The story in the homework about gold over the weekend is quite thought-provoking

regarding the logic behind this wave of decline 📉
#Tokenization of U.S. Treasury Bonds and the Decline of Gold's Status.
The era of gold is short-term in a downward trend, replaced not by Bitcoin or U.S. dollar cash, but by U.S. Treasury bonds.
This has been secretly promoted by Wall Street for a year and a half.
The current U.S. Treasury bonds are no longer the bulky financial instruments we used to imagine;
they now can achieve an annualized yield of over 4%, operate 24/7 nonstop,
and can be sent to any digital wallet worldwide in seconds, just like sending a message.
This is the "tokenization" of U.S. Treasury bonds.
The main repository on Wall Street—the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC)—
started pilot services for Treasury bond tokenization as early as July this year,
and will fully roll out in October.
The first batch of pilot targets includes U.S. Treasury bonds, Russell 1000 index components,
and mainstream ETFs, with over 50 participating institutions, all top players like JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and Citibank.
Previously, when we bought U.S. bonds, we had to wait T+1 day to confirm the transaction,
and both funds and assets had to be frozen for a day.
But after tokenization, U.S. bonds become digital certificates on the blockchain,
enabling peer-to-peer transactions in seconds, with funds and assets unfrozen simultaneously,
making the process from "one day" to "a few seconds" in efficiency.
This is a significant blow to gold.
As a safe-haven asset, gold's biggest problem is "no interest," and sometimes there are time lags in trading,
and collateralizing it is also troublesome.
But tokenized U.S. Treasuries are different—they offer over 4% annual yield,
can be transferred globally in seconds, and can be used as collateral in DeFi protocols to earn additional interest.
Market funds have already started voting with their feet—
the scale of tokenized U.S. Treasuries has surpassed $15.3 billion,
a 256% surge in 15 months, while gold prices have been falling recently.
This is not just short-term fund shifting; it’s a structural transformation of the global financial infrastructure.
But there is also a huge risk:
if a financial crisis like 2008 occurs, smart contracts will automatically execute sell orders,
potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in assets to be sold off in seconds,
with panic spreading ten times faster than before.
In the future, global funds will tilt toward "high-yield, highly liquid, instant transfer" tokenized dollar assets,
and gold’s safe-haven attribute will only weaken further.
#Would you choose physical gold or tokenized dollar assets?