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Tuesday | TezDay w Ben Elvidge - Uranium.io
Recorded: Sept. 9, 2025 Duration: 1:03:06Space Recording
Short Summary
Uranium.io is revolutionizing the commodities market with the launch of XU308, a tokenized uranium asset, backed by real-world storage and partnerships with major DeFi players. The project aims to create a transparent trading environment, attracting significant institutional interest and paving the way for future innovations in tokenized commodities.
Full Transcription
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Tuesday Tez Day.
We've got a good one today.
Ben Elvidge is joining us for a conversation about real-world uranium,
digital custody, and how it all connects back to Tezos through Etherlink.
If you've seen talk of XU308 floating around here, or heard the words tokenized uranium,
and thought, wait, what? You're not alone.
Ben's here to unpack what uranium.io is actually doing, how it works, and why this isn't just some
hypothetical concept. We're talking about verified on-chain exposure to a real asset
that also happens to be nuclear fuel. It's one of the more ambitious RWA experiments in crypto right now. And it's happening here.
This month's art article spotlight is live,
featuring five artists nominated by the community through the hashtag TezArticle tag.
August's picks include Bitlyonair,
Benjamin Bardu,
LMDesigns8, Sahar Rahimi, and Brooklyn.
Each one bringing something different to the table,
from pixel minimalism to AR-layered healing art.
If you haven't checked it out yet,
it's a solid reminder of just how wide the creative range is on Tezos
and if there's someone whose work you love use the hashtag Tez article tag when you share it
that's how next month's featured artists get chosen the article is live over at news.tezoscomments.org
August felt like the kind of month
where everything started clicking across the board.
Big DeFi names like Curve and Gearbox
showed up on Etherlink.
New games like Sugar Match, Appleville, and Pikes Arena
brought energy on mobile and desktop.
And under the hood, ShadowNet went live
as a new production-grade testnet.
The latest month-at-a-glance post from Kryptonio runs through it all,
including updates on sole governance, Temple Wallet 2.0,
and even institutional news like HexTrust's support for uranium.io.
It's one of the best ways to catch up fast.
You'll find it over at news.tezoscommons.org.
If you want to stay on top of Tezos without chasing updates all week, the Baking Sheet has you covered.
It's a weekly email that rounds up the biggest project news and community updates.
No noise, just what matters.
You can sign up at bakingsheet.tezoscommons.org.
Quick reminder about the Tezos Community Rewards Program
and how to make sure your nominations count.
There are two ways to nominate someone.
First, go to tezoscommons.org slash rewards and fill out the short form.
Second, you can nominate directly on social media. Just make sure
to use hashtag Tezos CRP. That's
the only tag we track. If you use just hashtag CRP
that it won't count. Now, if you're tagging someone's post, that's
fine, but the post shows what they did. But if
you're making your own post, like
a list of names, please
include a short note about what
each person did. That kind of context
will add more weight to your nomination.
So again, use
the form on the site or tag
hashtag TezosCRP
with a category and a reason.
That's how we make sure people get
recognized for actual contributions, not just popularity.
All right, well, let's bring in our guest.
Ben Elvidge is here to talk about uranium.io,
and he's been pushing one of the boldest use cases
we've seen on Etherlink so far,
tokenizing physical uranium
and making it accessible on chain we've got a lot to
get into from regulation and custody to why why it was picked in the first place so ben
thank you for being here let's start at the beginning how did you how did you go from uranium in the ground to uranium on chain
well firstly thank you for having me it's great to be here with everyone um a few of you know me
obviously kryptonio knows me we're on a panel together at tesdev um so yeah i've been becoming
vastly getting up quickly getting up to speed with with uranium and
all things nuclear, including attending the World Nuclear Symposium, which is the big
annual nuclear gathering here in London last week where we had a booth, which was amazing.
So how did I get involved?
So my background is really in sort of traditional finance.
Don't all boo and hiss at once.
But I did a decent stint at morgan
stanley um before that was a management consultant for my sins um and then left morgan stanley to
join a fintech and that was doing ai so that was using ai for investment signals before ai became
all about llms um and then sort of that business pivoted geographically to focus on India. I didn't
want to move my family there. And the folks at Trillitech, I worked with a couple of them
previously. And they got in touch and said, well, we've been doing this thinking about uranium,
we've done the hard yards in terms of the legal structure and how we think it can work.
We've got some great partners in Archex, Curzon Uranium can you come in and just build it and make
it happen someone thought somewhere along the line that I could do that and so that was basically it
in April last year I kind of took the gig and started as a consultant and then joined Trillitech
full-time because we launched a product in December and was was so excited by it. I kind of figured out a way to stay on and full-time push it forward.
And it's been a pretty wild ride for the last 18 months in terms of getting up to speed,
facing into some of the challenges, which I'm sure we'll get into,
you know, emphasizing how we are, like our friends that are now at Uranium Digital
that have previously tried this
and it isn't hugely volatile because it's on blockchain rails. So lots of interesting
dynamics. I've learned a lot. The Tesla's ecosystem has been very kind to me thus far.
Hopefully I've given some stuff back and we've done some cool things. But yeah, really delighted
to be here and excited to keep telling everyone about what we're doing at uranium.io.
I think we're entering a really exciting phase.
So what do you think was the hardest part of really turning that idea into something real?
Yeah, I think it's weird, right?
It's weird, right?
Because, well, I suppose it's not weird.
Because I suppose it's not weird.
It may be entirely logical.
It's maybe entirely logical.
But we continue not just within Web3, but across the board in society,
talking about technological evolution and more automation
and how we can better use technology.
But the biggest challenge actually is more the people side of things.
So how do you take an industry that's traded the same way
and an asset that's been traded the same way
for the last 50 years or so,
very paper-based, relationship-based
on which brokers you know,
who you have your relationships with
and they all move between each other.
And that's cool because we all know each other.
So we're quite happy with 14-day settlement cycles, right?
So we can agree a trade
today and that will settle in you know what is that the 14th and then the the 21st of september
i'll actually get the physical uranium in my account that combined with you know it trades
in minimum lot sizes of of a hundred thousand pounds in in weight um which is about 7.6 million dollars at current the current price
i mean who doesn't have a few millions right lying around yeah of course right you know
i've got that under the sofa um so you know that kind of stuff made it really interesting and i
think the timing just sort of is perfect in that, as you are seeing,
you know, I don't know if people could see the future, but with the US administration that came
in, obviously, the focus is on is on energy security, and nuclear is a big part of that.
And that's the same trend that we're seeing globally in terms of, you know, nuclear being
seen as the means of meeting all of society's
energy demands, whether that's AI and data centers that need to be on 24 seven, or whether
that's kind of decarbonization agendas from governments, or even just energy security in
the case of the US administration, and wanting to be more protectionist. So, you know, the hardest
bits were really the sort of people
side of things. And that covered two things. One, getting people to understand what we were doing
and get on board with what we were doing and be willing to support something that trades 24-7
globally near real time, but is really anchored in the real world asset, but also the explaining piece,
even to our friends at centralized exchanges
and things like that.
We obviously had a great time in July
with the three listings,
but that was a long journey explaining
what we were doing and why it was different
and why it wasn't anything too risky
just because it happened to be uranium.
Now, for folks who are just hearing about XU308, the uranium token, what is it?
How should someone think about it if they're used to standard crypto tokens?
Yeah, it's a great place to start as well.
art as well so xu308 is the token uranium.io is our website and actually platform which is the
So XU308 is the token.
first blockchain based marketplace where you can trade with no minimum lot sizes physical uranium
and we describe it in that way because what xu308 is is essentially you should think of it like a
a warehouse receipt in traditional commodities
trading. It's your receipt or a beneficial ownership to the physical uranium. So what it
represents is right now an ounce. So each token's an ounce. So if you own 10XU308, you own 10 ounce,
you have beneficial ownership of 10 ounces of physical uranium
that's securely stored in one of the three storage facilities
where you can store physical uranium.
And why that's really important is for two reasons.
Because one, the other alternatives that are on the market right now,
again, you can enter the physical market if you want to go through
the operational burden to open a storage account. It takes you can enter the physical market if you want to go through the operational burden
to open a storage account.
It takes about four to six months
because you've got to do all the non-proliferation checks.
And then you've got to have a cool $7 million or so
to actually purchase the physical uranium.
Or you can invest in one of these closed-ended investment trusts
like Sprott, which is listed in Toronto
and on the New York Stock Exchange as well.
But they often trade at a discount and don't do a fantastic job of tracking the uranium.
So we think it's a better, more efficient way of, if you're a financial investor,
as most listeners to this, I'm sure, are looking at it from the financial perspective,
as opposed to taking physical delivery.
Just speculation on my part.
It's a much better and more efficient way of doing that and
it's globally accessible as long as you're not sat in iran or any other sanctioned country
um but then secondly what's really important is i mentioned before the market's super opaque
it's only traded over the counter or otc um there's no real fair pricing for it that's published
as a price feed or a couple of price feeds that publish once a day.
But that's sort of done on voluntary disclosure.
So what my ultimate vision is, and I've been refining this thinking and being more vocal about this,
is that actually, like we're seeing in other markets, whether that's equities, bonds, money market funds,
tokenization is the next frontier of that market infrastructure.
For me in the uranium market right now, and I see it being applicable to other commodities markets
that share similar characteristics, this is an opportunity to leapfrog and get to the end point
using tokenization as the market infrastructure. And so XU308 can be the primary mechanism for trading uranium in the spot market.
And actually, you know, that's a very bold claim.
But as I said, we've spent the last three days kind of Wednesday through Friday last week at the World Nuclear Symposium,
where we actually had miners, producers, financial investors, other people in the nuclear supply
chain saying, actually, this is something that we could use to hedge our risk to sort
of could we ask, could they tokenize their existing inventory of uranium that surplus
because they might not have 100,000 pounds, but 10,000 pounds in weight of uranium.
And actually, if we tokenize it, we can realize some of that capital through the secondary market.
So I think that vision is absolutely possible.
We just need patience to get there.
All right, we'll dive into the World Nuclear Association here in a minute, I promise.
Now, what do people usually get wrong when they first
hear about uh tokenized uranium um i mean it's a long list uh people are getting better because i
think we're being more vocal about it um firstly um it's not a security so there's no, the structure in the way we built this is using actually common law in England, which is about two, 300 years old and trust frameworks.
And so basically the physical uranium is held in trust for the benefit of the owners of XU308 tokens, who are the beneficial owners of the trust.
of the owners of XU308 tokens who are the beneficial owners of the trust.
And so what that means in practice is you are insolvency remote from us.
We hope they would never come to that, of course, but also from our partners and everything else,
because your assets are held in trust.
So you and you've got your XU308 and that's a claim on those assets, regardless of what happens.
And so worst case scenario those
assets could be sold in the market and you would get your cash back which I think is really
important but it also means when it comes to how do we fit into this regulatory framework
that's evolving in the US with the Genius Act and hopefully clarity coming down the pipe both literally and figuratively in terms of
clarity i.e the clarity act um but as well as what we're seeing in europe with me car and i'm sure
asia will follow with with sort of more joined up regulation as well is we spend a lot of time
emphasizing that this isn't a security it isn't some sort of meme coin or sort of asset reference token. This is actually just
spot commodity trading. And just because we happen to have used what we consider to be better
infrastructure and technology to deliver this on and make this tradable, doesn't fundamentally
change that activity. And so that's the first thing I think people get wrong. I think the second thing people get wrong, not unreasonably,
is how is this different from previous attempts at tokenized uranium
where it was actually something that was a forward sales agreement
and actually turned out to be a bit of a rug pulling and capital raise.
And so that's why we're very transparent about our
proof of reserves we put the statement on there every month things like that and then the third
thing that's kind of linked to that is is really that and it goes back to the first point to a
certain extent which is this is this is commodities trading more so than sort of crypto or any other
digital asset and it really is about right now we spend a lot of time
making sure that we're accurately tracking the price as much as you can in the spot market and
it what that means you're not going to get huge spikes in in the price even if we see demand
hitting the levels that it hit when we first listed on the three centralized exchanges because it stays in line with the iranian price as it stands right now now hopefully we start to
get to sort of tens tens of millions of dollars of turnover and then we can arguably say well we
don't need to worry too much about staying pegged because we've got enough volume that we can be the
market um and secondly fundamentally the nature of the asset doesn't change from what
it is right now. And that's an asset that has performed of the five years up until the end of
July, it came up a bit in August, outperformed the S&P 500. This is obviously not financial advice,
by the way. Outperforming S&P 500 is uncorrelated to every major asset class,
outperforming S&P 500 is uncorrelated to every major asset class
and has the same sort of volatility as the S&P 500.
And so just because we, again, happen to have made it tradable
and investable on Etherlink, i.e. blockchain infrastructure,
that doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the asset.
And we've spent a lot of time with centralized exchanges going through that.
That tide is starting to turn now, and we've spent a lot of time with centralized exchanges going through that that tide is starting to turn now and we've got some exciting hopefully in the next month we're
a little bit delayed from where i would like to be but some exciting news in terms of being able
to add more utility to xu308 so people will be able to borrow against it which i think is going
to be a real game changer for that core audience in the kind of folks that are listening to this call
and within the wider Web3 sort of community.
Ben, you touched on the centralized exchanges listings, which was great.
You had three big main exchanges listed at Tokyo.
My first question was, how did that go?
Did you see a lot of interest from people,
maybe users from those exchanges or anything?
Was there volume?
Or how did it go from the launch till now?
And secondly, which is unrelated to the first question,
is that you also had recently a big report released
from various investors with a lot of data in there.
And I was wondering, like, what's the bullish case for uranium,
if I may say so, as an asset, you know,
because I think there have been many arguments around uranium
on why its demand might increase.
So, yeah, sorry that I hit you with two questions at once, but I didn't want to forget.
That's all right. I appreciate it.
So let's start with how it's gone.
Firstly, massive kudos to the team that's worked on this.
It's not just me, but the wider team that we pulled off, you know, exchange listings on three out of the top 10 sort of biggest exchanges globally and did that all in one hit.
You know, I was pretty bleary eyed. I was in New York at that time, so I didn't get any sleep and was sort of 4 a.m. when we went live.
But to do three in parallel without any hitches and that went off without a hitch and we did you know one over a million
dollars in trading volume in that first day we had a very good run as sort of all the marketing
campaigns and the airdrops kicked in that then fell away quite substantially after about the
first three weeks but then we got a nice bump yesterday um again because the price is and you
know not surprising the price moved quite nicely following
lots of positive announcements and lots of bullish sentiment at the at the symposium that we were at
last week um where most of the contracting happened so there was positive sentiment there and that's
what moves the market seemingly it's quite similar every september apparently and And so we did about $370,000 in 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.
That's come off again slightly. But we're doing high tens of thousands of dollars a day on average,
I would say. In fact, our average, we're still picking up some of that tail. But we want to see
more in that. And actually, rather than volume, what we look at is net buying activity, because we want more and more people to be buying and holding this. And that number can continue to improve in our minds. We've got big ambitions. We want this to be, as I said before, the mechanism for trading spot uranium to do that, to enable that we really have to have those volumes
coming through um as well as increasing the tvl um and and to sort of do that because it's relevant
and this goes to your second question kryptonio is sort of you know because we want to do that
and it appeals to so many different cohorts we've got to think about how we can package it up in
various different ways so
you know the additional utility in terms of being able to use it as collateral within other
protocols and projects within etherlink is going to be a big one i think for the sort of more web
three native i wouldn't quite go as far as dgens i'm not sure this asset sits with with the dgens
per se it's not doing thousands of percent return, but it is, you know.
It doesn't have enough volatility, I think.
Yeah, I mean, the volatility runs at about 23.5% annualized volatility.
So it's not got that similar characteristic.
But, you know, if you believe the doom mongers out there in the wider X communities that we're hitting on that four-year cycle around Bitcoin
and what that means for altcoins, we'll probably see a bit of a spike and then that fall away.
Actually having something that's uncorrelated and not driven by the wider Web3 and crypto
sentiment is probably not a bad thing for people to have in their portfolio, I would say,
just from a portfolio construction theory perspective. Again, not financial advice,
but I think that is just an objective fact because it is totally uncorrelated.
And sort of going on to the asset fundamentals, which was your second question there.
I think we did do the report and would encourage everyone to look at it.
You can get to it from uranium.io. It's the fuel the fuel the future report it's not a name that i'll have much
say in but i think it works quite nicely and we surveyed primary research we went out to 600
institutional and retail investors um to actually get their view obviously on tokenized uranium but more tokenized assets more generally
as well as um you know uh tokenized commodities more specifically i think what was really interesting is the view on uranium is is is bullish to unprecedented levels and again that
came out of the symposium last week in terms of there's never been more
institutional capital looking at how they can allocate to nuclear. And uranium is a big part
of that. And so from a fundamentals perspective, you know, if you look at our report, 97% of
institutional investors said they're considering allocating to uranium, 60% of institutional investors said they're considering allocating to uranium. 60% of
institutional investors say they'd do that in the next 12 months if access was made simpler.
And so that gives us a good imperative to work with other partners in the wider ecosystem. And
we are doing this. How do we almost, you know, take what we believe is the most advanced set of
market infrastructure for an asset to trade it on
a spot basis, but recognize that those institutional clients and firms operate in regulation that's not
yet caught up to that, it's getting there. And how do we then retrofit products and wrap products
around that to enable hedge funds, family offices and other asset managers to access the asset.
I think that's going to be a big driver in terms of the broad fundamentals.
Like all commodities, it's really a supply and demand game.
And what you want to see is lots of demand and somewhat constrained supply.
Uranium meets that, you know, is potentially hitting a bit of a pinch point in that regard. So if you look at the
World Nuclear Association's latest report, which came out last Friday, there's about 90% coverage
for the 2024 for the needs of the fleet of nuclear reactors globally, as at 2024. What that doesn't
account for is the fact that all of the new reactors in the US that
are being restarted or having their life extended or, you know, take Constellation restarting Three
Mile Island in Pennsylvania with Microsoft, take the investments that Meta and Google are making
in small modular reactors, take the fact that China have greenlit 10 new nuclear reactors,
modular reactors. Take the fact that China have greenlit 10 new nuclear reactors, India
have greenlit three new nuclear reactors. So that demand is not slowing down anytime
soon, and nor will it because of those wider trends I talked about before, right? Whether
that's, you look at it as a nation state from a energy security, energy, baseload energy
delivery perspective, nuclear meets those needs but at the
same time if you're more of a european government as we're seeing with germany it can deliver that
but also deliver on your decarbonization targets because when fully operational it is one of the
cleanest forms of energy in terms of carbon emissions, but doesn't have the intermittent problems that we saw earlier
this year that you see in solar or you see in wind. And so you can have the best of both worlds,
you've just got to be willing to commit to a, you know, China have got reactor builds down to five
years and very quickly. It's more like seven to 10 years in European nations in the US as it stands right now, and hence why
we're seeing lots of extension. What that means is we need more uranium production because
certainly the technology has improved around small modular reactors and advanced reactors,
but certainly not around new forms of nuclear energy production. So uranium will still be the base material for that.
So we expect, and the whole industry expects, that there's going to be quite a significant,
still going to be for the next 15 years, a significant shortfall of uranium supply to
the demand.
And therefore, you know, what typical macroeconomic theory dictates that
you probably should be quite bullish.
We've all seen those charts, right, with the straight lines that go up and to the right
in terms of supply and demand curves.
So from that sense, the macro thesis is bullish.
The institutional sentiment is very bullish.
The retail sentiment, I i think is bullish i think
we just got to keep doing our job in terms of marketing and saying they are not aware
a lot as well right the retail most of the retail is not aware probably
no because why would you be right because you don't have this million dollars to invest in it or you
you may be aware of it if you're in north america because
you've got things like the sprot uranium trust which has got about five and a half billion dollars
of assets so some people are aware of it clearly that's predominantly a retail vehicle um but yeah
if you're not aware of it and you're not aware the benefits that can give you why would you even
consider investing in it so we have to create quite a lot of noise and
a lot of my budget this year has been spent on marketing and creating that noise and commissioning
the report that we've done to say to people look this is something that you should seriously
consider if you're looking at gold and other commodities to diversify your portfolio why not
think about uranium uranium now a project like this could have launched anywhere why etherlink what is it
about etherlink and tesos that made it the right home for something like this
so for full disclosure let's do the full disclosure part right this as i said i joined in april last
year um a lot of thinking about 18 months worth to two years of thinking
had gone into this, really driven by the fact that Arthur wanted
to trade uranium, couldn't, and then had an idea of,
well, could this be something that would make sense to tokenize
and how would we deliver it?
So that was really the genesis of the idea.
I think Etherlink coming online has made that
possible. And from my perspective, bear in mind, I'm still new to the Tesla's ecosystem.
You know, April last year is nothing compared to what I would guess is most people's tenure
on this space right now. But for me, if i put my sort of consulting trad fi hat on
what you want is to launch a product on a platform that is secure that is scalable that is
robust from a uptime perspective and that is that is cheap to do right what you want to do is be
able to keep that
cheap as possible either for if I think really in tradified terms for one of two reasons either
so you can pass that saving on to your client if you're somewhat thinking about that but more often
not keep a margin and so you know I think we're all familiar with the Etherlink motto and I think
for that reason it ticks all of those boxes um i think the evm
compatibility is is not is has been neat in terms of being able to let people connect with their
evm compatible wallets but you know i think um it was it was less there wasn't much of a choice
architecture but certainly as i looked at my options of things that I could be doing last year, if we didn't believe that this was a credible platform to launch on and something that could make a big difference through the technology stack, I'm not sure I'd be sat here talking to you now.
So I didn't have much of a say on it being launched on Etherlink, but I absolutely think we've benefited from it being on Etherlink.
Now, this isn't just tokenized uranium in name.
It is real.
How do you prove that?
What does the real world side of the process look like?
It's been painful.
If I'm being honest, I think back to this time last year
where we were going backwards and forwards with Cameco, who is of the three storage providers so just to touch on that you can only store
physical uranium at one of three with one of three companies so cameco in who are based in canada
combidine who are based in the us and irana who are based in france there are storage facilities
in china of course and in russia but generally most of the Western uranium and nuclear world.
Russia, obviously, from a sanctions perspective, but CNCC or CNNC do a lot of their own stuff and keep that quite close.
So in terms of free and accessible, it's those three. And so we went with Cameco, who are the biggest of the three.
of all it's those three and so we went with Cameco who are the biggest of the three and that process
took six months to get sort of back and forth get them comfortable ensure that our FCA regulated
partner in Archex who's the trustee for the physical uranium could meet all of their requirements that
you know even just going back on the legal agreement took sort of two months.
And that was just on the legal agreement agreed all the principles behind that.
So lawyers together, I'm sure, could argue with themselves in a closed room.
But that's a different conversation.
So in terms of the real, this is very real.
And we were able to do this because, again, we've been incubated within the Tezos ecosystem and within Trulitech.
And so we actually purchased through a loan facility, which I'm sure the Tezos Foundation want back at some point.
But they're happy with us right now. So long may that continue.
So we purchased £100,000 of physical uranium, which is the minimum lot size.
And that's stored at Cameco. And what we do is every month we publish our proof
of reserve statement, which is the statement directly from Cameco that says, look, this has
got, I think it's like 33,000 kilograms of uranium, because kilograms in uranium is measured
slightly different to standard kilograms, but think of it as 100,,000. The industry talks in pounds when it comes to trading,
and yet the storage facilities do it in kilograms.
It's a whole thing.
But that's kind of how it doesn't get more real than this.
And what we're looking to do is, again, as volumes increase
and as we see more demand, many folks on this space
will be familiar with you know the
sort of oracle based proof of reserves type stuff is absolutely where we want to get to
but it's pretty expensive if you talk into a chain link or whoever else and so we're trying
to balance all of those things out and create the demand and use those dollars to focus on external
marketing and product market fit and product integration to make sure that works.
But I expect in the future, we'll be looking at other means to make it more sort of native
to being on chain in terms of proof of reserves and demonstrating that realness,
for want to be a better phrase.
So let's zoom out.
Do you see this project as a bridge between crypto
and energy markets or something bigger i i i don't think we're quite yet at energy markets because
they are so heavily regulated but i absolutely do see this project as providing a blueprint for
commodities kind of markets being traded on chain and the
right way to do it um so for me uranium there is and you know we've got two options at one point
that we need to decide which path we go down because of what we've built it gives us the
flexibility where either we look at because i do believe there's enough opportunity in the nuclear and uranium market that we could look at how do we move horizontally across that, supporting the financialization and increased financial participation in nuclear as a sector, whether that's looking at how do we support those in the mining and exploration
and production space, venture capital in specifically in that space to how do we look at
not just U308, which is the material that underpins this, but other more enriched versions
of uranium that are used directly in fuel fabrication and the like. So uranium value chain is potentially one option.
What's more interesting, I think,
and the bigger target addressable market
is probably looking at how we apply that blueprint
to other metals.
So all of those barriers to entry,
all of those challenges with the market infrastructure
that I was talking about,
uranium is equally applicable to other metals and materials like lithium or, you know,
things like ferro-alloys that are used in most industrial production,
trade in very similar ways. There's no sort of centralized exchange for that kind of stuff.
trade in very similar ways. There's no sort of centralized exchange for that kind of stuff.
Actually, the bigger vision and the bolder vision, one may argue, is to say,
why don't we skip all of the traditional market development that every asset class has gone
through and just put all of this on chain and make it accessible to everyone? I absolutely think we've
got the experience and the blueprint now to be able to do that. And we're having conversations in lots of directions to support that. And it's not about then just the market infrastructure, right? But you get all the composability benefits of being on chain with great protocols within the Tezos and Etherlink ecosystem now around Curve or Gearbox or Superlend.
And I think that makes it really interesting.
And I think the final thing as to why commodities as a bucket is interesting to me
is because it's for folks like myself who've come from more of a TradFi background
and more of a, dare I say, or at least perceived more serious type of finance. I would disagree with
that, of course, but that's certainly how some of my former colleagues would describe it and have
described it to me. Actually proving it out with real world assets is a great way to broaden that
adoption, which is not our primary focus right now is not bringing new people to the web three
industry. But I think at some point that has to be and if you
can just transact easier my ultimate vision is that this is just the rails and people talk about
it as a means of you know doing finance and trading commodities rather than thinking about
it as defy or or any any mention of blockchain or web three I think we're a ways from that, but that's ultimately where I'd like to get to.
Now, you guys recently joined the World Nuclear Association.
That's not something we see every day in crypto.
What was that process like, and what does it open it up for you?
Yeah, it's going to be a pretty similar theme i think
to most of my answers to these questions which is it was slow and it was thorough and diligent and
i think we probably all want that for people involved in material that can be made radioactive
and put into weapons um but even with the world nuclear association we had to be proposed by our
partners curzon who were already a member so they had to vouch for us we had to be proposed by our partners, Curzon, who are already a member. So they had to vouch for us. We had to go through a couple of interviews and vetting processes because we can now vote on the committees at the World Nuclear Association.
But but they approved it. They approved it.
And they and to me, that's a great endorsement of what we've done and the realness of what we've done, to use a sort of cliched phrase.
And why that was important more than anything
was because we wanted to validate and understand
and put that good product management sort of tendencies
into practice and get out there into a captive audience
of people with vested interests in nuclear in uranium
by being at the world nuclear symposium which only happens once a year is the gathering where most
activity happens in the uranium market most of the term contracting if you believe it anecdotally
happens at that three-day conference um and so being there gave us an opportunity to really test the water around x you 308. And we
had a stand there. We were very much the most innovative in terms
of not being seen before. Obviously, when Rolls Royce
small modular reactors are opposite you in the conference
hall, it's quite hard to say we're the most technologically forward thinking. But, you know, we kind of certainly had a lot of
attention and a lot of questions. And that was really important because now we're doing it
through the lens of we aren't here to raise money for a crypto project. We aren't here to
line our pockets as sort of being involved in a crypto project there's no real intent to rug pull we we
want to seriously participate in this industry and change the way the market operates and i think
being a member validates that to a certain extent because they take membership seriously
um which is great but it also gives us access to a captive audience, as I said, of people that we can engage with.
You know, we got 40 leads that I'm still following up with now in various different sectors of people that were interested
that either have physical material that they could tokenize, want to use XU308 as a means of managing their inventory and risks,
XU308 as a means of managing their inventory and risks, you know, to essentially create a
synthetic forward contract by buying it when they feel the price is low, like now, and selling that
in the future when they have utility offtake agreements. So financial investors and hedge
funds that are like, really like the nuclear thesis, don't want the hassle of opening a storage
account, don't like the fact that opening a storage account, don't like
the fact that I can only get in and out in 100,000 pounds in weight clip sizes. This gives me an
option to do it and express that view more effectively. So I think it's really twofold.
One, it legitimizes the projects, as it should, because we are genuinely doing this for real.
And two, there's a distribution opportunity,
which is what I spend most of my time looking at at the moment,
is how do we get better distribution?
And so it met both of those objectives,
and we're really excited to be part,
and hopefully want to play an active role of being a key member
going forwards of the World Nuclear Association and its working groups.
Well, it definitely adds a lot of credibility to you and the whole project, right?
So I wanted to ask you, you touched earlier on the price of the uranium,
trading uranium, right?
That there wasn't any good indication of the price.
Now we have one price, for example, for the Uranium that is trading on-chain.
Are there any other indicators or any arbitrage opportunities that might be created now with the on-chain price mark
and some other price marks?
Are there any other price marks?
Is something like that possible you think so so there are there are other sort of price benchmarks or reference prices but they
there's two main ones that operate across the industry one from a company called numerco and
one from a company called trade tech the numerico um price is available via API. If you kind of speak to them, they
kind of give it out for free because they're also a trader and a broker within the industry.
So it's a kind of value add service from them. But that prints about every 20 minutes in
US and UK market hours. And then they publish out a kind of end-of-day fixed price
at the end of US market hours every day.
Same for trade tech.
They publish out a price every day.
That sounds so foreign for the crypto-used people, right?
Yeah.
So that's kind of what's used as the the kind of reference price when most
people are talking about the price of spot uranium and that's certainly what the sprouts and the
yellow cakes of the world the big closed under investment trust use to value their assets um so
that just answers that part of the question in terms of arbitrage opportunities i think we're a little way away from that because we're seeing, going back to the earlier questions, right?
We've not seen enough volume yet, I would say, to say that we can completely ignore the reference price of the market because we want to keep it credible because it is physical uranium fundamentally.
So it's incumbent upon us to keep it in line with that
and have a fair value for that, that the market recognizes.
If we sort of saw a big spike,
I don't think there's enough participants
to arbitrage that back to normal right now
is the short answer, I think.
But eventually we hope to get there, right?
Is that we see bigger institutional players
looking at any dislocation between XU308 and the physical market and being able to arbitrage that out.
That's the way markets should operate.
Right now, we're kind of operating a soft peg, I would say, to the underlying physical price because we want to ensure that we maintain that credibility in the first instance.
All right.
Well, let's talk about compliance and risk.
What kinds of safeguards or oversight are built into Uranium I.O.'s design?
Yeah.
So those who followed us closely know that when we first launched in December,
we started with sort of quite a hefty KYC piece up front.
That was because we were sprinting to get it done. And that was something that we felt was going to be necessary with
discussing with our UK partners and everything else that went
along with that in terms of our service providers. But what we
found in March was that we did some additional analysis just based on feedback and sort of user sentiment.
And actually, we found that the UK regulator had actually, the European regulator had approved a couple of projects that were sort of doing ex post KYC. So they didn't need to because they were using quite a similar
structure actually around, you know, the underlying assets being held in trust. You only need to KYC
the people putting assets into the trust or taking assets out of the trust, i.e. the physical
material. So those intermediary beneficial owners didn't need to be kyc'd up front from a regulatory perspective
that was a that gave us a really big opportunity to actually lean into the fact that we're on train
on chain and getting people to connect their wallets and things like that and so
now on uranium.io from a from an onboarding perspective you can be in if you've got usdc on etherlink and you connect your your wallet
you can be in and abort uranium i would say in less than five minutes and then what we do is
we've contracted an outsourced compliance partner i didn't know that was a thing until
until we started exploring this um so they they kind of are regulated and have sort of they do
all of the policy work and things like that.
And they screen every transaction that happens through a series of platforms.
And then they've got their proprietary algorithm that runs over the top.
And then if someone gets flagged, we may ask them to do KYC or we may just do further investigation.
That's been pretty limited in terms of the folks that we needed to KYC.
So that's from that side of the regulatory perspective.
In terms of other regulatory pieces, again, you know,
we do have a MECAR white paper because that was necessary for some of our
exchange listing. But actually we still firmly believe,
and it's all about that balance of pragmatism versus principles, right?
So principally we believe that this is not something that falls into the scope of meat car per se it's definitely
not a security and actually it is just spot commodity trading which in fact in most jurisdictions
is unregulated just because it happens to be on chain doesn't fundamentally change that
but we recognize that not just regulators,
but actually distribution partners aren't quite there yet. So we don't want to kind of throw the
baby out with the bathwater and hold up our distribution opportunities. If we've got three
exchanges sat there saying, well, actually, you need to bend to our will as a new project,
because we don't believe this is something that sits in the scope of Mecar.
We'll just get the Mecar white paper. And so from a regulatory perspective, it's actually quite light touch.
So we've got the Expo screening and analytics. It's spot commodity trading, we believe.
And that's why we're having conversations now. conversations. Now, we've got some traction and some market movement with neobanks and more
traditional investment platforms, looking at crypto more broadly, but maybe have quite a big
base of users that trade commodities, and saying, well, actually, you can dip your toe in the water
in the crypto or Web3 space, and have something that's familiar, or more familiar to your existing client base as trading commodities and list uranium um so that from from those two perspectives around x-u-308 and it's trading
i think that's well covered in the most important piece most people want to talk to me about
when it comes to uranium and i've had people come up to me and you know one of the first questions
i often get is well is it safe because we we don't want the Iranians getting access to uranium.
Firstly, a bit of a misnomer. I'm pretty sure they've got enough uranium.
But secondly, it goes back to that sort of regulatory piece around the three converters.
So when we talk about the fact that the way we've built this enables you to take physical delivery,
talk about the fact that the way we built this enables you to take physical delivery.
What that actually means is, is you need to have one of those storage accounts and have
spent the four to six months going through that onboarding process.
You have to comply with the, some of the most heavily regulated entities in the world in
any industry for non-proliferation reasons.
So you have to have been approved by them, have an account with them, and then give us that account number if you want to take physical delivery.
So actually, starting with uranium has been complex and much more complex than something like gold or silver.
But actually, from a regulatory burden perspective, you can actually benefit from some of those high hurdles when it comes to the physical delivery, which makes us more comfortable in the structure that we've built.
So let's say this all works.
Uranium IO scales, people get it.
Five years from now, what's changed?
Fundamentally, it's quite simple.
What's changed is there's a clear, transparent, efficient market or more efficient market, I should say.
I'm not sure any market is truly efficient for trading physical uranium that's enabled effective derivative products to be built.
And that's attracted the capital that has been sat on the sidelines, talking about how they could de-risk their investments in nuclear and uranium to enter the
space and do that through XU308. And that's funding more innovation around, you know,
venture capitalists and other innovators and other entrepreneurs to do more in the primary
mining space, because they can get a clear, they've got a clear market on which to sell those kind of extracted assets um so so fundamentally five years from now i truly believe that we could
getting the right traction be the primary mechanism for this trading in the spot for this for the
trading of spot uranium and then that will enable us to build all those good
derivatives products that we see in, you know, other commodity markets like oil,
and natural gas. So, you know, futures, primarily, I think is really interesting.
But without an accurate spot market, it's quite hard to build a futures product.
As anyone who's tried to launchps, I'm sure will know.
So that's and then that sort of, you know, the Iranian market starts to take its place amongst other more well-known commodities.
And like other commodities markets, if we get it right and we create that sort of more liquid market,
get it right and we create that sort of more liquid market it wouldn't surprise me if we
see the derivative versions of when derivative products be 2 3x the actual spot market i think
that was what success would look like in five years time now ben would it be all right if we
opened up the stage if anyone has any questions yeah of course all right perfect last 10 minutes
here's your opportunity if you have any questions throw those hands up we'll get you up on stage and have been address your comments
questions and concerns directly now uh ben if uranium io vanished tomorrow i know it's terrible
don't don't think about that but if it did what would you build next oh that's really that's a really hard question um I actually think one thing that really
interests me and it isn't despite banging on about commodities the whole time I've been here
um I actually think what's really interesting is is the next evolution of lending in the in
the crypto space and the whole concept of lombard lending really interests me
um i think building something in that space could be really interesting where you're actually not
doing it on a single asset basis but across a whole portfolio and giving more of that
high net worth experience that bridges both lending in fear or in um or in crypto. I think it solves a lot of problems. And again, from my wealth, you know,
engagement with TradFi wealth managers and asset managers, that securities base lending is
something that is huge in the TradFi world. And it's not something that's being made available to
most Web3 investors right now. And I think it's a big opportunity there's also some super innovative new things going on where there's other commodities
that no one's even ever thought about making a tradable market in the through tokenization could
be accessible like water and that could be something that's pretty amazing i think michael
burry said invest in water he said that a long time ago.
Yeah.
That's the big short guy, just if anyone was curious who Michael Burry was.
He made a bundle on a bunch of bad derivatives.
How does that world affect you?
How do you feel about all that, those derivatives?
They're supposed to be AAA, but they're like low C.
Yeah, no, I think, well, this is not quite a pair of trust, is it?
There's, what, 13 people on here?
Yeah, you're fine. I think we're probably in not too dissimilar situations
as I look at the private credit and the interlaping sort of relationships between private credit providers, private equity and that sort of house of cards like Bottle.
When everyone can mark their own homework, it feels quite samey.
So I was I was going through college kind of when the first finance when that financial crisis happened
um so it was a bit before my time but it feels very samey in terms of some of the core problems
around who who's validating the assets and that's for me why getting into the web 3 space and
tokenization is so interesting because in theory,
you should be able to negate a lot of those risks.
I love it.
To touch on that, because one of the goals, as we said, of the whole project is around accessibility, right?
It makes it accessible to retail investors, to everyday users, everyday people.
I wanted to ask, how does the onboarding flow look currently, like how it is right now?
And what's the plan there to make it even more efficient, even more seamless, you know, for a non-crypto person to get on and just buy uranium
yeah so so right now it as i talked about before there's you basically just can either sign up with
a with an with an email or google account or you can connect an evm compatible wallet
deposit usdc on etherlink into that wallet buy, and then you can buy physical uranium from uranium.io.
If you go to one of the exchanges, you can on ramp and buy it,
you know, the USDT pair from one of those exchanges.
So I think from that crowd,
we probably can't make it any more simple than it is.
I would argue it's pretty hard to be as simple as any more simple than that.
But there is,
if we want to create more transaction activity directly on Etherlink, because obviously we don't see those transactions flow through when they're on centralized exchanges because they're in omnibus wallets.
So ideally what we want is more people coming direct to uranium.io.
And so we're doing a couple of things to address that experience and make it even easier. So we've integrated, again, through having it within the Etherlink ecosystem, we've integrated Jumper or the Li-Fi bridge. So people can bridge
any assets into USDC and fund their account that way from any of the chain that's supported by
Jumper or the Li-Fi bridge. And then we are looking at integrating another on-ramp provider that potentially will give us the Stripe-like experience where you can just put in your credit card and buy XU308 directly.
And we think that that will help break down some of those barriers for the retail investors.
But you touched on a really important point that for me was a big part of me wanting to stay involved in this, not get involved because there was obviously I was a contractor and so having
work was nice. But to stay involved, one of the big things for me was,
was it sort of really ticked that passion box in terms of accessibility and
delivering on that promise of,
I think when big financial institutions that I was either working with or in
the case of when I was at Morgan Stanley were talking about blockchain you know 10 years ago 11 12 years ago it was really about how it
can improve things and break down barriers and make things more accessible for me this project
delivers on that sort of core primitive and primary use case of what blockchain can do or what blockchain technology can do. And so that remains a big, big driver for me.
And as I said before,
it's quite interesting how I'm having to retrofit traditional finance
structures like derivatives and swap frameworks around a token now because the
regulatory regimes haven't quite caught up.
regulatory regimes haven't quite caught up.
Now, Ben, if someone wants to learn more or get involved,
where should they get started?
Yeah, uranium.io, we looked out on being able to nab that domain.
So it's super simple for me to direct everyone towards.
That's the primary place I would encourage anyone to go and find out more detailed information you'll see our white paper on there you'll see our
proof of reserves on there you'll be able to get to the fuel the future report which i mentioned
um if you're kind of wanting to stay on x we've got a pretty active um x account so our handles uranium underscore io we we we manage that pretty actively um and then
we've got pages on on reddit as well um where there's more conversations going on um and we've
got a telegram channel but but i would say x and and our website directly are the two places that
i would direct people towards and is there anything you need help with right now that
the tesla's community could actually step into yeah look i think i think we're always looking
and i see kevin's listening in so we've had some good conversations there i think we're always open
to conversations around how how we can better collaborate and integrate across the ecosystem
because we we want to give those second order benefits.
So if the first order benefits are breaking down the barriers to access and getting more
people to participate, you keep them in the ecosystem by giving them more utilities and
things to do with that XU308 piece, with that XU308 token.
And so anyone that's listening that's got ideas,
I'm always going to be happy to listen to those
and encourage everyone, you know,
everyone that's an advocate for the ecosystem,
understanding and happy to make any time,
just get in touch with me.
I've got a Trulitech email address as well.
So sort of the more people that advocate
and kind of stole the virtues of what we've built
and what I think is a very cool project here with uranium.io out to the wider community, then I think that would be great as well.
Well, big thanks to Ben for joining us today and walking through how uranium.io is making tokenized uranium a reality, not just as an idea, but with real-world backing and real-world traction.
Tuesday, Tuesday happens every week at 8 p.m. UTC,
so if you liked this one, swing by next Tuesday
and catch the next conversation live.
That's it for episode 146.
Until next time, stay curious, stay connected, and we'll catch you next time.
Thanks for joining.
Take care, everybody.
Thanks very much. Thank you.
