During the fifteenth anniversary of GoldRepublic, American investment strategist Peter Schiff spoke at Theater Amsterdam for an event titled The Future of Gold. The evening brought together economists and analysts to discuss the role of precious metals in the current financial system.
Schiff shared the stage with Jim Rickards, Willem Middelkoop, and Edin Mujagić, immediately setting the tone with his familiar message: the U.S. dollar is under pressure, while gold is making a quiet comeback.
The Dollar Is Losing Its Shine #
Schiff is one of the world’s most famous gold advocates, renowned for predicting the 2008 financial crisis. At the same time, he is a vocal opponent of bitcoin.
According to Schiff, the U.S. national debt has now surged to over $38 trillion, while interest expenses have surpassed the defense budget for the first time.
Central banks are responding by buying gold en masse: over 1,300 tons in 2025, a new record.
“We are returning to the pre-1971 situation, when gold was the neutral world reserve. De-dollarization is no longer a theory, it is happening now.”
His message was clear: it’s not that gold is rising, but that the dollar is falling in value. The U.S. currency is slowly losing its status as the global reserve currency, as countries and central banks prepare for a new financial era in which confidence in fiat money is waning.
Why the Dollar Is Losing Ground to Gold #
Schiff points out that the United States structurally spends more money than it brings in. The government pays off old debts with newly borrowed money. At the same time, the central bank further erodes the dollar’s value by printing extra money.
In this climate, he argues, it is logical for countries and investors to return to gold: a tangible form of value that cannot be altered by policy or software.
According to him, the end of the dollar’s dominance is approaching. In this new era, gold could take over the role of the primary reserve asset as central banks rebalance their holdings.
The Birth of Value: Gold as Digital Ownership #
During the event, GoldRepublic presented the art piece The Birth of Value: a unique 24-karat gold object weighing 12.2 kilograms, cast from a single piece. It represents gold that is actually stored in GoldRepublic’s secure vault in Amsterdam.
What makes this project special is that every piece of the gold is digitally recorded on the blockchain. This is the technology behind most cryptocurrencies: a decentralized system where transactions are permanently stored.
This allows buyers to purchase a fraction of the artwork and thus also own a part of the underlying gold. The project is an example of so-called Real World Assets (RWA): real, physical assets that are converted into digital ownership rights.
In this case, it involves gold in a vault, which is divided into digital parts recorded on the blockchain and audited annually by independent accountants. This allows anyone to directly own a small piece of the underlying gold, without a bank or paper certificate.