CACHE uses GramChain® asset tracking to provide a reliable Proof of Reserve (PoR) which guarantees 100% gold backing and facilitates physical redemption on demand.
GramChain® tracks events at the origin and enforces immutable transparency so that any error or omission will be permanently and publicly visible. This level of transparency enforces operational excellence.
GramChain’s transparency is based on three key design principles
- Origin Integrity: gold bars are packaged, photographed and tracked using tamper-evident GramChain® RFID tags by vault personnel. Data is recorded as “events” that always specify “who did what, when and where”.
- Event Immutability: The event data is immediately hashed and broadcasted to a public blockchain (Ethereum). The data is public and its hash can always be compared against its original Ethereum hash to verify the data’s integrity.
- Public Access: All data is public. Sensitive data is first salted and then hashed keeping the data private but providing a public audit trail on a “need to know” basis.
These three design principles result in the following characteristics:
1) GramChain® does not depend on, forgeable, third party documents
Traditional PoR systems rely on vault or bank statements. However, in the 21st century, although illegal, it is a trivial matter to falsify vault or bank statements. Signatures, statements and even notarized documents can be easily forged using photoshop and color printers.
Bernie Madoff defrauded nearly $65 billion USD over three decades by forging documents without investors, auditors or the SEC uncovering his massive Ponzi scheme.
The use of encryption and public blockchain technology combined with photos and detailed event data provides a vastly superior Proof of Reserve.
2) GramChain® events are tamper evident
By making event data public and including the hash of the prior parcel event, GramChain® creates a chain of events (the “Chain” in GramChain) so that any modification to a given event’s data (e.g. the mass of a bar) will invalidate its own data as well as that of all subsequent events.
This mechanism ensures that GramChain® data integrity can always be proven to be exactly as it was originally submitted by the vault operator. Event data hashes are a critical design feature that prevents CACHE, GramChain® or any other party from doctoring event data.
3) GramChain® implements redundant check and balances
GramChain® itself does not insert events pertaining to assets, it limits itself to support vault operators, custodians and service providers to use the GramChain® system. This policy, along with the tamper evidence controls and physical gold photos, create a very powerful check and balance system that limits GramChain® to do data quality checks.
If GramChain® identifies inconsistent data, the vault responsible for the event is contacted and the error is corrected with a new event. Since no records can ever be deleted, all details of the original error and its correction will always be publicly available.
New CACHE tokens cannot be minted until:
- Physical gold is present in a vault and it has been recorded with a “scan” event by the vault; and
- Custody of the gold has been transferred to CACHE by the vault with an “assign” event and a confirming vault statement has been uploaded to GramChain® .
4) GramChain® events and photos are public
All GramChain® data is always publicly available. Sensitive data is first salted and then hashed keeping the original private but providing a public signature of that data. This allows anyone to review the raw event data and independently confirm its hash with the event hash stored on the blockchain which verifies that the data has not been tampered with.
Philosophically this allows anyone to audit the data providing as close to a trustless Proof of Reserve (PoR) system as is possible.