Swiss Bank, Managing 5.7 Trillion Dollars, Made a Surprise Gold Venture with a Partner Altcoin!

UBS, the Swiss banking giant that manages $5.7 trillion in assets, successfully tested its UBS Key4 Gold product on the Ethereum Layer 2 network ZKSync, enabling Swiss customers to directly purchase physical gold.

The test, which is part of a comprehensive effort to modernize gold investments, aims to expand the supply of gold while exploring scalability, privacy, and interoperability.

UBS Key4 Gold offers services to individual customers by allowing partial investment in gold:

• Real-time pricing
• Deep liquidity
• Secure physical storage
• Optional delivery

The product is built on the UBS Gold Network, a permissioned blockchain that connects vaults, liquidity providers, and distributors to facilitate the gold trading process.

UBS tested ZKSync Validium, a scalable ZK Rollup with off-chain data storage feature, to optimize Ethereum's institutional-level gold trading capabilities. The key focus areas were:

• Scalability: Processing high transaction volumes
• Privacy: Ensuring privacy for global customers
• Interoperability: Smooth transfer of assets between networks

UBS Group Digital Assets Leader Christoph Puhr said the following on the subject:

"This is another great example of how UBS collaborates with technology providers to be at the forefront of innovation. While tokenized securities have significant potential, scalability, privacy, and interoperability continue to be key challenges. The PoC we conducted with ZKSync demonstrated that Layer 2 networks and ZK technology could be a solution."