Designing an Internet Gold Investment System: Architecture, Business Processes, and Database Schema

The article begins by introducing gold as a chemical element (Au) and a valuable commodity with safety, liquidity, and profitability, making it a popular investment asset.

It then identifies the four essential participants in an internet gold trading system: users, internet platforms, gold exchange members (banks), and the Shanghai Gold Exchange.

Based on these participants, the author defines the core functional requirements: account opening, buying gold, selling gold, withdrawing gold, and gifting gold.

The "three‑horse‑carriage" of the system is described: a transaction service handling buy/sell/withdraw/gift logic, an account service recording multi‑dimensional asset holdings, and a gateway service connecting internal modules with external bank interfaces.

System architecture diagrams illustrate how the transaction, account, and gateway services interact with a backend middle‑platform (caching, payment, card center) and external financial institutions.

Business flowcharts detail each operation: buying gold converts user funds to weight (amount = payment / price), selling gold converts weight back to cash (cash = weight * price), withdrawing gold converts weight to physical gold, and gifting gold transfers weight from a marketing account to user accounts.

The article emphasizes the importance of stable gold price feeds from the exchange or external sources to ensure accurate conversions.

Database design is then presented, listing tables for buy orders, sell orders, withdraw orders, gift orders, reconciliation, user‑pin weight, gold‑account weight, and various dimension tables, each identified by a UUID primary key.

Finally, the author concludes that with the architecture diagram, process flow, and database schema in place, the remaining work is to implement the code, highlighting that the core of any internet financial system is capturing the fundamental conversion between money and asset weight.