Good afternoon and good evening, everybody. Welcome to the Abaxx Technologies and Abaxx Exchange Q3 2024 conference call. During today's call, I will be referencing disclosures from last week's Q3 2024 quarterly corporate update and quarterly financial statements and our regular disclosures found on SEDAR+ and the slides we've prepared for the call. By reference to the press releases and disclosures, I also want to draw your attention to some of the specific cautionary statements and notices that accompany each of those releases, respectively, and to start off this call by referring to our caution on forward-looking statements and the regular risk disclosures of our quarterly and annual filings. Please see our disclaimer on forward-looking statements in the slide attached.
In addition, given the highly regulated nature of our products and operations and the early growth stage of our ramp-up and listing of new futures products, it's also important to reiterate the cautionary nature of our forward-looking statements with respect to products that are still subject to ongoing regulatory work and review. I'll endeavor to point out these cautions as we go, but as of today, our regulatory status is that of a recognized market operator and exchange and approved clearinghouse in Singapore with futures products currently trading in physical LNG and VCM carbon, and as of the end of last week, we've now submitted products for review and comment in lithium carbonate and nickel sulfate. Any other potential products discussed today, including new markets like gold, Smart Commodity-based metals, or weather derivatives, or even some of our innovative technology-enabled products, would be subject to meeting all regulatory requirements.
For those of you who are new to the company on this call today, we've hosted project update calls semi-regularly around key project milestone period ends and did not typically reference financial statements or specific financial guidance. The company is now, of course, in a transition state, ramping up commercial operations and revenues. So we will look to transition this quarterly call to that of a typical financial KPI update in quarters ahead. But on today's call, the majority of the material updates will be more of a project update and onboarding KPI of nature. So as in recent calls, the call is intended to serve as a review of recent disclosures and a forum for investor Q&A. I'm sure that the Q&A portion of the call today will be heavily focused on the commercial ramp-up of the Abaxx Exchange.
But with my prepared statements, I'll also highlight some of the exciting updates together on ID++ and the Abaxx Technologies suite, as we're excited to report that we are now a fully operating business in this area as well. I was actually just discussing with one of our investors just today that our Q3 update on Friday was, of course, heavily focused on the exchange onboarding and derivative product updates. But we just casually dropped the launch of three software technology products without their own standalone product releases, where each uses a proprietary combination of novel deep tech innovations not seen anywhere else in the marketplace. And in many ways, each of these software products could stand as their own companies focused on just new product features and SaaS distribution of these tools.
But as you know, we're building these tools first and foremost in service of the Abaxx Exchange, Smart Commodities markets, and to be able to do things in pre-trade and post-trade workflows that none of our competitors can, which would allow us to release potential new derivative contracts that nobody else can or be able to take new market share in highly competitive markets on the back of our own clearinghouse in a major financial center. Now, if all stays on track, in 2025, I suspect that we can really shock the global derivatives and institutional wholesale markets with no less than two software-enabled market innovations that will separate us from anyone else in the field.
Given our proprietary approach to solving some of these hard engineering and compliant operating challenges, when we do launch them, it could put us, I think, well ahead of the field in a multi-year development cycle, again, solving these hard engineering problems. But again, sometimes it's hard to contain my excitement on how things are coming along together at the end of 2024 here and as our team's roadmap and plan for 2025. But I do always need to caution that a lot of this forward-looking innovation will be subject to meeting regulatory requirements and navigating the complex technological adoption cycles of our institutional clearing and exchange members, which we've just started to navigate with live software products.
So again, having reached this operating growth stage in both parts of our full-stack technology and operating business, and now that Abaxx is one of the handful of commodity futures businesses globally with our own independent clearinghouse and a major financial center, we should have a number of updates to share on both aspects of the business in months to come, with new exchange members to onboard over the remainder of the year, new firsts in physical delivery trades and battery metals futures with our lithium carbonate and nickel sulfate contracts over the next month or two, which we'll talk about later in the call, and new commodity industry partners still onboarding, and new milestones and product releases on the software technology side of our business as well.
Turning to the agenda, joining me on the call today, as usual, for the Q&A portion of the call, are our Chief Commercial Officer, Joe Raia, Chief Strategy Officer, Dave Greely, and CFO, Steve Fray. As in previous calls, today's call will be prepared in three sections. I'll first lead the sections on the exchange and related corporate updates. And then I'll walk through the phase two technology update, including some of our recent acquisition and corporate partnerships with PrivacyCode and MineHub and a bit of what we have in store for 2025. And finally, we'll cover some of the corporate finance updates and answer some investor questions in the Q&A section.
For institutions and analysts who are new to Abaxx and the call with us today, I would also encourage you to listen to our previous project update calls, which are on the Abaxx website and Abaxx YouTube channel, drawing specific reference to the previous commercial product presentations from Dave Greely on LNG and the voluntary carbon addressable markets, his presentation on our nickel sulfate product, the ID++ and Abaxx Console Suite technology demonstration from Ian Forester, and my discussion on our strategic approach to operating off of two balance sheets and two distinct complementary business units.
Abaxx Exchange and Clearing, which I'll also refer to as Abaxx Singapore and Abaxx Technologies, so that the sum of the parts can realize our long-term Smarter Markets vision and strategy for changing the way the commodities are priced and traded to allow the invisible hand of the free market to better discover and price and distribute the positive and negative externalities of the natural resource sector. In fact, talking about past presentations, for those of you that are starting to use large language model retrieval augmented generation tools, I would highly recommend that you set up an Abaxx IR RAG notebook of some of our previous calls and disclosures.
Over the coming quarter or two, you will see Abaxx start to publish some public endpoints to some of our own internal AI-enhanced data and agent models within the Smarter Markets Coffeehouse, AI-powered agents on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter, and on our public websites, Abaxx, and elsewhere. But for now, given that we're a bit of a one-of-one market infrastructure company as a full-stack innovator in both technology and brand new global derivative products, we have a pretty high educational threshold. And I believe that AI RAG tools can be very useful in letting investors and corporate partners use a natural language Q&A interface to parse through our disclosures and explanations of our two operating companies and the full-stack innovations of Abaxx.
For now, specifically, I would recommend Google's NotebookLM product with its convenient research interface and powerful token context window using Google's Gemini model, which seems to work quite well with Abaxx Investor YouTube videos, Smarter Markets interviews, and various PDFs, such as our corporate presentations and white papers on physical commodities. For further background in pulling all of those breadcrumbs and disclosures together, I'd recommend that investors start working with such a platform to fill in the blanks in addition to our quarterly and live Q&As. So first up, let's get into the operations. On June 28th, as you know, we launched the Abaxx Commodity Futures Exchange and Clearinghouse in Singapore with trading commencing in physically deliverable LNG and carbon futures contracts. Five new centrally cleared physically deliverable commodity futures contracts in LNG and carbon are now available for trading, a total of 98 new instruments across five futures curves.
On deck for launch will be our lithium carbonate and nickel sulfate futures, which we can talk more about a little later. Our initial suite of futures contracts for LNG and carbon are open for trading 14 hours a day, Monday through Friday. But stay tuned for some innovations we're working on that front for next year. Full clearing and execution are currently accessible through three clearing members now: StoneX, KGI Securities, and ADM Investor Services, who becomes our third full clearing member at the beginning of November. We can also cover the FCM topic in more detail in Q&A, but it's important to note that the initial volume seen in the first few months and then up through our Q3, we're only coming through one or two of those clearing firms who are able to trade at the open.
Within these FCMs, the Abaxx products were only available to a limited number of initial execution brokers and their clients and market makers, and were not available in all global regions in some of the early sessions. However, as we recently announced, we now have some of the large Swiss and global commodity merchants onboarding and connecting via bank FCMs and our clearing members, which has been critical for getting the block trades that have been demanded in our markets up and running. As of today, we've now onboarded six merchant trading firms with 16 more in progress for block trades and central limit order book trading, and nine financial trading and market-making firms with 10 more in progress. We completed the onboarding of 10 introducing brokers and five more in progress. We've had a very strong Q3 for onboarding KPIs.
Again, we have one additional full clearing member application in the works. So by the end of the year, up to six total FCMs and their respective global client bases should be connected for trade across regions. And prospectively, at least two more banks are now in the connectivity pipeline for next year. I should also note that this profile of initial clearing, ISV, and brokering group is very strong for this stage of a new market launch. From a peer infrastructure and connectivity perspective, this profile and the global merchant commodity firms has really leapfrogged us to arguably perhaps the second spot in Singapore's clearing ecosystem, with only the Singapore Exchange Group, SGX, with a broader ecosystem as of the end of the six months of onboarding.
Or said another way, despite the early volumes and revenue figures you're seeing in a new operating clearinghouse and exchange platform that's still building liquidity, we are already arguably the second most globally connected platform for global derivative contracts based in Singapore, which is a top financial center in the largest commodity region in what I would say is really a top three financial center globally. This makes our infrastructure investment quite valuable already, even before the DCF of future exchange volume revenues on our products. So borrowing and paraphrasing Howard Lutnick's framing for the ramp-up of his own FMX Futures Exchange, a year of onboarding, a year to build open interest and liquidity, and then growing and competing like hell with just a few incumbents in our market.
So we're headed into 2025 and our new products and innovations in quite a strong position, despite some of the launch and onboarding plans pushing out a little longer than we had anticipated earlier and heading into this year. So at launch and through the first full operating quarter, as presented in our Q3 2024 financials, we had a limited amount of connectivity and no banks or large merchant commodity firms ready for block trades, which only started to take shape in October and in early November with the announced block trades subsequent to the end of the quarter.
However, if you recall, we did make the call to open the market ahead of the summer holidays despite limited early connectivity because it became apparent heading into the end of Q2 that not all of the brokers, nor most of the traders executing from Europe or North America through various global trading arrangements would be able to trade it open. But we realized that being the first new clearinghouse in many years with new technology and new global products, it would be a few quarters of a rolling start trading regardless. And therefore, we decided to open the market and finalize the rest of the connectivity on the other side of launch, a process which is still ongoing. And now looking to our next product launches, specifically lithium carbonate and nickel sulfate, we are in some ways facing a similar issue.
We know that despite strong demand from the global metals community who have worked with us to design the products, we will likely confront a similar decision again in the next few weeks to launch the products, even without full client connectivity, as it seems that the current state of the institutional back office is always kind of wait until everything is fully complete before lifting the pencil, so to speak, without any real pre-launch movements to be done in parallel. So given that we were a new exchange and clearinghouse, many of the traders wanting to use our products will push us to launch, even if they can't trade on day one, but then be able to make the case internally to get moving on a product that's sitting out in the market with daily settlement prices.
This new operational reality makes it difficult for us to have a big launch opening events, like say the initial trading of a stock IPO or something. But we've always assumed that we'll be starting our markets with block trades anyway and compete with bilateral over-the-counter flows as we build up a futures curve and open interest with broader financial trading volumes and therefore revenue to come after.
Despite this less-than-ideal product launch structure, however called the negative externalities, a cold start, market-building dilemma, it's important for me to reiterate that the positive externalities of our physical delivery markets in particular and how quickly positive network effects can take hold once we do get the physical merchants connected and using our markets for bilateral block trades, which currently trade on spot over-the-counter basis only, and where there is no centrally cleared markets for anything other than cash-settled PRA index products with no futures market reflexivity and no competitive buyers and sellers of last resort. This positive externality inherent in our physical markets is what I jokingly called black hole growth on X.
It goes something like this: once there is volume and open interest from the marginal suppliers of our products, the big merchant commodity trading firms, and there's no other market for hedging or centrally standardized delivery terms, our markets at some point become an early tipping point to be a matter of best execution. A marginal trader can't simply ignore our prices and try to price wildly off our markets for substantially the same physical delivery terms further and further as we become a transparent market of best execution. This is not the same dynamic as a cash-settled PRA index future where there is no futures curve reflexivity because a survey assessment is not a best execution deliverable price. It's simply a post-facto marker to really bet against future outcomes.
This is why the marginal spot trade from the physical commodity merchants is so important to our markets, to kickstart that growth best execution network effect against no other alternative in the markets for some of our products. And as I said before, it's exactly these firms that have helped us design our contracts, and we are just now starting to make it through the onboarding processes for trading our products, as we saw with Mercury's block trade announcement the other week, as well as a large U.S.-based industrial conglomerate and trader that we mentioned earlier in the quarter. So again, even if some of our physical delivery products launch without a lot of early daily volume, as their natural traders still can't trade them, this is not an IPO market.
We're going to continue to roll out our products so that we do have a large and connected ecosystem, so as large a connected ecosystem as possible across regions and the ability to trade every new product. This really solves two issues for us. First, it gives a better chance of trading the opening launch of futures products in 2025 and beyond, as the onboarding really is a one-time thing, but also gives our infrastructure better real option value for listing any new financial derivatives in the future, be it competitive products already in the market where we can compete on operational or technological efficiency or the ability to create new products, ones that are not yet priced into our discounted cash flow, in my view, as we build this liquidity. Finally, speaking of regions, so we also updated the market.
We've begun our CFTC FBOT application to expand direct connectivity to additional regions. Please see our latest PR that we put out on Friday, last Friday, for more details there. So beyond the exchange updates, and I'm sure we'll have a lot more of those in the Q&A that we will have Joe and Dave join us for. Beyond the exchange updates, I also want to spend a bit of time again on the state of our technology development and our broader Smarter Markets vision and share with you today the first exciting software releases that took place subsequent to the end of Q3, which was the first time Abaxx released software to the general public outside of the exchange.
So in this section, I'll cover a lot of the same ground from our early July call, as I know is a pretty information-dense strategy discussion, and I'm still fielding a lot of investor questions around it. And as we can talk about a little later as we head into the end of the year and start to plan our tech roadmap and software product expansions for next year, we've also been discussing internally with management and the board if we need to pursue perhaps a restructured approach to capitalizing and funding these businesses separately. Even though we've always operated with two corporate entities, two separate managements, and two different balance sheets under the same corporate umbrella, it's been difficult to navigate our cost of capital in different businesses of a multi-year capital allocation for infrastructure.
As we've discussed before, the full-stack startup is one of the real unicorns in software disruption and market innovation, where everyone likes to own one in the rearview mirror of a market success in hindsight, but the reality is that they are almost impossible to fund without a few deeply committed shareholders over a longer duration than the typical fast money and OPM managed capital cycles that we live in, so to review, a so-called full-stack startup is a new infrastructure company attempting to challenge large oligopolistic incumbents first, head-on in the old ways of business, but with perhaps a new edge, but then disrupting both their own business and the whole sector through unique software innovations launched from the inside out. This is opposed to a new software business that ends up being a vendor to incumbents.
The challenge with these types of companies, as Abaxx has painstakingly found out over the last few years, is that the traditional institutional investors don't typically understand the frontier software opportunities, and the frontier software VCs rarely understand the complexities and regulatory risk of a high-moat traditional industry, which leads a company like Abaxx to simply focus nearly all of the messaging on just the traditional market opportunity. But as we head into 2025, with the foundations built in both our clearinghouse and the ID++ software suite, we're extremely excited on how it's all coming together and what we have prepared to execute on next year. Again, our go-to-market software investment has always been through our own clearinghouse and our own commodity product opportunities first.
But as new market opportunities for ID++ present themselves in the realm of AI infrastructure needs, we are also looking at new paths of financing the two businesses separately. And just to go a little deeper on why I call it the full-stack startup, I should probably lay out a little bit more specifically what the Abaxx Technologies full-stack is. I recently published an internal memo to our team in which I explained and described the Abaxx full-stack as a product layer cake. First, at the foundation level of a layer cake is the open internet protocols that we're developing and we can collaborate with in various open standards bodies and open-source projects. Specifically for Abaxx, these protocols are in the realm of digital identity and personal data privacy.
Examples of these protocols are the Decentralized Identity Foundation's, Decentralized Identifiers or DIDs, and DWNs or Decentralized Web Nodes, as well as W3C Verifiable Credentials, protocols for content addressable file storage, blockchains, and distributed hash tables. The next layer of ID++ is what we call the policy layer, where Abaxx-specific policies and implementations of open protocols work into our software applications. And with ID++ in particular, there are a number of proprietary business frameworks and policies for using these decentralized and privacy-focused protocols in a highly regulated business environment and technology stack, which ultimately becomes our competitive advantage in building software tooling and even moats around our business and implementation of these open protocols. That's why we're able to brand ID++ and the Abaxx private network using the policies around these protocols. So that's the ID++ policy layer.
The next layer is the specific identity management applications, notably the Abaxx Verifier and Abaxx Verifier Plus applications that are now live on the mobile app stores and being used right now on the Abaxx block trade platform at Abaxx Singapore and the Smarter Markets Coffeehouse. The other identity management application is the Abaxx Credential Issuer, which is used in back offices for managing membership accounts. Again, some of these proprietary product development work and the tooling just for the identity and access management applications could be leading software products in their own sector as standalone businesses and will roll out more futures, tooling, and software developer kits for products along those lines in quarters to come. The next layer of the work is the workflow applications.
This is Abaxx Messenger, Abaxx Sign, Abaxx Drive, and Abaxx Vault, all common tools and SaaS applications in the cloud markets, but where Abaxx has the only full workflow suite built on a decentralized identity and deep data privacy stack. Abaxx Messenger is our first rollout underway for Abaxx Exchange, and in 2025, potentially MineHub and Smarter Markets Coffeehouse businesses as well. The Abaxx Messenger is also important as it will function as an AI prompting cockpit for the rest of our workflow and applications over time, and then the final layer, of course, is our business applications, where these tools will serve to add leverage and competitive advantage to our industry, allowing us to do things other competitors couldn't do without these or similar tools.
These business applications are things like Smart Commodities derivatives with origin and metadata-enhanced digital titles, and of course, full digital title for clearing and collateral, or potentially servicing, or we could potentially service Smart Commodity or AI-enhanced features in platforms like MineHub or Coffeehouse, where we keep data private but are able to use these important cloud technologies, and then finally, servicing software and data supply chain with PrivacyCode, which we recently acquired, so as I touched on in the July call, from a commercial perspective, these are three potential strategic benefits to this full-stack startup, this internal disruption business model approach.
First, as an indirect strategic benefit of this business unit configuration, by having our own in-house software product development team and full-stack engineers working on new and innovative ways to build market infrastructure and always keeping our tech team in the so-called front office of our business, we believe that we're able to stay ahead of market innovations by not always falling back on default third-party products, consultants, and the long lead time enterprise integrator projects that underlie most of our competitors. We made the very hard decision in 2022 to change our initial exchange technology stack centered around Nasdaq systems, software designed to run on legacy on-prem data center configurations, and we built a more advanced cloud-based infrastructure, replacing Nasdaq with new vendors, Baymarkets, and Exberry.
This decision introduced new risks and a painful delay in the short term, but we believe that the decision now sets us up much better for the long term by accelerating the second phase, or the second pillar of our business using technology, and as an added benefit, we also believe that this new infrastructure and software deployed can reduce our cost significantly versus legacy infrastructure for our exchange and clearinghouse competitors, and therefore open up a direct margin expansion opportunity, and perhaps even setting us up for new business strategies that can compete on price and volume in existing derivative markets. The second strategic benefit, again, I covered a lot of these in more depth on the last call, but to highlight is potentially introducing new innovative commodity products that I, as I mentioned above.
With our ID++-enabled software tools, our industry-leading exchange software cloud infrastructure, as well as a number of new market infrastructure regulatory licenses, we've been progressing from the Abaxx tech side of the business. We're now finalizing our roadmaps and detailed planning for full digital title and Smart Commodity contracts to be revealed in 2025 and beyond. And again, I should caution, this full digital commodity collateral product is not part of our current regulatory approvals, but the advanced status of our software development and some key prior decisions to change our software stack to embed ID++ natively in our infrastructure will enable this major opportunity to be a market innovation leader when all infrastructure partners are ready.
While other financial services are certainly working on pilot-stage blockchain collateral systems or the often-hyped multi-trillion-dollar market from tokenized real-world assets, we do believe that we have a unique and differentiated approach from any other marketplace. Our proprietary approach is enabled by ID++ and our strategic software innovations, the identity tech and privacy tech, as the central pillars of our innovation strategy, rather than now, in my opinion, the commoditized functionality of distributed ledgers and blockchains. In the July call, I talked about the identity, privacy, and distributed ledger trilemma framework, which I won't review in detail here, but in summary, if you look around the market today, every blockchain-based tokenization solution ends up sacrificing or centralizing or trying to create a platform at least of one of these requirements of the trilemma.
We're taking the approach that in order to accept a full digital title in our clearinghouse, we will require, one, an extremely high standard of certainty and finality of digital identity in the underlying title signatures, an extremely high standard of centrality and finality in the distributed ledger state, and three, extremely high standards of certainty when it comes to the persistence of data that is passed privately between market participants. And of course, our own standards here will be very much aligned with that of our regulators' core policies and principles, another engineering and incentive problem where a lot of the DeFi projects do not meet the hard constraints of the regulated institutional markets.
Just to be clear, as I started on the last call, as both developers of this technology and engineers of these hard problems on one hand and operators of the clearinghouse on the other, we will be the toughest client our software developers will ever see. It's worth repeating that I would never allow the current slate of Bitcoin ETFs to touch our clearinghouse as collateral, nor most of the so-called stablecoins or any of the infrastructure that currently underlies them at many of the self-described qualified custodians in the digital asset space. They would not meet Abaxx standards of digital trust that would be required for an international commodity market, and they do not solve the trust trilemma triangle from a market infrastructure policies and protocols perspective.
And finally, the third strategic benefit of the software innovation strategy and the potential advantage of our corporate structure and software in the front office approach to innovation is how we've configured internally to take advantage of the rapid innovation and the unprecedented CapEx cycle that's taking place in the field of AI. Outside of our core commodity futures markets, or perhaps even outside of financial markets as a whole, we have been working through additional go-to-market strategies for ID++, which we believe is an essential new cloud trust framework for AI to unlock historical enterprise data in a private but trusted environment. I mentioned all this on the last call, but we have even more conviction around our path forward now. And with the technology roadmap as a background, I guess we can spend the final few minutes before the Q&A on our capital planning.
As mentioned, we developed the structure of Abaxx Technologies software business as a separate operating entity, yet, as described above, still highly complementary to our primary businesses at Abaxx Exchange. Going forward, depending on the capacity of our balance sheets and the corporate finance decisions we make at the parent company level, we'll continue to develop new business lines organically or via partnership or acquisition on the Abaxx tech level balance sheet. Although perhaps it hasn't worked out quite as well as we had hoped, the two-balance sheet approach also was meant to help provide a cost-to-capital efficiency and flexibility to overcoming the funding dilemma I mentioned earlier about only having a few natural investors in a full-stack startup.
We are certainly a one-of-one company and opportunity in our sector, in my view, which can be a good thing and a bad thing depending on the mood of the market. On the one hand, we've achieved operating status in one of the highest margin, highest value sectors in all of finance, a commodity futures exchange and clearinghouse, but on the other, we are the only full-stack startup clearinghouse in traditional institutional markets outside of crypto. And in fact, we may be the first one ever, which also makes it hard for many check-the-box type investors to value Abaxx.
I also believe that we are now in a very interesting cost of capital phase transition, where we have more and more institutional investors looking at us every week as the exchange ramps up towards profitability, but we're not quite to the point where the market is affording us a forward-looking NPV, cost of capital, on our potential product trading cash flows. I would argue that on a sum-of-the-parts basis, we are still being valued at a very cautiously low probability discount of ever reaching hundreds of thousands or millions of contracts per day in our markets, and of course, likely no value for us achieving our hard engineering goals of a potentially game-changing software deployment of ID++ into our markets.
The second one in particular is a bit hard to swallow for me, as from an engineering and execution standpoint, in my view, it's only a function of time for ID++ to be in the market. I don't see overly complex risks beyond our control to say that there is a near-zero chance of us achieving this mission that founded this company. Near-zero probability of ID++ success is where the market is currently pricing Abaxx, even as RWA tokens and all kinds of other nonsense in offshore retail markets are valued wildly, even though I see little chance of them ever, of the current iterations of those tokens, ever touching institutional commodity markets or capital markets.
But I would say, on the bright side, however, that despite the forward discount value issue that we've been trying to unlock and overcome as the exchange ramps up with more products, partners, and announcements, we have, in our view, expanded our access to capital, even if we're still trying to unlock a better pricing of capital. There are now a number of strong outbound and inbound alternatives presenting themselves as we continue to invest in growth infrastructure, as evidenced by the recent small strategic financing that was priced well above our closing price at the time of announcement.
We'll have access to ramp up working capital into early next year after closing of this recent placement, and we will look to update investors on other strategic funding plans at the Singapore level or otherwise as we work through the corporate financing paths and choose our definitive path over the coming quarter. So with that, I'd say let's turn it over to the Q&A portion of the call. And maybe just to give myself a little break, I'll hand it over to Dave to cover any updates on Smarter Markets Coffeehouse and the ID++ Verifier Plus.
Thanks, Josh. Yeah, get yourself a sip of water. So jus t a very quick update while Josh catches his breath. As you know, we rolled out Coffeehouse, the social media platform from Smarter Markets.
Really, two of the purposes for it are both to support the commodity futures exchange and clearinghouse and also to support the tech efforts that Josh has been talking about. We started the podcast really to shine a spotlight on the issues that we thought were important in markets and that we thought we could address through Smarter Markets, both with the exchange, the clearinghouse, and the technology, and to see if anyone else cared. And a lot of people cared. They've got a very strong following for the podcast and a very strong network of guests and folks who've contributed to its success over the years. And so the social media platform is an evolution of that, another place where that type of people and many of those guests can interact with each other.
That has multiple benefits for Abaxx as well in that it gives us a place to keep those conversations going, to understand what are the commercial needs of the marketplace, and to understand some of the problems that need to be addressed and some of the more interesting ways that we might be able to be helpful there. Also, with the technology, it is a way to roll out the ID++ technology in a relatively low-stakes environment, certainly lower stakes than rolling it out on a regulated futures exchange and clearinghouse, and to be able to take a lot of the industry on that tech journey that Josh has talked about, from starting with getting accustomed to the use of decentralized identities to using verifiable credentials to being able to use artificial intelligence as part of your workflow and ultimately to full digital title.
So what we plan to do in the Coffeehouse is to begin rolling out those tools. Already, people are using Verifier Plus as a way to gain access and to explore the three levels of user access with verifiable credentials. And so that's the first use of getting those tools into people's hands. Just the past few weeks after launch with the waitlist active, we already have 170 people on the waitlist for memberships, and we've been bringing people on, contributors, getting them on board to letting them interact, getting conversations started, and we'll continue to build that out. So very much, it's very much the same cold start problem as we have with the exchange. First, you have to have the connectivity. That's what we're working on now. Then you build the liquidity. Then you get the conversation started.
Then more people will want to join and more will want to be invited. So that's what we're working through. It's going well. And we think that will augment our efforts in the other networks we're creating. So we're creating a social network. We're creating a market network through the exchange and clearinghouse, and we're creating the technological networks through the ID++ technology. And so I'll keep that update short and sweet and turn it back to you, Josh.
Thanks, Dave. Appreciate that. So now I'm going to go through some of the investor questions that we've had on the call and sent in ahead of time. Starting first with discussed exchange trading revenues for Q3 and Q4 to date. As I understand, rebate incentives were introduced and onboarding has been productive. So yeah, so first, a number of the revenue questions.
We have, in the early parts of our trading, initiated a rebate program. This is quite typical in launching new products and exchanges where people are incentivized to make and take liquidity, and we are kind of ongoing discussions around extending that program through Q1 currently, and as far as the trading, maybe I'll turn it over to Joe to kind of go through an update, and maybe I'll go through a few of these other questions. Again, all semi-related. How many clearing firms, trading firms, and other participants are estimated to achieve exchange traction and liquidity? Yeah, so maybe I'll turn it over to Joe for those to start.
Yeah, thanks, Josh.
Specific to rebate programs or incentive programs, as you mentioned, it is very typical and traditional and important to all of the above to utilize firms that want to provide liquidity in our products, which is a good thing because they've come to us and asked us to participate in that, to provide liquidity, to provide bids and offers. And so that's something that is done through literally all the other exchanges that are in the marketplace, particularly for commodities, but I'm sure outside of commodities. And we saw that as an important point here to prime the pump, so to speak, with liquidity for trading. And the result of it is that we have prices on our Gulf of Mexico futures contracts now every morning, every day, which is something that is attracting additional players to trade our products.
We have bids and offers and liquidity on our voluntary carbon markets on both J-REDD and also, CORSIA Phase One contracts. And so those, again, are attracting additional firms that want to trade those products. And we expect the same will be necessary for our battery metals products when we launch them. So again, it's typical. It actually has the effect that we wanted to by attracting other firms, both on the trading side, brokers, and on the clearing firms actually also to participate with us.
Excellent. Thanks, Joe.
And again, just maybe a little bit of discussion of how many firms and when we're getting to the critical mass of enough market connectivity.
Yeah, as you mentioned, we put out KPIs on Friday on the clearing firms and clearing members. From a customer access perspective, they're one and the same.
We do have three full clearing members, as you mentioned, with StoneX, ADM, and KGI, but also two additional firms in Mizuho and Marex International that are connected with us. I think the importance of that is that the customers of those firms that have existing clearing relationships with them, meaning Mizuho, which is the largest firm that's involved in project financing for LNG, and I would say arguably the largest of clearing firms that are involved in LNG markets, that now their customers can trade our products. And the same with Marex. Marex has a lot of firms that are involved in carbon, also in battery metals. And so as we launch those products, those customers will have pretty much immediate access to our products.
I think that, as you also mentioned, Josh, we have two more bank FCMs and three additional clearing firms that are looking to onboard with us in 2025. We have one that hopefully will be on board as another direct clearing firm by the end of this year. Again, that will bring additional customers immediate access to trade our products. Then when you look at the trading firms, we have quite a large pipeline now of firms that are in progress, both on the financial trading firms, but also merchant firms and market-making firms that are in the pipeline to trade directly with us and also to trade block trades. And those block trades will come through interdealer brokers. Those are the TP ICAPs and the BGCs of the world.
And we have who are already onboarded with us, but we have an additional 10 interdealer broker firms that are onboard with us and five more in progress. So again, those are in anticipation. The ones in progress, most of those are in anticipation of our battery metals products that will be rolled out either right in the next few weeks or right in the early parts of 2025.
Great. Thank you. The next question is with regards to market data. It was a specific question if it's going to be available on the Bloomberg Terminal. I think it's best to kind of talk about a couple of things with our market data strategy. First off, we do have a number of partners in the ecosystem that have made a lot of investments to be kind of first players in the market and have access to things like market data.
And so really, that's the first place is providing sort of IP whitelisting for our partners to be able to access market data. Over time, there are things that we're looking at in providing open data, at least in the initial timeframe, inside Smarter Markets Coffeehouse and specific sort of website access. And then, of course, the third is the distributors such as the Bloombergs and the such. So all of these pieces have been underway and will provide updates to the market in time. But for now, we're going to be focusing on creating standardized KPIs of both onboarding, block trades, and these types of metrics probably for at least this quarter and the next. There's some more questions about lithium and nickel sulfate and the timing of that. As I mentioned up above, we have submitted these contracts.
As many of you are aware, one of our key partners in the development of the nickel product was BHP Billiton, and the unfortunate timing around the closing of Nickel West kind of had us relook at some of the strategy of the underlying product availability. As we've seen in some of our competitors' markets, it's never good to launch a product without a lot of available underlying supply, and so in nickel, in particular, we wanted to make sure we had the right products in place and the right suppliers in place, but that's now been resolved and moving forward, so again, we will be in a position to launch nickel quite soon when we decide with our market partners when the time is right to launch. Lithium actually is a product that's now becoming increasingly exciting for us and a number of the client participations.
Joe, I don't know if you want to maybe get into the lithium product a little bit more, and then I can talk about the timing situation again.
Yep, sure, Josh. Real quickly, it's still subject to regulatory approval, as you've mentioned. We just submitted those contracts to the MAS last week. We'll more than likely have three products. And just in context, our contract on Abaxx will be the first non-Chinese U.S. dollar-denominated physically deliverable lithium carbonate contract offered anywhere on any exchange. And again, we haven't done this in a vacuum. We have quite a lot of inbounds from it or participation and work with the industry on developing the contract and also even outreach from trading firms that said they want to be involved in our trades right from the beginning. So that's ongoing. The onboarding of those firms is ongoing.
As I mentioned, the brokers that are involved in it is a very heavily brokered market right now. And the brokers that are involved in that market are onboarding with us or are already onboarded with us. And again, the only product that's available now is in China, mainland China, non-U.S. dollar-denominated, non-deliverable outside of China. And so this is quite a new product that does, again, once again, demonstrate our desire to not go with the status quo and develop and launch lookalike contracts that are cash settled. This physical contract will solve a lot of issues for risk management in the physical lithium markets, and particularly in North America and in Europe, where we see quite a lot of development work in the production of lithium as a critical battery metals or a critical minerals product that's being demanded in the marketplace.
So we're very excited about this product.
Great. Thanks, Joe. There's also some comments and questions around weather derivatives, which I think we've kind of revealed for the first time in our last press release. Just as a broad statement, I think it's important to say that we're walking a very fine line of obviously an early-stage company that has a lot of investor interest around new products, new developments that potentially becomes public information one way or another through the development of products. So we think it's important to always disclose things that we're working on so that nobody has specific information that others don't. But that said, when we're in the early stages of developing products, we're obviously in a very highly competitive marketplace.
And so we don't want to go into all of our details and strategy up until the point until we're very close to the point of launch. So we will take this one, but I think going forward, we need to increasingly be cautious, but just making the point that we've got a very full pipeline. Again, we built this business not to launch one or two contracts, but you build a full-stack clearinghouse because we view that there's opportunity in commodities and energy transition in Asia, the largest commodity market in the world. And we're going to be developing products for a long, long time. But maybe with that overall disclaimer, maybe I'll turn it over to Joe since he was involved in weather derivatives at the NYMEX.
Yeah, thanks, Josh. But those are the guardrails around that. I don't think there's much more to add.
Again, as you said, we have a very full pipeline of products. The clearinghouse is really the foundation of launching those products across all different asset classes. I think, thankfully, we have so much interaction with the marketplace that the inbounds just keep coming for new ideas and new products, especially at a very, very early stage of our development. We just launched, right? This is. I look back at all the products that we launched at the NYMEX over the years. That was with a clearinghouse that had been in existence for decades. This is completely different, completely new, and yet we still have inbounds on new products. I won't go into details on whether or anything else that we haven't developed or submitted, most importantly, to MAS, our regulator, who has been a fantastic regulator to work with.
So again, I won't go into any more detail on that.
Perfect. Thanks, Joe. And then obviously some questions on gold, which we also mentioned at update. Again, this is in a situation where we're still in relatively early-stage discussions with our regulator, even though we're in quite late-stage developments of the products themselves. And so the gold product would likely be a Q1 product, again, subject to meeting all regulatory conditions. Whereas, and I don't think I said it specifically, we should be in a position to launch lithium and nickel before the end of the year. It's just the question is the optimum timing. So whether it's in early December or early January, again, subject to regulatory finalization, those products will be ready to go with gold in Q1. There's a number of questions about revenue and revenue forecasts.
Again, we are just not in the stage of forecasting any sort of revenues. Now, of course, revenues and volumes are closely tied in our business. But as I think we've said in the past, what we're really focused on is the physical use of our contracts, block trades from physical commodity traders out the curve. That's been the primary focus. So one of the questions related was, other than duration, do you see any hurdles or obstacles preventing the exchange from hitting break-even? And again, the short answer is no. We don't see any issues. It's just a function of timelines. And of course, that becomes a function of capital. But in our view, the block trades have started. As we announced in carbon, there's a number of very interesting developments we're looking at for not just single cargoes, but strips of cargoes for LNG next year.
So that's a mixture of obviously matching buyers and sellers on terms, the brokers matching buyers and sellers on terms, having everybody in their banks or FCMs onboarded. But again, we're working through those issues. And everybody's quite excited to start working some block trades and not just futures block trades, but cargo trades in our exchange next year. But again, we do see that really the path is starting with block trades, building that open interest. Open interest then drives new volume. And that volume obviously becomes revenue after the first quarter when we, as we phase out things like rebate programs. There's some questions specifically about various banks and specific institutions. So again, as per the past, unless the institution themselves are choosing to press release their involvement as a market operator, we typically always want to preserve the privacy of our clients.
Yeah, I mean, most of the big banks, commodity traders, again, that's the phase we've been in is being able to onboard them for block trades. Are you able to expand on additional information of your release on ID++ along with the path to monetization? So yes, we will definitely provide more demos, particularly as we get into some of the workflow suites next year, such as Messenger, Sign, Drive. As I kind of explained in the layer cake analogy before, the core of our work has really been on the protocols and the issuance and verifier, the identity management applications to date. Now, of course, we've been working across the stack because they're all interrelated. But there's probably a little bit less to demonstrate in something like a protocol than there is in an application. So yeah, we will definitely do more demos.
Again, the question is the path to monetization. And really, there's two things here. As I spent a lot of time in the main comments above, our focus is less on monthly subscription-type monetization, although we'll have that as well. The main focus is being able to be differentiated using the tools and the protocols to be able to do differentiated things that other competitors can't. That to us is a much more valuable part of the investment than the actual SaaS revenues. But of course, we will provide a KPI framework as well as those products roll out, both from a user perspective, like things like verifiers downloaded, login attempts, monthly, daily active users, that sort of thing. So that will obviously be part of our presentations next year, as well as, of course, SaaS and monthly revenue-type disclosures.
Yeah, a lot of other sort of strategic-type questions that I think we've covered a lot already in the comments. And with that, I think we are coming up to the end of the hour. Let me just scroll through one more time and make sure we didn't miss anything that wasn't generally covered by others before. Yeah, I think Joe or Dave, do you want any final comments or questions? Great. Seeing none. So with that, I guess we've hit the top of the hour. And thank you, everybody, for their time. Please obviously follow up in the investor email. I'm always pretty available, as you know. And like I said, we're looking to roll out some AI-related tools for investor education and questions as we go as well.