Overview
Kinka Gold is a tokenized-gold product that lets people hold a digital token that can be traded back for physical gold bullion. Each XNK token represents one troy ounce of high-purity Japanese gold held by a third-party storage company, and holders can transfer or, for a fee, trade the token back for the underlying metal. It is built around physical bullion sourced to London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) Good Delivery standards rather than a synthetic or paper-gold price feed1.
Kinka Gold is operated by Kinka (BVI), Ltd., a subsidiary of UNBANKED, INC., a publicly listed financial services company in Japan. The token first launched as an ERC-20 contract on Ethereum and was later issued on Cardano with technical support from EMURGO, a co-founding entity of the Cardano network2. Holdings on either chain represent the same one-ounce-of-gold claim.
Key Features
- One token, one ounce of physical gold. Each XNK is collateralized by one troy fine ounce of bullion meeting LBMA Good Delivery standards, designated for use on the Osaka Exchange and held in vaults described as bankruptcy-remote2.
- Multi-chain access. XNK runs as a Cardano native asset alongside its original Ethereum ERC-20 contract, so holders can choose the network that matches their wallets and fees3.
- No custody or management fees. The project does not charge ongoing custody or management fees on holdings. Fees apply only when converting XNK back to physical gold, plus standard network gas1.
- Direct redemption for bullion. Holders can convert XNK into delivery of physical gold from the storage company's vault, distinguishing the product from gold-price tokens that only track a market quote1.
- Institutional tokenization stack on Cardano. The Cardano issuance uses EMURGO's real-world-assets tokenization engine, the same infrastructure EMURGO maintains for institutional clients4.
What to Expect
For everyday buyers, the project's website is the primary entry point. Purchases happen through an over-the-counter (OTC) request form with a 0.1 ether minimum order, after which Kinka delivers the equivalent XNK to the buyer's wallet5. The site explains the gold backing, the redemption flow, and the fee structure on a single explore-and-FAQ page.
For decentralized finance (DeFi) users, XNK is meant to act as a programmable gold-backed asset on Cardano, usable in lending, collateral, and payment scenarios as Cardano protocols add support2. For institutional and curious onlookers, the EMURGO press materials and the Kinka whitepaper are the most detailed reference points. The marketing site itself is light on technical depth and is not the canonical source for the Cardano deployment.
The website is configured to block search engines from indexing it and has not been substantially updated since the Cardano launch, so live announcements about chain availability, integrations, and partner exchanges appear first on the project's X and Telegram channels rather than on kinka-gold.com.
