In late January, Usman Saleem was in Doha with investors when the price of gold shot up~$500 dollars overnight — about ten percent on an asset that typically moves eight or nine percent across an entire year. The move came as spot gold broke past $5,100 per ounce in a sixth straight session of gains.
"Overnight, this was an asset that was probably behaving a bit like a meme coin, at least in commodity terms," he said.
Usman Saleem is the founder of Oro, a vertically integrated tokenized gold company built on Solana. Speaking with Amira Valliani on a recent episode of Bits to Bricks, he walked through what those nights actually look like on the operational side.
The operational realities of gold markets
That night in Doha, he was up every hour. Market makers needed help rebalancing onchain liquidity pools, and people were messaging him trying to put five-figure positions through pool depth that wasn't quite ready for them.
A second test came at the end of February, when the US-Israel strikes on Iran landed on a Friday evening, after traditional markets had closed for the weekend. Onchain gold kept trading. Buyers leaned into the old playbook (war means gold goes up) and prices ticked higher in real time across Oro's pools. Traditional venues had nothing to say until Monday, when spot gold opened up nearly two percent and tested $5,400 an ounce.
What's interesting is what happened next. Over the following weeks, gold actually reversed and fell sharply (down roughly twenty percent from the post-strike peak as investors rotated back into dollar liquidity). The weekend's onchain price discovery had captured the market's first instinct in real time, even if that instinct didn't hold.
"The modern world we're living in is so complex," Saleem said, "that it does not necessarily play out in that context." Onchain venues won't always be right. What matters is that they're open when the question is being asked.
For Saleem, the moment confirmed something he had been arguing for years. "This demonstrates that a product like this has demand even within crypto natives," he said.
"The usual challenge I always got when we first started building is crypto natives don't want this. They want Bitcoin. But in the last few months, more and more people are recognizing that this asset is important, and people want to trade it 24/7."
An asset with five millennia of behavioral data, trading inside a market structure being rebuilt in real time. That's where Oro is operating.
What Oro is actually building
Ask Saleem to describe Oro and he resists the obvious label. "I don't see ourselves as a tokenized gold company anymore. We're a vertically integrated gold company."
Most tokenized assets stop at the wrapper, placing an existing asset in a ledger. Oro is trying to own the entire path a gold bar travels, from upstream sourcing through vaults, into distribution via fintech apps, and finally into capital markets products built on top of the asset.
Saleem pitched what that ecosystem could look like:
- A miner in Kazakhstan sells gold into the platform.
- That gold reaches a user through a fintech app in India.
- Capital from a US lender finances borrowing against it.
None of those connections exist cleanly in today's gold market, which is fragmented by design. The LBMA runs spot in London. COMEX runs futures in New York and Chicago. Trading happens in one place, refining in another, retail somewhere else again — and none of them interface in the way Oro is building toward. Tokenization is just the thread that ties the pieces together.
Why Solana
On The Index podcast earlier this year, Saleem gave the longer answer on why Oro is built on Solana.
"I didn't choose Solana. Solana chose me," he said. His entry into crypto happened to be on Solana, and the early ecosystem support compounded fast. A Superteam grant got Oro off the ground. First angel checks came from people he had never met. After attending Superteam Ignition Singapore, he closed a first institutional check on the back of it. From entering crypto to closing a $1.5M pre-seed: five months. "That wouldn't have happened anywhere else except Solana."
The longer-term bet is structural. "If we're thinking about this world where everything is on Solana — and I do think Solana has an amazing competitive edge of being this home of all assets — and if gold is going to be one of the most important assets in the next decade, then this is the main place to be building on."
Building trust when the gold isn't in the room
Building a token to represent gold isn't the hard part. It's backing that token with real gold and establishing trust with investors that their token is backed by real gold, stored securely.
Oro's approach has three layers.
- A bankruptcy-remote legal structure, with a foundation holding custody of the gold on behalf of token holders, separated from the operating company.
- Third-party custodians — Brinks handles the physical vaulting, not Oro.
- Monthly audits from RSM, one of the larger international accounting firms, which independently verifies reserves with the custodian and checks that gold was acquired before tokens were minted, not retroactively.
That last point is the one most people skip past. "I can just mint the gold and then be like, okay great, I sold ten tokens and now I'm going to retroactively back it," Saleem said. "The backing has to happen first. And then basically the tokens have to be minted."
The cost of that rigor shows up in operations rather than retail pricing. Oro sources at institutional rates and runs competitively against the fintech apps charging two to four percent spreads on digital gold. The institutional segment is a tougher segment to make pricing attractive for, but Saleem believes Oro will get there, particularly with volume.
The geopolitics of where the gold sits
Every tokenized gold issuer has picked a jurisdiction. Each Other Gold is in Switzerland; Pax Gold is in London; Matrix Dock chose Hong Kong; and Oro chose Dubai.
Six months ago, Dubai looked like the safest pick in the lineup. After the spring's regional conflict, however, Saleem doesn't think any single jurisdiction is the right answer anymore.
"A best-in-class tokenized gold product would have its custody diversified over multiple jurisdictions," he said. "How do you take the view that Hong Kong is safer than London and London is safer than Switzerland? The world is changing so fast."
He pointed to the structural pressures (such as debt burdens, aging populations, immigration tensions) that make even historically safe Western jurisdictions less obviously safe. He was careful not to predict any specific outcome. London isn't dangerous. But a product whose entire value depends on physical custody has to hedge geographically, the same way investors hedge any other concentration risk. And when every issuer offers LBMA-grade gold sitting with a top-tier custodian, the product converges. Custody geography becomes one of the few places left to differentiate.
What's worth tokenizing (and what isn't)
Saleem gets asked constantly when Oro will tokenize other commodities, and his framework is direct. "I don't think every asset will make sense," he said. "Otherwise, perps are great for everything."
Some assets are physically easier to tokenize than others. A kilo of gold takes up less space than a kilo of silver and is worth far more, so custody economics work. Most rare earths fail that test before you even get to the challenges surrounding an audit. For something like uranium or gallium, an ETF or a perp gives you the price exposure without the spot custody complexity.
Tokenization earns its place when it enables something the alternatives can't, such as real access, new yield, or genuine price discovery in a market that doesn't have it. Saleem pointed to the team building Uranium Digital, which is constructing the first tradable market for an asset that currently trades entirely over the counter. That's a real use case. Tokenizing oil to give retail price exposure when a perp does the same job is not.
For Oro, the unlock is yield. Because the foundation holds physical custody, it can participate in gold leasing — a financing mechanism that originated with Swiss bullion banks in the 1960s and 70s, where refiners and jewelers borrow gold to fund inventory in a delta-neutral way. Oro routes reserves into active leases run by established financing houses, then passes that yield back to token holders. Most institutional gold programs and Swiss ETFs do the same on the back end. They just don't share it.
When Amira asked for a five-year price prediction, Saleem didn't hedge. "Eight to ten thousand easily, in the case of us just going in the same trend. If crazy shit happens, who knows." Then, with a smile: "Just buy gold."
It's the conviction you'd expect from a founder who has bet his career on the asset.
This article draws from our conversation with Usman Saleem, Founder of Oro, on Bits to Bricks. For the full discussion, listen to the complete episode.