Episode
nGRND – The Gold That Pays You to Leave It in the Ground
- Podcast
- The Crypto Conversation
- Published
- Jun 7, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1537
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://bravenewcoin.com/insights/podcasts
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Summary
Professor Lisa Wilson is CEO and co-founder of nGRND, a gold protocol that turns verified but unmined "in-ground" gold into a fully backed, reward-bearing digital asset rather than digging it up. An Australian who holds a South African professorship and lives in France, Wilson is a genuine mining insider — she has written operational and hazard-standards systems for the likes of Rio Tinto and BHP — with a parallel career in blockchain, where she helped list the world's first actively managed certificates for investment-grade carbon assets. Why you should listen Wilson's pitch is a contrarian one: the best place to keep gold may be exactly where it already is. Billions of ounces of verified gold sit classified as resources that can't economically advance to production, with mine timelines now stretching toward two decades once permitting, First Nations consultation and environmental compliance are factored in. Gold, she argues, is unusual among metals — it has almost no industrial use, so above-ground stock is mostly worn or stored, which means an ounce in the ground is functionally the same store of value as an ounce in a vault. nGRND acquires long-term rights (30 to 100 years) to independently verified deposits, leaves the metal "in situ," and monetizes it without the environmental decimation of extraction. The mechanics are concrete: for every 35,000 tokens in circulation, at least one ounce of preserved gold is held in the protocol treasury, and every ounce left undisturbed avoids an estimated 792kg of CO2. The more interesting half of the model is what happens on the surface. Because the land above each deposit stays untouched, nGRND layers a second income stream on top of gold's own appreciation — what Wilson calls alternative land-use monetization. That can mean…