Kurt Hemecker has spent his career trying to answer one question: How do you scale trust in a digital age?
He started out writing encryption firmware for US avionics, then built international payment circuits on Wall Street for British Telecom, then helped expand mobile payments to forty countries at a startup that was absorbed into PayPal. Each step taught him the same lesson: moving money is not a technology problem. It is a problem of trust distribution and political consent.
That lesson became vivid at Libra—the Facebook-backed project that attempted to redesign money at internet scale, later rebranded as Diem. Kurt was there. He watched the association—Shopify, Spotify, Uber, A16Z, social impact organisations—spend years educating regulators, negotiating with governments, and building what he describes as the most intellectually ambitious monetary project he had ever seen. He also watched it fail, not for technical reasons, but because money is sovereign, and sovereigns pushed back. While Libra/Diem was busy asking permission, other players such as Tether and Circle were simply doing it.
After Diem wound down, Kurt turned to the verification problem. If finance is going to be programmable, how do you make identity and compliance programmable too—without turning every transaction into a data breach waiting to happen? That question took him to the MENA Foundation, where he worked on zero-knowledge proofs: the branch of cryptography that lets you prove something is true without revealing the underlying information.
He is now CEO of Gold Token SA, an MKS PAMP company, where he is relaunching DGLD—a token backed one-for-one by physical gold stored in a Swiss vault in Ticino. MKS PAMP refines four nines of purity, distributes to central banks and Costco alike, and runs trading desks in Geneva, New York, and Hong Kong. Kurt’s argument is straightforward: this is not a blockchain company trying to get credibility in gold; it is a gold company putting its asset on modern rails.
In this conversation, Kurt walks through what actually killed Libra, why zero-knowledge proofs have not yet reached the mainstream and what it will take, and why tokenised gold is not the same thing as a gold ETF. He also makes the case for gold itself—not as a speculative bet, but as one of the four pillars that families with multi-generational wealth have quietly relied on for centuries. None of it is investment advice. All of it is worth hearing.
You can follow Kurt on X at @khem and explore DGLD at dgld.com.
Marieke: Kurt, it’s great to have you with us. You and I have known each other for some time—I had the opportunity to sit on your board at Mina Foundation, and now we have the pleasure of working together at MKS PAMP on the Digital Gold Token, where you’re CEO and I’m one of your advisors. Nicolas and I co-author Currency of Power, a newsletter we recently launched that looks at geopolitics and new forms of money—of which tokenizing gold is one. We couldn’t think of a better guest to discuss gold, tokenized assets, privacy, and everything happening in this new financial world.
We’ll cover three areas today. First, your career: from PayPal to Libra/Diem, then Mina Foundation, and now MKS PAMP. Second, privacy and anonymity—critical concepts as finance becomes more digital, and an area where you have real expertise. Third, tokenizing gold, which is highly topical right now. Welcome, Kurt.
Kurt: Thank you, Marieke, and Nicolas as well. I’m delighted to be here, and genuinely fortunate to have Marieke among my advisors on the gold project.
“Financial infrastructure is not just code. It’s governance, legitimacy, and political consent.”
Marieke: Let’s start with your path into crypto. You’ve been in the space long enough to have seen Libra, Diem, Mina—a zero-knowledge proof protocol we’ll explain—and now tokeniszd gold. What brought you in, and how has the journey unfolded?
Kurt: I’ll go into a bit more detail than I usually do on a panel, since we have the time. Going way back, I studied computer science and started out developing encryption firmware for US avionics, then spent time on Wall Street working for British Telecom on international circuits between financial institutions. So I’m a bit of a dinosaur—I’ve been through what Chris Dixon calls Web1, Web2, and Web3.
My move into crypto wasn’t ideological at first. It was really about scale. I’d spent a large part of my career working on digital payments. At PayPal, I was working for a mobile startup called Zong, where we had expanded mobile payments into more than forty countries, and that eventually became part of the PayPal portfolio. That experience taught me something quickly: moving money is not primarily a technology problem. It’s a problem of trust distribution and regulatory coordination.
Then at Libra, which became Diem, I saw for the first time an attempt to redesign money at internet scale. It wasn’t just another wallet or payment app—it was about creating a programmable monetary layer embedded into global platforms. The opportunity to work on that was intellectually irresistible. Love them or hate them, the Facebook team brought remarkable thought leadership, and the broader association included Shopify, Spotify, Uber, Lyft, investment firms like a16z and USV, and social impact organisations. These were people who know how to build services that people actually want to use.
But in the end—and everyone knows the story now—it became a masterclass in how sensitive money is as a social technology. That clarified something for me: financial infrastructure is not just code. It’s governance, legitimacy, and political consent.
That realisation led me toward a deeper question: if finance is going to be programmable, how do we make verification programmable too? That’s the famous Web3 ethos—don’t trust, verify. And that’s what took me to Mina and zero-knowledge proofs: the idea that you could prove compliance or identity without overexposing personal data.
Now at Gold Token SA, which is an MKS PAMP company, I see the continuation of that arc—taking one of the most historically trusted assets and putting it onto modern rails in a way that respects both regulation and innovation. The throughline is simple: I’ve been working on how to scale trust in a digital age.
Nicolas: I remember writing about Libra when it launched. My recollection is that one of the main arguments in its favour was that it would counterbalance the Chinese payment system. Everyone was impressed by how rapidly and at what scale China had shifted its entire payment culture to mobile, and there was concern they would extend that dominance to Africa, Asia, and beyond. Was that a fair reading, or did I over-interpret the geopolitical angle?
Kurt: Not at all—that was certainly one dimension. There is a genuine technology war underway, and who controls global payment infrastructure matters enormously. There’s rarely a winner-takes-all outcome, but there are usually a few winners, and you want to be among them.
That said, there were other dimensions too. Social impact was a significant one—improving the distribution of wealth and giving more people access to exchange. That’s why there were so many social impact organisations in the Libra association. And then there was the question of sovereign debt distribution, which became increasingly sensitive.
Marieke: On the social impact point—that was also a driver for Bitcoin, wasn’t it? The idea of a more equitable financial system. How do you see the current adoption curve of crypto and stablecoins, given everything you’ve witnessed? Is it moving as fast as you expected?
Kurt: A bit slower, honestly. But I think that’s just the nature of these revolutions—they don’t happen in one sweep. Even the shift to plastic and credit cards forty or fifty years ago was incremental. It was one step among many. Money does move on crypto rails today with far less friction than on traditional rails, which are genuinely quite outdated.
Nicolas: Who would you say replaced Libra, or Diem, as the main player? Is Tether the iteration of that vision, perhaps with better timing?
Kurt: They achieved one part of the mission, not the whole. And frankly, that was a source of real frustration at Libra and Diem. We were spending enormous resources educating regulators and talking to governments, while over here Tether and Circle’s Centre Consortium were simply doing what we wanted to do—and nobody was stopping them.
The difference was ambition and approach. Libra and Diem took the right path of engaging regulators directly. Tether found a killer use case: where do I park my money between speculative trades? That was it, and it was enormously successful. They’re very smart people who’ve since parlayed that into other products and services. The challenge now is how they pivot from that original use case into everyday payments—and you can see that effort in USAT, their regulatory-compliant stablecoin.
Companies like PayPal have a significant advantage in that transition because they already have the merchant network and the distribution.
Marieke: That’s a fascinating framing. I was at Circle at the time, working on the launch of Centre. Our approach also involved talking to regulators, but it was simpler — dollar only. Going back to what you said earlier about the politics of money: my understanding was that Libra was conceived as a supranational currency, a basket of five currencies. Do you think that ambition was one of the main obstacles?
Kurt: It was certainly one of many. The thinking behind the basket was sound—it addressed exactly the challenges we see today around interest rates and what happens when they go negative, and how you maintain a treasury in that environment. But it became politically very sensitive around sovereign debt and who controls it. In hindsight, starting simpler, with a smaller initial ambition, might have been the wiser path.
Nicolas: Is there a lesson here for major disruptions generally? That you need a first player to educate regulators, absorb all the obstacles nobody anticipated, and prepare the ground for the next wave?
Kurt: I couldn’t agree more. And starting simple is part of it. We saw this in the ETF space—a great evolution in financial instruments, but some of the early products were structurally too complex to survive. The ones that worked were the ones that were straightforward.
The deeper lesson from Diem is that regulatory fit is not something you add later. It’s a product constraint from day one. Even with all the technical robustness in the world, if your product doesn’t align with how regulators conceptualise risk and monetary sovereignty, it won’t work. And if policymakers can’t explain your product in one clear sentence to their constituents, you don’t really have regulatory alignment.
Nicolas: Their constituents essentially want to know two things: does it create jobs, and does it improve purchasing power.
Kurt: Exactly. The Swiss regulator FINMA went remarkably deep on Diem. I remember discussions about the consensus algorithm—it was based on something called HotStuff, developed by a research team that eventually joined Facebook, built on Byzantine fault tolerance. FINMA wanted to understand: at what point is a transaction considered final, and what happens before that? They were concerned about the chain of claims. If this became systemic—and that was the immediate concern, given the existing user base—how do you manage that chain if something breaks? They got deep into the probability algorithms around transaction finality. It was serious, rigorous work.
Nicolas: That’s the challenge with payments systems generally—they must be universal and large-scale, but also essentially faultless. You need absolute certainty that the money goes where it’s supposed to go.
“Keeping a secret means not telling it. And that’s the essence of zero-knowledge proofs.”
Marieke: After Diem, you moved to Mina Foundation to work on zero-knowledge proofs. Can you explain what that is, and why it matters—assuming no prior knowledge?
Kurt: The core realisation is this: compliance data is everywhere. Countless counterparties ask for the same documents, and every intermediary stores identity or other personal information. That creates privacy risks and inefficiency.
There’s a joke I like: “I can keep a secret—can you?” The point is that keeping a secret means not telling it. And that’s the essence of zero-knowledge proofs. You don’t share your data, but you can still prove that something based on it is true.
I’m not a mathematician, but the explanation that made most sense to me uses a physical metaphor. Imagine a mountain with two entrances. Inside, there’s a complex network of paths—most lead to dead ends, but one connects both entrances. I want to prove to you, Nicolas, that I know the path without telling you what it is. So I walk through once and emerge. You might think I got lucky. But if I do it a hundred times, you become essentially certain I know the path—even though I’ve never shown it to you.
That’s zero-knowledge proof. You can prove you know something without revealing the knowledge itself. The applications are significant: proving you’re above a certain age, or that you don’t come from a restricted jurisdiction, without disclosing your passport. Proving in a vote that you’re a valid constituent without revealing your identity. The reason it hasn’t been more widely adopted, I suspect, is that we haven’t yet had a crisis large enough to force it. Every time I speak at a conference and ask people to raise their hand if their data has been exposed in a breach, every hand goes up. But it hasn’t yet become acute enough to drive mass adoption. That may change—particularly as AI moves from chatbots into devices all around us, capturing vast amounts of data.
Nicolas: Tell us more about Mina itself.
Kurt: It follows the classic foundation-plus-labs structure that became common in crypto. The protocol—Mina—was incubated by a company called o1Labs in San Francisco. The co-founders, Izzy Meckler and Evan Shapiro, along with one of their first engineers, Brandon Case, built something quite remarkable. They realized they could represent the entire state of a blockchain in a single recursive proof of less than 22 kilobytes. Their marketing team came up with “the world’s lightest blockchain,” which was brilliant. It took the world by storm.
The deeper innovation was making that proof programmable—enabling applications to generate proofs from private off-chain data, so that data is never exposed on-chain but gets encapsulated in this infinitely recursive proof structure. That was a genuine breakthrough.
The structure—a foundation overseeing the ecosystem and treasury, with a separate labs entity doing the technical development—was pioneered by the Ethereum Foundation and became the standard model. Polkadot had Web3 Foundation and Parity; Zcash had the Electric Coin Company. The idea was to ensure genuine decentralization and allow ecosystems to grow without centralizing around a single entity.
Marieke: Having operated both types of structure myself, I found the foundation model genuinely difficult. It’s almost like running a publicly listed company but without any of the governance or guardrails. Roles become extremely unclear, and real decentralisation is very hard to achieve in practice.
Kurt: Structurally, it’s not the right way to set things up. You need people in the same room, driven by the same goals, rather than a decentralized group with different agendas. To get a product to market, to iterate, to communicate quickly—it’s very hard when a critical engineer is on the West Coast, another person is in Asia, and the product manager is in Europe. I haven’t seen a single project you could hold up as a textbook success with that structure.
Nicolas: So what you’re both saying is that the foundation model made sense when the concept of crypto protocols was new and you needed to attract participants and grow an ecosystem. But now there’s enough common understanding and sufficient interest across the world that the model may no longer be necessary?
Kurt: At a high level, the foundation is the governance structure and the lab is the product development engine. The question is how resources—typically raised through a token genesis event—get deployed. There’s now a strong move toward winding down foundations and transitioning to decentralized treasury structures. It’s part of the broader collective experiment we’re living through: trust in centralized institutions, whether governments, central banks, or media, is at a historic low and falling. What replaces it? Do decentralized systems actually work? How does decentralized governance function? These are live experiments.
Marieke: There’s an inherent tension there. You need centralization to get things done—to ship an MVP, to build a product. But decentralizing means giving up power, and in some crypto ecosystems it’s fair to say that’s very hard for core teams to actually do.
Kurt: Exactly. What’s the incentive? Even if there’s a genuine greater good at stake, unless your basic needs are met, you still need some incentive to keep working. That’s what these governance structures are trying to sort out. And there’s a broad spectrum—from pure memecoin casinos to projects like Mina with real utility underneath. The experiment continues.
Nicolas: Coming back to privacy: can you explain the difference between privacy and anonymity, and why it matters—particularly given how often people conflate the two, or assume that if something is private it must be dodgy?
Kurt: Anonymity means nobody knows who you are. There can be perfectly legitimate reasons for that. But privacy is different. Privacy means the right parties know what they need to know—and nothing more. That’s the concept of selective disclosure.
The way privacy typically works today is you hand over all your data to another party and trust them to keep it secure. Sadly, through usually no malicious intent on their part, it often isn’t. Bad actors want access to it and find ways in.
In a truly anonymous state, it’s hard to build trust without some form of verification. So the goal is to keep the perimeter of exposed data as small as possible—selective disclosure rather than full exposure.
Nicolas: I serve on the board of the digital arm of La Poste, the French postal service. La Poste is the organisation that knows where you live, because delivering mail is their core mission. I’ve been pushing an idea: during KYC [know your customer], why do you need to disclose your address at all? Couldn’t La Poste simply attest that they know where this person lives, without revealing the address itself? Is that the same concept?
Kurt: Exactly the same. Though it touches something that gets sensitive: at some point, there has to be a trusted source of the underlying data. Garbage in, garbage out —you have to trust someone somewhere. In your example, you’re trusting La Poste as the authoritative source. And you could go further: you could prove that the attestation came from a valid trusted source without even revealing that the source is La Poste.
Marieke: That example feels particularly resonant right now. The number of places where we’ve each deposited our physical address, our passport copy, our phone number—trusting that each institution will protect it—is enormous. And given the scale of cyber attacks and the current social climate, that trust is increasingly misplaced. Is the technology actually ready to address this?
Kurt: Not quite yet. There are interoperability issues between platforms, performance constraints, and other hurdles. But there’s also a broader economic problem: we’ve become accustomed to getting services for free in exchange for our data. People are uncomfortable with giving away their data, but they’re happy to get things for free. Nothing has yet emerged at scale where people are willing to pay for a privacy-preserving alternative. That economic shift has to happen first.
My apartment door is a good illustration. I was happy with the lock I had. Then someone tried to break in, and I got better locks. In retrospect, I should have done it sooner. I think it’s the same with digital privacy—people won’t act until something happens to them personally.
Nicolas: Who decided that a utility bill constitutes proof of address? Is there a law? A banking regulation?
Kurt: I’m not an expert, but from my experience it’s driven by the compliance industry and how they’ve developed frameworks to combat fraud and triangulate identity. It’s not always a utility bill—it can be voter registration or other documents. But it’s an industry convention more than a hard legal requirement.
Marieke: This connects to the unbanked. The way regulation has been defined, to open a bank account you need to prove both identity and a physical address. If you have neither, you’re excluded. Part of the crypto and blockchain movement has been to challenge that—could biometrics, for example, substitute for an address as proof of existence? Projects like WorldCoin are going down that path. But the flip side is that a biometric is a unique and permanent identifier. If that gets compromised, you lose your identity permanently, with no way to reset it.
Kurt: That’s exactly right. And it gets back to the question of which data really needs to be shared, and what the risks are if it’s exposed.
Marieke: You mentioned something called the “Internet of True Things”. Can you explain that concept?
Kurt: Intelligence is moving into all the smart devices around us. Your refrigerator will eventually know you’re out of milk and place an order. There’s an enormous amount of data being captured in the process. The Internet of True Things is the idea that we can rely on this data—verify things as true—without having all the underlying personal data exposed.
Something like Mina has real potential here, because it’s compact enough to run on small devices. Evan Shapiro, one of Mina’s founders, has since launched a project called UserNode, with his blockchain running on mobile devices. The vision is verified truth in the devices around us, with our data protected. Your device performs a transaction, proves it’s authorised, and executes your policy settings—without streaming your entire behavioural data set. Nobody needs to know how much milk you drink.
Nicolas: So about ten years ago we had the Internet of Things—all devices communicating freely, all data circulating and training systems to give us personalised experiences. And now we’re stepping back and saying: actually, free circulation of data is dangerous. We’d rather build a layer that enables authentication and communication without disclosing what’s in the device. And that’s now technically feasible?
Kurt: Technically, yes—but the middleware and application layers still need to be built to make it widely usable. Two years ago, some camera manufacturers like Leica were already integrating zero-knowledge proofs into images, so you could prove a photo hadn’t been digitally altered since capture. I’m not sure where that stands now in terms of wide adoption, but it’s extremely important as deep fakes become more prevalent.
