We all know that in times of global uncertainty, investors flock to gold as a store of value. What is less well understood is that silver outperforms gold when the precious metals bull market runs. Usually, in these cycles, gold starts early, but then as it becomes relatively more expensive, silver momentum begins and basically catches and passes gold. Let's take a look at the last 50 years' worth of bull market runs. In the 1970s, gold went from $35 an ounce up to $850. Pretty impressive, 24 times return. During the same period, silver was up 35 times. (No Audio) N ext major bull run in the early 2000s, gold quadrupled, but silver was up tenfold. You can see this cycle starting to come again now. Gold started to run in about 2022, and now silver is just starting to build momentum. It's up 30% this year already.
If history is any guide, it's got a long way to run to both catch and then fly past gold. Why does silver outperform? There are a few reasons why, but in part, it's because when gold goes off into the vault, silver gets up and goes to work. It's got dual utility. Gold is primarily a precious metal, whereas silver is both a store of value as well as an important industrial commodity. It is used in everything from your electronics, EVs, power, solar power, that is, green energy tech. As the world continues to decarbonize, there are strong structural forces driving the demand for silver that gold simply does not share. On the supply side, we've got about a quarter of silver coming from primary silver miners. These are the companies actually looking for the stuff.
The vast majority comes as a byproduct from gold, copper, lead, and zinc miners. These gold miners are not changing their production profile just because the silver market goes up a little bit, leaving the supply response for silver basically price inelastic. We've got this great setup now where demand is starting to rise, but the silver side is generally non-responsive. Generally, what happens when this occurs in commodity cycles is the price really starts to kick up. It does get better because around 75% of all silver that's mined is coming from Latin America, Russia, and China. These are hardly the poster children for operational and geopolitical stability. There is very little silver that's coming from true tier one jurisdiction. The Silver Institute over the last few years is reporting deficits in the order of 100 up to 250 million ounces. These aren't rounding errors.
This is up to about a quarter of global production. With decarbonization fueling the demand for silver, these deficits are only set to continue into the future. On the macro front, we've got massive money printing, ballooning U.S. debt, credit downgrades, and a general lack of confidence in fiat currencies all over the world. This is driving investors towards precious metals as a hedge against inflation. The central banks were onto this early. About three years ago, they started doubling gold purchases, followed quickly by retail. Silver has flown generally under the radar and still remains historically cheap. The gold-to-silver price ratio is seeing about 86 to 1, way above the historical average since the gold standard was abandoned of about 65 to 1.
Even silver just catching up to that average would see a price increase of about 45%. This is not a moonshot forecast on price, just a mean reversion. Of course, if gold was to continue over that same period in time, then all bets are off in terms of how far the silver market could actually run. I guess how do you as investors participate in all of this? You can go and buy physical silver. You can get bars, coins, ETFs. For serious leverage, it's the smaller junior miners, particularly those moving from exploration into production, that offer the greatest upside. That brings me to what I believe is the most compelling investment opportunity on the ASX at the moment. It's the Paris Silver Project. It's owned 100% by Investigator Resources. I know what you're thinking, right? Paris sounds expensive, but this one's in South Australia.
No baguette, just a lot of high-grade silver. There's 57 million ounces. The Paris Silver Project is one of the highest-grade undeveloped silver projects anywhere in the world. Since we've done the study in 2021, we threw off a project that had about, I think, $480 million worth of cash. Since that time, we've upgraded the resource. We've got a Definitive Feasibility Study underway, approval process kicking off on our way to production. What sets us apart? We are a low-cost, high-grade silver project. We are sitting in a safe, stable jurisdiction. We have district scale exploration potential. We are perfectly aligned to the green energy thematic, and we're undervalued compared to peers. They're the main points I just want to step through as we work through the rest of this slide deck. First, really quick corporate overview. We have a market cap about $48 million.
We've got $5 million in cash, so really well funded to finish off the DFS as well as to continue the ongoing exploration programs. I do want to bring your attention to the slide. However, late last year, the share price really fell away sharply. That was in a response to the company putting out an announcement that the DFS was going to be delayed. The market misread this as there being some sort of fundamental flaw with the DFS. I joined the company about three weeks ago, and I've just been pulling apart that DFS. Not only is it sound, but there's a huge amount of opportunity to capture the value of this rising silver market through things like a larger pit, lower cut-off grades to bring more silver metal into the mine plan and effectively feed into that rising price environment.
That's really what we're focused on capturing now. I'm pretty certain that when the DFS does drop, that overreaction from late last year will correct. That provides, of course, a really nice opportunity for you all to get ahead of the curve. The 2021 project economics were really sound. $480 million of free cash. Here's the important point. Since this study was done, the price has gone up 70%. That's 7-0. If we run the new price deck through the old PFS model, we get another $650 million to the upside. That's without considering that the silver price should also enable a larger pit, lower cut-off grade, so more metal in on top of that. We have a Definitive Feasibility Study now underway. A lot of key studies already complete along the lines of this.
I'm really just focusing now on making sure we capture the value that this increased silver market has to offer. We're also starting to really interrogate, I guess, some of the cost assumptions that have currently been put in the PFS, in particular around tailings system, moving from a dry tailings to a wet tailings, basically halves the OpEx and halves the CapEx associated with the tailings. Looking at things like reducing the detoxification circuit, this should get all of the costs down lower and help just really reduce the capital and changing out from expensive power run on diesel gensets in the PFS towards alternative power, which can really bring those costs down. The main focus here is to try and get the OpEx down because that enables us to bring that cut-off grade down.
Because in our ore body, we have a grade tonnage curve around the cut-off that's really quite steep. Any reduction in the cut-off grade would enable us to put more metal into that mine plan and feed it into the higher price environment. You can see on the picture there that already some of that optimization work that's been going on in the last few weeks is showing there's going to be a much larger pit when the Definitive Study eventually drops. In parallel to this, we're also undertaking the mining permitting process on our pathway to production. Paris is only the start of the story. It is located within a 15-kilometer long silver corridor. It's been peppered with drill holes to just confirm that there is widespread silver mineralization all throughout the area. It's geologically identical to Paris.
We've got hits right up the top, about five kilometers north in Apollo. That's eight meters at 1,260 grams a ton. All the way down the south, five kilometers south of Paris, we've got Manto, three meters, 86 grams a ton, including one at 218. There are a whole heap of hits in between, including nice intercepts of both gold as well as lead. It's starting to really paint a picture with the ongoing exploration through this area that we have a district-scale silver system on our hands. The new acquisition that we have just recently made is Athena. Athena is an underexplored area on a tenement right adjacent to ours. It was drilled historically for iron ore and iron ore only. As the drill holes passed through the magnetite body, they basically stopped and they were never initially assayed for silver.
Years later, following success around Paris, they were drilled, they were reassayed for silver and found that many of those holes actually terminated within the silver mineralization. It's still open at depth in these areas and some really nice hits through there, including five meters at 493 grams a ton, but no follow-up drilling. This ground was eventually picked up by a private company. Three months ago, we entered into an earn-in agreement and next week we kick off a geophysical survey as part of that drill targeting. Whilst Paris and the Paris corridor offer those opportunities for district-scale silver and value creation, we also have an asset in the western side of the state near Broken Hill. It's got historical gold and copper mines. We've run a few geophysical and geochem surveys through there.
They are really highlighting a number of targets that have got coincident IP, mag, gravity, as well as soil anomaly. We're starting drilling there in September and that'll be the first drilling program in this area. Really looking forward to what those results may yield. Where are we? We got basically, we got demand going through the roof both as silver for an investment metal as well as a very important industrial commodity, and supply simply cannot keep up. That is the backdrop for Paris, which is a low-cost, high-grade project, fully leveraged to the upside in terms of price with great district-scale exploration potential. With the Definitive Feasibility Study and exploration really underway, we think now is a great time to invest. If you are thinking silver, think Investigator.
We are located at the booth over in the far corner and would love to explain this in a lot more detail. Thank you.