel that gold is behind, per se.

Silver is smaller than I thought it would be — although silver perps are actually pretty popular. I think there's like four times the silver-perp volume on Hyperliquid that there is for gold. Spot silver is smaller than I thought it would be; I think that will grow quite a bit.

But as this infrastructure gets into place, you'll just see more in-kind deposits — the magic of going from putting gold in the vault to getting liquid, tradable tokens back. You don't have to physically move the gold, and you can swap them for cash or borrow cash. That's the big driver, and it's happening."

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