Two, here I am.
All right, Andrew, and I see.
Good morning.
That your presentation is already up. You are ready to go. We will just wait another exactly 60 seconds until the top of the hour to stick to our schedule. So, Andrew, our sound and video and presentation check are finished. You can now mute your line, turn off your video for a moment, and then come back in about 45 seconds. Thank you very much. Welcome once again to RedChip's FinTech and Digital Asset Treasury Virtual Investor Conference. Our next company today is Blue Gold, ticker BGL on the NASDAQ. Presenting today is Andrew Cavaghan, CEO of Blue Gold. We will begin with Andrew's brief presentation in a moment, and then we're going to open this event, of course, to your questions. Your lines will be muted throughout the presentation, but you can always submit a question by pressing the Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom window.
Let's get the formality of the Safe Harbor Statement out of the way. This segment may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements pertaining to future financial and/or operating results, along with other statements about the future expectations, beliefs, goals, plans, or prospects expressed by management, constitute forward-looking statements. Any statements that are not historical facts should also be considered forward-looking statements. Of course, forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. Andrew, please go ahead.
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me here and this opportunity to meet with your investors. Thank you, RedChip. My name is Andrew Cavaghan. I'm the CEO of Blue Gold. We recently listed on the NASDAQ about six months ago, and we're a vertically integrated gold business. Started off physical gold mining and then have moved into the tokenization of gold and trying to make that gold useful to people so that you can use it as a form of money rather than just as a store of wealth. So that's what we're about. The business itself has three main different areas. So there's the physical mining and trading of gold, the tokenization of that gold onto the blockchain, and then the FinTech platform that enables you to spend that gold using credit card, debit card, as well as making direct settlements for payments that you have.
At the center of the offering is the Standard Gold Coin, which we successfully launched with our Genesis Mint in January this year. The Standard Gold Coin has been so named because we want to establish it as the Standard Gold Token, Gold Coin. It's a new area of development, the tokenization of real-world assets, and we'll come on to that, and gold in particular. But we think it's an area that's got potential for enormous fast growth, and that's the reason we're putting investment into it, and we've launched our own Standard Gold Coin. In terms of where we are as a business from an investment perspective, we've recently received coverage from Zacks Small-Cap Research, and their report is available on our website, as indeed this presentation is as well. They've given us a target of $20 a share. That's just on the digital side of the business.
With the mine, which I'll come on to later, that would add substantial additional value. So this is their analysis, which I'm repeating there. The things that are coming up that we're excited about, so we've launched the Standard Gold Coin. We are looking to list on a number of exchanges over the coming weeks. And on the mining side, I'm actually down here making the call from West Africa where our mining asset is and where we're in negotiations with the government to resolve the lease dispute that we have on the mining asset. In addition, we're looking at acquisitions of other mines, both in West Africa and in Latin America, all focused on precious metal, gold, and silver.
And then finally, on the trading side, so where we're buying and selling gold from third-party sources, identifying sources of gold with good provenance that we can buy at a discount to spot. And that generates another opportunity for profit. So in terms of, I think, what makes us interesting and special, we're the only company that I'm aware of that is operating in the vertical gold space from mine all the way through to wallet. So by investing with us and being part of our journey, you are able to participate in the mining, the trading, the tokenization, and ultimately the FinTech wallet. We think this presents a very interesting opportunity, a very attractive opportunity for investors that isn't currently out there in the market. We're going very long on gold.
We're very bullish on the role it will have to play both as a store of value, but also as a useful currency in the future. That's clearly the thing that we're promoting. A critical thing to be aware of with the tokenized gold is that all of the tokens that we issue are one-to-one backed by physical gold. It's allocated gold. For those of you familiar with the physical gold market, there's a big difference between paper gold, which is a theoretical entitlement to a homogeneous amount of gold, and then allocated physical gold. In our case, it's the latter. Your token has the actual bar number of gold, of the gold bar that you have a share of. If you've got one token, it's one gram. These are kilo bars, either 999% or 999.5%, both of which are certified good delivery bars.
Those are the bars that we are and will be backing each token with. The focus over the last six months has been very much on launching this new product and the FinTech that goes with it. Alongside that, there has been the continued engagement with the government of Ghana and the development of an acquisition pipeline. Both of those offer substantial upside potential beyond what we have priced into the stock at the minute. In order to deliver the gold, given that we're not producing ourselves at the minute, we've secured 1 million ounces of gold from a dedicated trading partner based in the UAE so that we can meet what we forecast to be the immediate demand for this token.
The other benefit of setting the business model up to have this vertical integration is it creates a diversified revenue stream, not just the physical mining, but also the trading income. And then there's the economics associated with the sale and the on-ramping of the tokens. And then every time they change hands, there's a very, very small fee that's earned. And then, of course, the FinTech revenue that comes from we're enabling financial services to be provided to the holders of the Standard Gold Coin. And that's where we see, long-term, probably one of the greatest sources of value for shareholders because of the way that FinTechs are valued compared to physical mining companies. My own backgrounds, I've been working in Sub-Saharan Africa within the large projects, so energy and mining space, for over 15 years.
Prior to that, I worked in private equity, trained as a lawyer in London. Over this last 15 years, I've raised and invested over $150 million into projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. We also have recently hired, as part of this extension into digital, a very experienced Chief Technology Officer who's built and sold three businesses successfully in the past, including being the CTO of Barstool Sports. I'll come on to the rest of the team later, just in terms of the highlights. The macro problem, I think our macro view, the US dollar, the pound, the yen, the euro, all of these currencies decline as inflation erodes value. We're all reliant on governments not printing too much of it. If we put our store of wealth into a fiat currency, we run the risk of it declining. In fact, that is what's happened.
So many people have shifted their wealth into other forms of inflation-proof investments, gold being one of them, being very popular as a hedge recently, given the run that everyone's seen on gold. The challenge with gold is it's a if you've actually got physical gold, you've got to store it somewhere, you've got to insure it, very difficult to transport. And there's a trust factor around, is this gold really what you're saying it is? And so the actual usefulness of gold is a challenge. But there's an enormous amount of it above ground. So there's an estimated $12 trillion worth of gold, but way less than 1% of that has actually been tokenized.
The tokenization opportunity, obviously, this is one of the themes that I'm sure you've been hearing from other presenters, and we'll hear from additional presenters today, particularly around stablecoins and real-world assets, is forecast to grow massively over the next five years. You can see the charts there that we've got. The stablecoins themselves, of course, rely in the kind of strict definition of the word, rely on being pegged to a fiat currency. So what we're talking about here is actually a slight misstatement of stablecoin because it's linked to a commodity. But unlike other commodities, it's treated as a proxy for money or has been over the millennia. And that represents a very small proportion of what is currently tokenized. So a massive growth opportunity is forecast in terms of tokenized assets, $10 trillion up from $118 billion in 2024.
And what we're doing with gold, and we're not the only people, I'll talk about the competition, we think is a very exciting segment for growth within that overall market growth. So in terms of applications of this, as it says here, buy it on your phone, much easier. But very difficult to buy physical gold at the moment. We'll make that easy because you buy the token that is like a coat ticket for the gold bar that you've got sitting in a third-party vault. You can spend that token. So obviously, very easy to exchange tokens on the blockchain. You can spend that by exchanging with someone else, by spending it through a card connected to your wallet, whether that's a wallet you already have that's got card capacity or one that you get from us.
So that point of sale where you're buying something in a shop, your gold is sold and converted into fiat, and you can buy something. So it means that if you want to keep your day-to-day money in gold, you can do that and access it through a credit or debit card. Alternatively, you can pick up your gold bar at a number of different outlets. So we're starting off with just vaulting in the UAE, but we intend to expand with our vaulting partner. We're in partnership, working with Brink's, one of the most reputable and certainly one with the biggest footprint. 120 countries globally have a Brink's outlet where we can store gold. So you can go to Brink's and collect your bar. You'll have your tokens, and you can redeem it there and then. You can get physical.
You can spend it on a credit card by turning it back into fiat, and you can easily buy it. So just to draw down a little bit more on the Standard Gold Coin, so it's one-to-one, one token to one gram. We think that's a much more useful structure than being one token equals one ounce. So it's about $160. It was up as high as $175, I think, dollars. And that's a manageable unit for someone to use. And obviously, you can exchange decimal places of a token, but that's the basic token. Those tokens are actually being issued by a Wyoming Digital Asset Statutory Trust, which is a new vehicle set up by Wyoming. Wyoming is broadly recognized to be at the forefront of digital legislation around the establishment of companies and the U.S. globally at the front of recognizing and protecting digital assets for investors.
So we've set it up in the U.S., set it up in Wyoming in the U.S., and that is the entity that issues the tokens. The gold itself, as I mentioned, is vaulted in the UAE, which arguably is one of the safest places in the world to have gold. There's a virtually zero prime rate within the Emirates. And as I mentioned, Brink's is one of only two or three, really, globally recognized and accredited third-party storage companies. So fantastic brand there. So the Wyoming Trust owns the gold that sits in the UAE, I should just clarify, as well as issuing the token. The rails itself are built on Base, which makes it immediately accessible onto Coinbase as an exchange. And for those who are familiar with the technology, it's a very versatile platform.
Also, my CTO tells me it's not an area of historic expertise for me, so it's something I'm learning about. Of course, one of the big benefits of being able to make payments through the blockchain is the costs are much lower. I think we've probably all experienced the frustration of making payments through the SWIFT system, and payments get delayed, often for many days. There's high costs involved. So this does away with all of that. I've mentioned the reserves and the redemption already, so I won't belabor that. The points on the right, I think, are already covered. I think a key slide is around the competitive positioning. Standard Gold Coin, issued by Blue Gold, is on the first one on the left-hand side. There are two others that have got scale in the market.
One's Pax Gold, PAXG, and the other's Tether Gold, XAUT. So Tether's really been promoting themselves very strongly recently and seemingly getting a lot of traction. I think the key difference there is that they so well, first of all, we're issuing as a publicly listed company, which creates an element of a requirement of transparency and regulation. As an officer of the company, I'm obviously regulated, as are the other officers and directors. So the transparency and reporting around what we've got, what we're doing, and the auditing of everything that we're doing, I think, gives investors confidence. There actually aren't, as far as I'm aware, any or many publicly listed issuers of a blockchain, of an actual crypto asset. So I think that's an important differentiator. Tether has a high denomination, I mentioned, the one ounce. They're also offshore.
So El Salvador, there's less protections than Wyoming and the U.S. As far as I'm aware, there aren't Proof of Reserves. I think they actually tokenize on a T+30. You send them the money, and they'll buy your gold within 30 days. So we do it instantly, and you get the bar number. And then the attestations from a third party we're talking to, we're working with one of the Big Four auditors come in, verify the gold there, and compare it to the ledger of the tokenized gold to ensure everything is as it should be. Those attestations are made public and give confidence. Also, we make it explicitly easy to redeem. We think redemption is critical to trust in gold. The token is really just a proxy for what you have specifically, and your ability to access that is key.
Now, we think once people have done it once or know they can do it, the likelihood of them wanting to do it and be lumbered with a physical bit of metal they've got to put somewhere and pay for and insure, and you can't take through an airport, it's quite unlikely they'll do that. It's much more useful to be able to walk through an airport with a token on your phone and access the gold bar at the other end, wherever you're going. But that's us compared to Tether. I think that's probably the clearest distinction between the two. PaxG is more of a service provider, a tokenization service provider. But what they do is not that dissimilar from what we're offering in terms of the trust and transparency.
But it's really tokenization as a service to institutions, not particularly geared towards the retail market and certainly not to try and make it a functional token that can be spent. And that's really where we're going with this. And no doubt there are a number of others that are in development and are being looked at and may emerge. And our view is this is really a kind of a rush to scale. So we are working to secure institutional buyers of this Standard Gold Coin and to get the market cap of the coin rapidly up. Not only does that create a higher income base for us on a recurring basis, but it also makes the Standard Gold Coin more relevant, more liquid, and I think more trusted as far as retail investors are concerned. So moving on, conscious, I'm at the end of my allotted time.
So the Blue Gold One app and card are the fintech sort of end of the product where at the moment, you can access it on the web. The app will be launched shortly, and there's a number of fees associated with operating that. On the physical mining side, I've touched on it, but haven't really spoken about it. So Bogoso Prestea Gold Mine, 5.1 million ounces measured and indicated resource with a 14-year life of mine, 250,000 ounces per year production, very substantial asset. And as I say, the focus of my time down here in West Africa is to resolve the lease dispute with the government of Ghana.
But that mine and the production from it is not priced into our stock as far as I can tell and would offer, according to Zacks Small-Cap Research, a $32 per share on top of their $20 per share target that they've got for the digital business. The way we generate income is set out here. So Standard Gold Coin, there's an on-ramp, and then there's a per transaction fee. The one app for using the credit card, there's a rebate. And on the trading side, which is separate from the mining, buying gold with a discount by sourcing it in-country or from licensed aggregators and then selling it with that small margin. So the milestones that have been achieved, I've covered already. We have got funding capacity, got lines of credit in place, and we've got money escrowed to the restart of the mine, $65 million.
This is a slide taken from Zacks Small-Cap Research report and can be found on our website. I've mentioned the $20 target, $32 upside on top of that, so $52 in total. The team I've covered, so it's me and my background, Nathan Dionne, CTO, and then Lorenz Werndle, CFO and non-executive chairman with a deep mining background based in West Africa. We also have a strong non-executive board and an advisory board with relevant experience both in trading and in payments. The share ownership, the cap table is about 35 million shares in issue now. With the exercise of the warrants that would bring in a further 132, so it's not for free. That's another 11.5, small number of private warrants and an equity line of credit that I've mentioned already would take us to 54.
Okay, apologies to RedChip for overrunning by 5 minutes on my 20 minutes allotted, but hopefully this time for a few questions.
Thank you, Andrew, for that most enlightening presentation. As Andrew said, we would love to hear your questions, actually to take them in written form. Press the Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom window and type in your question. Please don't use the raise hand button today. We're only going to be taking your written-in questions, Andrew, of which we have quite a few already. First one here is a central theme from the presentation, is that gold has succeeded as a store of value but failed as a usable currency. What has changed technologically or structurally that makes this the right moment to digitize gold at scale?
Okay, well, I think the technology is obviously the blockchain technology that's been around now for some years and I think is well tried and tested and trusted. But I think the thing that's really catalysed this is the shifting attitude within the legislature of the U.S. in particular that doesn't see this as being a fringe or something that needs to be squashed, but something that should be embraced and actually celebrated. So with the GENIUS Act, it was a very seminal pivot. And so we see this as something that will be much easier to promote and to be widely adopted, particularly within the U.S., as I say. It's really the only country in the world currently where you can market and sell digital assets within the strict confines of the law. So that's, I think, the thing that's made the biggest difference.
And the other thing, and this is more of a macroeconomic thing, is.
Our apologies to everyone. Andrew seems to have dropped off. We're going to try to bring him back on right away. Please stand by. Thank you very much. We appreciate everyone for standing by. This is the RedChip FinTech and Digital Asset Treasury Strategies Virtual Investor Conference. We'll try our best to bring back Andrew Cavaghan of BNB Plus. Sorry, of Blue Gold. My apologies, of Blue Gold. And I'm looking to see no, Andrew is not back quite yet. And we do apologize for that. We'll give him another 30 seconds or so because we are running up to the 30-minute mark, and we're going to be presenting another one of our great companies today. Just give Andrew another moment here to see whether he can come back with any closing thoughts.
Okay, we have just found out that Andrew is experiencing a power outage in Ghana, West Africa, where he is based. So he won't be able to return, and we apologize for that. We are now coming up to our next presentation, and we already have Michael Christophe here. Michael, could you give me a sound check and a video and presentation check, please?