PAX Gold (PAXG) is an asset-backed token where one token represents one fine troy ounce of a London Good Delivery gold bar, stored in professional vault facilities. Anyone who owns PAXG has ownership rights to that gold under the custody of Paxos Trust Company. Since PAXG represents physical gold, its value is tied directly to the real-time market value of that physical gold. PAXG gives customers the benefits of actual physical ownership of specific gold bars with the speed and mobility of a digital asset. Customers are able to have fractional ownership of physical bars. On the Paxos platform, customers can convert their tokens to allocated gold, unallocated gold, or fiat currency (and vice versa) quickly and efficiently, reducing their exposure to settlement risk. PAXG is also available for trading on Paxos’ itBit exchange. PAXG will also be available on other crypto-asset exchanges, wallets, lending platforms and elsewhere within the crypto ecosystem. At any time, PAXG holders can lookup the serial number, value and physical characteristics of their vaulted gold just by entering their Ethereum wallet address on the PAXG lookup tool on Paxos.com/paxgold.
Quantstamp is a security-auditing protocol for smart contracts. As a apps platform, Ethereum has proven its security time and again. However, apps and smart contracts on top of Ethereum may still have bugs in which malicious players can cause havoc on the network. The two most notable examples of these being the $55 million DAO hack and the $30 million Parity wallet bug. These issues not only affect the people who’ve had their funds stolen, but they also diminish the credibility of the entire ecosystem. Quantstamp is making smart contracts more secure through automated software testing and a system of bug bounties. Although starting with Ethereum, the team is building the protocol to be available on any DApp platform in the long run.In an industry where security is a primary concern and bugs have caused the theft of millions of dollars, Quantstamp should help to legitimize blockchain projects and ensure that large-scale smart contract hacks are a thing of the past. Quantstamp held a successful ICO in November 2017 in which the team raised a little over $30 million dollars. They distributed 650 million (65%) QSP out of the 1 billion total supply to ICO participants at a price of $0.072 per token. After the usual post-ICO volatility, the QSP price stabilized at around $0.10 (~0.000005 BTC) through the end of November. The price followed the trend of the altcoin market and rose rapidly to an all-time high of $0.82 (~0.000051 BTC) before slowly falling to its current price of ~$0.286. The QSP price weathered the beginning of the year market downfall better than most other altcoins.