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.
Stratis is a powerful and flexible Blockchain Development Platform designed for the needs of the real world financial services businesses and other organisations that want to develop, test and deploy apps on the blockchain. Stratis significantly simplifies the development process for creating Blockchain applications and accelerates the lifecycle for Blockchain development projects. Stratis private chain allows businesses to deploy their own customise blockchain without the costs of running their own blockchain network infrastructure. The vision of the Stratis platform is to become a one-stop shop for all blockchain things, mostly becoming a blockchain-as-a-service (BAAS) platform. Technology-wise, it is a clone of Bitcoin’s core code, with a few enhanced features and written in C# language instead of C++. The team is based in the United Kingdom but has a decentralized structure with members spreading across the world. Several people on their management team are well-versed in enterprise software development using .NET and C# – a positive sign considering those are the project’s two primary languages. Chris Trew, the founder and CEO, has over 10 years of experience in enterprise IT and was a volunteer developer for the Blitz project. Stratis is competing against other BaaS projects in an increasingly saturated but gigantic space. Lisk may be the largest direct competitor in offering sidechains for businesses. However, Lisk is written in Javascript (not C#) and has sidechains that are more publicly available. The decreased privacy may be a turnoff to corporations looking to keep their code proprietary. The company held an ICO in June 2016 and manage to raised 915 Bitcoin.