How about gold-backed Stablecoins?

[Peter90]

Nexo Adds PAX Gold as Collateral Option

About Nexo
Nexo is the most advanced and trusted instant crypto lending provider on a global scale.


With PAX Gold, a digital token on the Ethereum blockchain, representing a physical amount of gold held in the vaults of London-based Brink, Nexo now offers gold investors instant access to their gold wealth in over 45 fiat currencies via same/next day transfers and across 200+ jurisdictions.

"There's a lot of overlap in the mentality between the crypto world and those who hold gold," said Paxos’ CEO Chad Cascarilla. "What you know have is the liquidity, divisibility, and transferability of crypto, while owning gold."

While Kosta Kantchev, co-founder of Nexo, commented: “Gold bugs proliferate the crypto community and the Nexo-Paxos offering now enables them to do what until now was only available to high-net-worth individuals via Lombard credits on large quantities of physical gold - accessing the value of gold without selling it”.

He added that for generations now, the ultra-wealthy were purchasing large quantities of physical gold, which was used as collateral for credit lines. The proceeds were then used to buy even more gold and/or diversify into other asset classes, essentially leveraging physical gold position and accessing its value without selling.

Now with PAX Gold allowing fractional ownership of gold in а frictionless manner via blockchain technology, the same concept is available for as little as a few hundred dollars. Nexo accepting the digital representation of gold as collateral makes what was previously reserved to the privileged ones available en mass to all.

This is a bold move in a larger disruptive trend of tokenizing the world that will see commodities, stocks and bonds, real estate, fine art, and any other asset class being brought on-chain to be owned, traded, exchanged and borrowed against.

Apart from unlocking the value of previously idle assets such as Picassos and Monets, the tokenization of the world enables large scale fractional ownership. This, in turn, ensures social inclusion and participation in Western-like wealth creation to even the remotest corners of the world, constituting the second paradigm-shifting use case of blockchain technology after the transformation of money by Satoshi Nakamoto’s whitepaper in 2009.

[WhiskeyHoney]

If this currency is gold-backed what's the difference between it and a fiat currency?

[Peter90]

If this currency is gold-backed what's the difference between it and a fiat currency?

@Whiskey 
fiat currencies are produces in this way: push a button, and there you have currency (Yen, Yuan, Dollars, Euros etc.).
You can create as much currency as you want to.
Very easy.

Not so with gold-backed currencies.
In order to produce gold-backed currency, you need gold.
Physical gold.
Gold bars.

The quantity of gold at your disposal decides on how much currency you can produce.
The quantity of gold limits the quantity of currency that you can create.

If 1 currency unit = 1 gram of gold, and you have 1 kg of gold, you can create only 1.000 currency units of gold-backed currency.
You can't create as much currency as you want to.

[Senin]

http://www.goldscape.net/gold-blog/gold-backed-cryptocurrency/

This list is old and not really updated, nevertheless I find it interesting, a lot of substantial infos in there.
I consider stablecoins as the second generation of cryptocurrencies, and I think commodity-backed stablecoins, in particular gold-backed ones, will play a major role among them.

They will play a major role a) among investors, the same ones interested in buying precious metals; b) among normal folks needing a stable currency while living in countries whose currency is subject to a relevant depreciation; c) within the economy and the financial industry, as their stability allow them to be deployed by institutional entities as a means of transfer and a store value.

There are many projects of gold-backed stablecoins, I believe DigixDao (Singapore), Novem (Lichtenstein), Xaurum (Slovenia), OneGram (Dubai/UAE), HelloGold (Malaysia) and Kinesis (Cayman Islands), just to name a few, are serious projects.

So, how about gold-backed Stablecoins?

Stable coins are most likely not a new generation of cryptocurrency, but its new variety. Stable state coins secured by gold are a serious guarantee for their normal circulation. I did not even know that there were already at least six stable coins of various states that were provided with gold. This will cause more confidence even in a decentralized cryptocurrency.

[Peter90]

I did not even know that there were already at least six stable coins of various states that were provided with gold.

I wish you could point me to these 6 state supported gold-backed Stablecoins, as I know none... 

On the other hand, you are right, being backed by gold will enhance the confidence in them, in the stability of their value, and hence their adoption in everyday's life and in retail business