1. What is to prevent hacking?
This is a system that uses strong financial cryptography, developed by Ian Grigg.
http://systemics.com http://financialcryptography.com
The software resides on the Android phone/tablet, which is not vulnerable to the same type of attacks you see in web browsers. The main weakness is if someone steals the phone physically, they can attempt to brute force your password. However, this is always a risk. You cannot eliminate risk, you just minimize and mitigate them. People use Bank of America online banking even though it has crappy security. Our product has excellent security. But nobody has perfect security, in this life.
2. What is to prevent the platform owner from closing up shop, leaving the country, and taking all the gold with them?
The gold is entirely held by the bullion dealers. I suppose that any bullion dealer at any time could just take the day's orders and walk away without fulfilling them. But the bullion dealer is in business to sell bullion, and would be giving up all future profit by doing that. The same incentives would apply. I assume you probably use a mail order bullion dealer now. Why do you trust the dealer to fulfill your order when you wire the funds up front? Because he has to have a high reputation in order to be a bullion dealer.
If a bullion dealer did default, this is why there would be a 10% bond for all Issuers. If they default, the bond fund would be used to make the account holders whole. It would be a form of insurance against the risk of default by one dealer/issuer.
3. What is to prevent the local government from wanting a piece of the action though regulation and/or taxation?
All local governments do this. There is no way around it. However, bullion dealers manage to make a living today in spite of local government. They will continue to do so in the future.
One example is in America, many mail order bullion dealers do not sell bullion to people in their own state. This enables their customers to avoid punitive sales taxes. This system is merely digitizing what people are already doing.
Our project is NOT incorporated in Kenya. We are simply using Kenya as a test market, where the regulatory barriers are low. It's a great place to find the weaknesses in the system and strengthen or fix them.