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The Role of ABX in the Origins of Kinesis

Kinesis grew out of a partnership with the Allocated Bullion Exchange, or ABX, an online institutional marketplace that had spent more than a decade handling the trading, storage, and settlement of physical precious metals. The arrangement brought ABX’s existing knowledge of the bullion business into the Kinesis structure so that gold and silver holdings would be managed according to long-standing practices in the physical market rather than methods more common in cryptocurrency platforms.

While many digital precious-metal services depend on a single custodian or a limited set of storage sites, ABX was built instead around allocated ownership, professional vaulting, and the ability to settle trades across different locations. Those same principles became part of the operational base that Kinesis uses.

ABX’s Background and Experience

ABX started in 2011, at a time when demand among institutions for allocated metal was rising after the global financial crisis. The platform was set up to bring a traditionally scattered market under one electronic system that could link refiners, dealers, vault operators, brokers, and investors.

In the years that followed, ABX accumulated practical experience with the logistics of owning physical bullion—sourcing metal, settling trades, moving bars between vaults, and confirming that the material met investment-grade standards. That same operational knowledge now underpins a number of the processes that run behind Kinesis, including custody arrangements and the day-to-day administration of physical holdings.

A Worldwide Network of Vaults

One practical result of the partnership is access to ABX’s network of professional bullion vaults located in the major financial and trading centres: Dubai, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Vaduz, London, New York, Singapore, Sydney, Toronto, Zurich, Panama City, Batam, and Brisbane.

The vaults themselves are run by established security and logistics firms such as Brinks, Loomis, and Malca Amit. Together these companies safeguard large quantities of precious metals, cash, and other high-value assets for banks, central banks, refiners, exchanges, and institutional clients worldwide.

While Kinesis users cannot choose a specific vault for their bullion, the platform’s storage model—which distributes metal across multiple insured vaults in jurisdictions like Switzerland, Singapore, and the UK—means investors benefit from a degree of geographic risk diversification.

What This Means Day-to-Day for Users

Most of the benefits of the partnership reach users indirectly through the platform’s ordinary operations: precious metals sit in professional vaulting facilities that follow the same kinds of security, insurance, and access-control procedures used across the wider bullion industry. ABX’s accumulated experience with physical bullion movements helps keep storage, transfer, and settlement processes aligned with established market standards.

Because Kinesis rests on actual physical ownership rather than synthetic exposure, the reliability of the underlying operations matters. Every change of ownership ultimately depends on the metal existing, being stored correctly, and remaining independently verifiable.

Maintaining Quality and Trust in the Metals

ABX also supplied its Quality Assurance Framework, a set of standards that govern the precious metals entering the system. The framework is meant to confirm that the bullion meets recognised investment-grade criteria.

Instead of depending only on vault records, the framework records both the quality of the metal and its earlier history before it arrives in storage. That documentation adds a further point of reference for buyers, especially when the same bars change hands more than once. Three main ideas sit at the centre of this framework:

• Certification requires every bar or coin to meet recognised investment-grade purity standards and to come from an approved refiner.

• Provenance means each item can be traced back to the refinery that produced it, creating a written record of origin.

• Chain of custody keeps a continuous record from the refinery through transport and into vault storage, helping maintain the integrity of ownership records over time.

These practices follow patterns that have long been used in the international bullion market, where clear documentation and traceability support liquidity. Investment-grade bars that keep a documented chain of custody can usually move between professional vaults without needing fresh assays or re-verification, which reduces both cost and the time needed to settle a transfer.

Most of this work stays in the background. Still, it forms the operational base that lets physical precious metals be traded and moved with reasonable efficiency while preserving confidence that the metal itself is what the records claim it to be.