- Schiff says tokenized gold could become the best stable asset for digital payments
- His plan involves buying, storing, and spending gold through an app-linked platform
- CZ replied that tokenized gold still depends on trusting custodians and companies
Gold has always been the old king of value: unyielding, heavy, and unbothered by innovation. But when Peter Schiff, the long-time gold advocate and Bitcoin critic, recently said that “tokenized gold” could be the future of stable value, and the idea sparked immediate debate.
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) immediately pushed back, dismissing the concept as fundamentally flawed and reliant on old-world trust assumptions.
Schiff’s Vision: Gold on the Blockchain
Schiff described a digital world where investors could own, trade, and spend gold through an app, with gold stored in vaults but represented by tokens on-chain. He claimed such a system could finally make gold usable as a medium of exchange in the digital economy.
“So the one thing that makes sense to put on a blockchain is gold because it will work and it will do all the things that bitcoin can never do,” he said.
CZ’s Rebuttal: Why Tokenized Gold Is Not ‘On-Chain Gold’
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) was quick to respond.
CZ argued that tokenized gold is not truly gold on-chain. Instead, it represents a promise that depends on trust.
“Tokenizing gold is not on-chain gold. It’s tokenizing that you trust some third party will give you gold at some later date, even after their management changes, maybe decades later, during a war, etc.”
“Trust Me Bro” Tokens and the Limits of Gold on Chain
His view is that while blockchain offers decentralization and trustless value transfer, tokenized gold brings back the same old reliance on middlemen. The vaults, the custodians, the companies, all require users to believe they will honor the gold backing. CZ called it a “trust me bro” token, a sharp phrase that captures how these assets depend more on faith than on code.
CZ also pointed out that this is why “gold coins” have never truly taken off in the crypto market. Despite several efforts, digital gold tokens have struggled to gain lasting adoption because they are still built on traditional trust-based systems.
In CZ’s view, if an asset needs trust to hold its value, it is not truly crypto, no matter how shiny it appears.
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