Onegram, a Sharia-compliant cryptocurrency backed by gold is seeking $500 million with its crowd sale of 12 million OGC tokens which launched as Ramadan began on Friday.

As a cryptocurrency, OneGram sees each coin backed by one gram at the launch at its launch, with OneGram’s developers pointing to the resiliency of gold over fiat money. Every OneGram transaction generates a small fee, which is reinvested to buy more gold to increase the gold reserves backing the token. The developers’ plan is to add more gold if or when transaction volumes increase with profits to be shared among all OneGram investors.

Islamic Sharia-compliant finance excludes any gambling-related activities and forbids any borrowing on investors’ money. It has been gaining recognition beyond nations with an Islamic majority, with one London-based FinTech startup becoming the first Islamic financial firm to see regulatory approval this year.

Developed during a six-month period, OneGram claims to offer a proof-of-stake blockchain that is ‘’further anonymized’ than Bitcoin with developers employing zero-knowledge dual-key stealth addresses and ring signature protocols toward ‘instant, untraceable, unlinkable, trustless transactions.’

With its crowd sale, OneGram hopes to raise $500 million for over 12 million OGC tokens. Investors are mandatorily required to create an account on ‘GoldGuard’ to purchase gold at live spot rates.

Ibrahim Mohammed, OneGram CEO revealed early support for the crowd sale from the cryptocurrency and Islamic finance communities since its launch over the weekend.

He added:

More than 1,000 people have registered for GoldGuard accounts to participate, and the number is growing each day as we prepare to launch our crowdsale in alignment with Ramadan.

The purchase will also pay toward a number of development costs including business dev (5%), salaries (2%), operational and marketing costs at 1.5% each. A total of 10 in OneGram fees. When the cryptocurrency is deployed on the blockchain, the transaction fee – by design- kicks in. 70% of transaction fees are reinvested to buy more gold for the cryptocurrency-backing vault. 25% of the transaction fee is used toward development and operations while the remaining 5% is split between rewards for POS miners and charity donations.

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