Kinesis, a fintech firm advocating a monetary system based on physical gold and silver, on Friday (April 16) launched a Shariah-compliant digital financial platform in partnership with Indonesia’s government-run postal service.
Called PosGo Syariah, the platform enables Indonesia’s predominantly Islamic population to manage their wealth, trade, save and transact in the debt and interest-free gold bullion via a mobile device. It is supported by the Shariah Supervisory Board of the country’s National Shariah Council.
According to Kinesis, the nationwide reach of the postal service PT Pos opens up the economic stability of physical gold to the entire population of Indonesia, including unbanked and underbanked communities, through its 24,000 physical service locations across the country.
The PosGO Syariah app comprises PosGold, a digitalized physical gold trading platform, and Switch, which allows real-time peer-to-peer transfers of both gold and fiat balances. The product also offers Pos Pay, a payment gateway and e-wallet service, as well as Gold To Mecca, a gold-based community savings programme for Hajj and Umrah pilgrimages.
Along with PT Pos, Kinesis has partnered with Allocated Bullion Exchange (ABX), an online exchange platform for physical bullion, and PT Bullion Ecosystem International (BEI), a fintech group which provides mobile applications for gold trading, to launch the platform. The product is initially available to PT Pos’s 45,000 employees and will be rolled out nationwide in the succeeding months.
Kinesis chief executive officer Thomas Coughlin says: “People are increasingly moving away from traditional currencies and I am humbled to present Kinesis as a robust and scalable solution for digitalized and mobilized gold as a currency.
“Crucially, this project shows just how the Kinesis technology can be applied in the real world at a national level. Through public-private partnerships, which are a core part of our DNA and driver for innovation, we will continue to work with nations across the world to deliver viable solutions for the transformation of an outdated monetary system.”
London-based Kinesis is promoting a blockchain-powered monetary system with 1:1 value correspondence with physical gold and silver.
As such, it is reviving the “gold standard”, which it believes can provide a more stable and reliable source of value than even many of the central bank-backed fiat currencies, while retaining all the convenience of use. Also, because it is based on gold and silver, Kinesis says its monetary system is better than most cryptocurrencies, which are highly volatile.
