Hybrids of Precious Metal and Code: Gold-Backed Tokens and the Pendulum’s Next Arc
Elaine Diane Taylor • December 7, 2025
GOLD
When I hold a one-ounce gold Maple in my palm I can feel the patient weight.
Slow, bright, older than every empire that ever fought over it. With a little heat the precious metal can be melted and re-stamped for the next kingdom, or the one after that. Or I can just pass it down in my family for centuries without losing a single carat.
In 10,000 years or 100,000 this gold will be the same. Shining like a star.
Now, I can also open my digital wallet and that same ounce of golden value fractures into a thousand liquid shards. The ancient metal learned to dance in code.
The pendulum is swinging from centralized to decentralized. The hub of the wheel is taking us down a rocky road filled with mud and anger, but society is innovating again, and after the winter there is always spring. Gold stays through that winter.
The pendulum hasn’t broken, it just found a new rhythm. Since history is a wheel and we’re spinning around the wheel of peace or war, let’s look at this same repeating story.
Let’s look at a time when the elite were warring over power. Sound familiar? Well, in the past pendulum swing from centralized power to decentralized, the merchants and makers joined together to overthrow the elite and make a new system.
THE FLORIN
Florence, 1252.
The city had spent years bleeding from noble street wars—Guelfs, Ghibellines, private armies torching warehouses, contracts worthless.
Trade was choking.
In September 1250 the cloth merchants and guild masters had enough. They marched into the squares, expelled the warring aristocrats, and installed the Primo Popolo—the first government in Florentine history run by the people who actually made and moved things.
Less than two years later, in the autumn of 1252, that same merchant guild opened the mint and struck a new gold coin: 3.53 grams of pure 24-carat, lily on one side, Saint John on the other. No king’s portrait, no emperor’s claim. Just the guarantee of the guild halls that the weight and purity would never change.
They called it the florin.
Within a generation it was accepted from London to Constantinople. Letters of credit written in Bruges were settled in florins in Venice. Merchants had built a money they could trust because they controlled the mint themselves.
Centralized ledger, decentralized trust. From centralized to decentralized. Until the pendulum swung again and the ‘new’ power centralized again hundreds of years later.
DIGITAL GOLD
We’re doing it again, only this time on a planetary scale.
Gold closed the week above $4,200. Central banks added another 710 tonnes in the last quarter. Citizens everywhere want the metal for the first time because trust in governments and the system is eroding again.
It starts slow, until it’s not.
One way to participate in gold’s rush upward is to own a tokenized representation of physical gold held in a vault by a private company.
A gold back token.
Tokenized gold, with allocated physical ounces living on blockchains, has surged past a $3.9 billion market cap, fifty times larger than four years ago.
TETHER & PAX GOLD
The two biggest gold tokens are Tether Gold and Pax Gold.
Both are backed 1-to-1 with an ounce of gold held in vaults, allocated, audited and redeemable.
So it’s one way to ride the price up and then transfer out without the fees that happen when you sell a physical ounce.
But it’s not in the hand. So the risk of the company failing, or the electric grid going down are real, but it’s not an unreasonable risk unless there’s a zombie apocalypse or you’re in a war zone.
So counterparty risk depends where you live and where we are on the wheel of peace and war.
One is pure sun-metal dancing on chain. One is pure value in your hand.
BITCOIN
The digital gold travels by fiber optic cable instead of caravans and ships.
The raw gold is indestructible and limited in supply. It can be rebranded by melt to become another brand or none at all. Bitcoin’s math is indestructible and it is limited in supply just like raw gold. It has no brand to any nation, as it is decentralized digital money.
It could have been shut down when it was very small, but those in power thought it best to laugh at it and mock it, then try to manipulate it to rise and crash, but it’s still growing. More institutions are coming on board and creating financial products around it now. Governments are adding it to their savings accounts.
Who owns how much is the question, with some saying it was started by governments themselves, but the majority of Bitcoin is spread far and wide now, and each sale, each day makes it more and more decentralized.
TRUSTED DIGITAL CURRENCY
What’s still missing is the exact 1252 moment: a tight circle of the biggest actual merchants—OTC desks, miners, payment companies, trading houses—forming a consortium and issuing a second-layer coin that is always redeemable 1-to-1 for bitcoin or gold they custody, pricing their real commercial contracts in that unit, and defending the peg with their reputations.
When that circle finally locks arms and keeps the promise for a straight decade, the parallel will be complete.
The institutions and commercial and central banks are in the pie frame of mind, where all that exists now is all there will be, so they fight over the size of the slice, and use whatever means necessary to keep friends in power.
And now we’re moving to a garden mindset. The creators are planting seeds. Creating businesses and products with new technology and with the oldest, most trusted money in the world.
Florence gave the world the first global gold money without a global empire.
We are giving ourselves the first global gold money without a single bank.
THE PENDULUM NOW
At the center, fiat empires still print and pressure. They are in the autumn of their cycle and going into a deep winter as the fiat system loses more and more power via debt. It’s when corruption is covered up until it just can’t, and then they will turn on each other, when their system is lost and they want to save themselves.
On the widening rim, creatives and merchants are planting gardens: Layer-2s blooming, DAO treasuries diversifying, quiet wallets stacking utility tokens, payment tokens, the new rails, grams and sats.
Same flight from debasement, opposite tools, all the bases covered.
This week @ShowdeerArt minted Electric Girl #19—soft lightning threading through golden hair, circuitry and bloodstream pulsing as one.
When I saw her, my heart recognized that girl and I knew her: electric, golden, a mask and something she knows and just might tell you.
Art is the communication of meaning.
In a zombie apocalypse we’ll bite the physical gold coin.
But in a functioning new world and solar system wide economy we’ll verify the token, build gardens of new value that increase life, and receive capital in a fair amount for the work of our hands and minds.
Digital gold is not cold metal plus sterile code. It is alive, electric, ancient sun in new wires.
Either way, the merchants are once again building money they can trust.
Hold the token and ride the arc.
Hold the gold coin and outlive every arc.
The next swing of the pendulum is already humming—half ledger, half electric spark as we all move from mechanical to electric.
Instant on and off.
What are you creating?
Elaine~
Art: #19 Electric Girl by the brilliant Chris Bigalke aka Showdeer on X @ShowdeerArt and his website https://www.showdeer.art/
Elaine Diane Taylor on X @ ElaineDTaylor
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Thank you to Jim Rickards for including me in the foreward of his New York Times bestselling book The New Case for Gold.
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Nothing on this site is intended as investment advice. We’re all watching which way the wind is blowing.
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Gold is at historic highs because trust in government and legacy systems is at historic lows.
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Barkerville, Gold Rush Town, British Columbia, Canada
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Thank you to Mike Maloney for including my song Coins and Crowns in Episode 1 of his bestselling YouTube series Hidden Secrets of Money.
Coins and Crowns
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
SOCAN/ASCAP
from the album Coins and Crowns
Coins and Crowns is featured in Episode 1 of Mike Maloney’s bestselling series Hidden Secrets of Money.
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Not Much of a Holiday (Bank Holidays and Media Persuasion)
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
Single available on iTunes
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A Terrible Breeze (War and Social Media)
The news comes down
A little bluebird sings
Words of war
Of fire and furious things
Of testing might
‘Til no patience knows
If keeping still
Still keeps you safe at home
It’s a terrible breeze
They speak of today
Of threats that used to live a world away
We all know wind
Can blow both ways
And a terrible breeze can blow it all away
A worldwide net
Sees our village grow
’til we all forget
What each one used to know
How a blind bird’s wings
Can reach the shore
And turn that wheel of peace and war
Village fools sinking down, down, down
Debt and gold wound in numbered shrouds
Deal of a life it’s bread and clowns
Can we afford another go around?
The news comes down.
It’s a terrible breeze. The news comes down.
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
Single available on iTunes
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Preparing for the Fall is a live boutique album featuring Wag the Dog, Black Swan Dive, American Pie and Gods of the Copybook Headings. Available on iTunes, Google Music, Amazon Music and major digital distributors.
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The Gods of the Copybook Headings
words by Rudyard Kipling and music by Elaine Diane Taylor
from the album Preparing for the Fall.
The copybooks of the early 1900s gave us all the wisdom we need. The sayings that were copied are the truths, the gods of our world. All the empires who followed the gods of the marketplace have fallen, and there’s terror and slaughter when the gods of the copybook headings return. The lyrics are by Rudyard Kipling. One of my gurus.
Another Week on Wall Street
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
from the album Coins and Crowns.
See the bankers wave the Wall Street wands
See the conjured piles of paper green
Now they’re betting all their tricks go wrong
They’re betting the world as you know it
If they win You lose the whole world as you know it
Ever seen a long con?
Ever seen a tampered wand?
Ever seen the betters sipping tea
Making bets just sipping tea
Well don’t talk back
Your betters, your bankers are having a tee, hee, hee
Heyo heyo, just another week on Wall Street
Heyo heyo just another week on Wall Street
A little grease (Greece) is floating out to sea
Little PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain) are bobbing up and down
So send a storm and then we’ll see
when the tide goes out who’s naked on the beach
Who’s that wizard hiding behind that hedge?
Who’s that wizard hiding behind that hedge (fund)? But I’m just speculating
See the bankers wave the Wall Street wands
See the conjured piles of paper green
Now they’re betting all their tricks go wrong T
hey’re betting the world as you know it
If they win You lose the whole damn world as you know it
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Nothing on this site is intended as individual investment advice. We’re all watching which way the wind is blowing.
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Elaine Diane Taylor 
