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An idea to tokenize or track US gold reserves to make their movements transparent on a blockchain won’t work in the same trustless way as Bitcoin does, but doing so could help the cryptocurrency, says a research analyst.

Greg Cipolaro, global head of research at New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG), said in a March 21 note that Trump administration officials, including Elon Musk, have floated using a blockchain to track US gold and government spending — an idea supported by crypto executives.

“Here’s the thing about blockchains. They’re not very smart,” Cipolaro said. “They’re limited in the information they convey. For example, Bitcoin has no idea what the price of Bitcoin is or even the current time.”

He said the tokenization or tracking of gold reserves on a blockchain could help with audits and transparency but would still “rely on trust and coordination with central entities” compared to Bitcoin, which “was designed to explicitly remove centralized entities.”

Cipolaro added that tokenization and blockchain-tracking ideas aren’t competitive with the crypto market and might help to increase awareness of it, which “could ultimately benefit Bitcoin.”

It comes amid calls from some for an independent audit of the United States’ gold reserves.

Republican Senator Rand Paul last month seemingly called on Musk’s federal cost-cutting project to investigate the US government’s gold stash at the Bullion Depository in Fort Knox, which the US Mint says holds around half of the country’s gold. 

The Treasury audits and publishes reports on gold holdings at Fort Knox and other locations across the US every month, but President Donald Trump and Musk have both parrotted decades-old conspiracy theories about the gold and questioned whether it’s all still there.

Related: Who’s running in Trump’s race to make US a ‘Bitcoin superpower?’ 

They have both pushed for an independent audit of Fort Knox. The vaults were last opened in 2017 for Trump’s then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to view the gold and before that, in 1974 to a congressional delegation and a group of journalists.

The Mint’s website says that no gold has gone in or out of Fort Knox “for many years,” except for “very small quantities” used to test the gold’s purity during audits. 

Trump’s Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said last month that Fort Knox is audited every year and “all the gold is present and accounted for.”

Magazine: Elon Musk’s plan to run government on blockchain faces uphill battle 

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The following is a guest post from Felix Xu, Founder of ARPA Network. The U.S. government’s approach to artificial intelligence (AI) has shifted dramatically, emphasizing accelerated innovation over regulatory oversight. In particular, President Donald Trump’s executive order, Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence, has set a new tone for AI development, one rooted […]

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US authorities are seeking to return $7 million to victims of a social engineering scam that tricked them into sending money to fake cryptocurrency investment platforms. 

The scam involved the fraudsters contacting victims and earning trust before directing them to websites masquerading as legitimate crypto investment platforms, Virginia’s Eastern District US Attorney’s Office said in a March 21 statement.

Once victims made a deposit, the funds were funneled through over 75 bank accounts under the names of shell companies, then sent abroad “deceptively characterized” as domestic wires, despite being transferred to a bank outside the US.

“The sites falsely represented to the victims that their investments were making sizeable gains,” Virginia’s US Attorney’s Office added in its statement.

“When victims would attempt to make withdrawals, the perpetrators would coerce the victims to send even more money using tactics such as claiming the victims owed taxes on their purported profits.”

The United States Secret Service seized some of the stolen funds from a foreign bank in 2023 and began the civil forfeiture action by filing a claim in a US District Court.

However, the bank also made a claim against the cash, and the US authorities eventually reached a settlement agreement for $7 million of the seized funds. 

Victims of the scam have been urged to contact the Secret Service to petition to recover their losses. 

Related: Web3 businesses can outsmart crypto scams before they strike — Here’s how

In its 2025 Crypto Crime Report, blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis said crypto crime has entered a professionalized era dominated by efficient cyber syndicates. 

Australian federal police said on March 21 they had to alert 130 people of a message scam aimed at crypto users that spoofed the same “sender ID” as legitimate crypto exchanges such as Binance. 

Another similar string of scam messages reported by X users on March 14, spoofed Coinbase and Gemini and attempted to trick users into setting up a new wallet using pre-generated recovery phrases controlled by the fraudsters. 

Cybersecurity firm Malwarebytes sent a warning on March 18 about a syndicate using a new form of crypto-stealing malware hidden inside a “cracked” version of TradingView Premium. 

Microsoft’s Incident Response Team said on March 17 that it had discovered cyber scammers were using a new remote access trojan (RAT) that targets crypto held in 20 cryptocurrency wallet extensions for the Google Chrome browser. 

Magazine: Ripple says SEC lawsuit ‘over,’ Trump at DAS, and more: Hodler’s Digest, March 16 – 22

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