Thanks, Tara. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the special presentation on Abaxx Technologies 's Mid-year Investor Call. During today's call, I will reference a number of our recent public disclosures found on SEDAR+. By reference to these disclosures, I also want to draw your attention to the specific cautionary statements that accompanied each release, and start today by referencing 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. I also want to add two very important cautions for today's call, as we are shifting the format a bit for today's special presentation update. First, this is a strategic update and not a financial quarter-end call. We will not be discussing financial reporting metrics or guidance.
For financial reporting discussions, we look forward to our November call, which will cover our Q3 results and be the first to include our initial trading volumes on gold, LNG, carbon, and other futures contracts and resulting revenues. Second, a key presentation for this call is to discuss our exciting new Abaxx Digital Title and Abaxx US Dollar Trust Network technology pilots. We want to specifically point out that these pilots will initially be conducted outside of our regulated clearinghouse. A key goal of this pilot process is to get not only the market comfortable with our legal and technological product claims, but also, of course, our regulators. I will also talk about the use case for the Abaxx Digital Title innovation and the Abaxx Trust Network for moving real-time collateral, so there may be the logical jump to think about this as initial margin collateral technology.
Our pilot transactions will be specifically taking place outside of the clearinghouse, and I will endeavor to continue to point this out appropriately throughout the presentation and discussion. In addition, given the highly regulated nature of our existing products and operations and the early growth stage of our ramp-up and listing of new products as the year progresses, 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. We'll also endeavor to point out these cautions as we go.
As of today, our Abaxx Singapore entity's regulatory status is that of a recognized market operator exchange and approved clearinghouse in Singapore, with revenue-generating futures products currently trading in physical delivery LNG, the only product of its kind listed globally, which is a huge milestone, two VCM carbon futures contracts, of which our CORSIA contract became the first VCM contract to ever go through a delivery cycle through FCMs in a regulated clearinghouse, our battery metals business in lithium carbonate and nickel sulfate, and new since our last April call, our Singapore Kilobar gold contract, which is now generating daily trading volume across four monthly contracts.
Any other potential products discussed today, including potential new markets planned for additional precious metals, additional base metals and battery metals, our first weather derivatives, smart commodities, and green premium contracts, or even some of our innovative technology-enabled products in the pipeline, these new products would be subject to meeting all regulatory requirements and disclosures before listing. As we speak about our gold products today, I want to point out upfront that our Abaxx Spot entity has been newly incorporated in Singapore this year, but operating under a different branch of the Abaxx corporate family tree, not part of the entities regulated by the MAS under Abaxx Singapore, as the Monetary Authority of Singapore does not regulate spot commodities. For those of you who are new to the company on this call today, we've hosted project and product update calls semi-regularly at quarterly ends and key project milestones.
Given the mostly development stage of our company in previous quarters, we did not typically speak to financial statements or financial guidance directly. As the company's futures exchange has generated significant new trading volume across our Kilobar Gold Contract and now LNG Gulf of Mexico contracts here in Q3, the company is now solidly in an operating transition and growth stage, ramping up commercial operations and revenues. Our Q3 period and November call will be our first formal presentation to include financial results and key performance indicators. I want to reiterate the special presentation nature of today's call.
It has been clear from our recent stakeholder discussions, especially following our technology pilot announcements over the last few weeks, which happened to take place just as futures contracts in gold and LNG started to ramp up with daily volume on the exchange, that a more focused update was needed to contextualize the immense transformational progress of the business over the last few weeks. Particularly, as I embark on a few weeks of institutional investor meetings in the weeks ahead, the primary reason for the call is to make sure that all investors have a chance to interact at this transformational time in the business after over a half-decade-long development of both our technology and our markets. For years, we have been executing on our full stack venture strategy, building both a regulated market infrastructure and a suite of next-generation purpose-built financial software.
Today, you will see how those two pillars are converging just at the right time. The primary presentation in our last call was rightly focused on the commercial ramp-up of the exchange and the milestones of our LNG, carbon, and metals markets. Today, I want to start by laying out the vision and strategy for our technology, as it is now starting to move from our long-term roadmap to the operational reality. The recent announcements of our Abaxx Digital Title pilot for physical gold and the subsequent plan for an Abaxx US Dollar Trust Network for tokenized money market funds are not tangential software products. They are the core of our long-term mission to build smarter markets. We believe the time is now for upgrading the global post-trade and commodity financing collateral ecosystem.
Our work is designated to address structural inefficiencies that separate global commodity benchmarks from physical trade by unlocking the collateral value of real-world assets. This is the key to creating a more capital-efficient system for our clients and realize the full value of growing the Abaxx Network, the highest long-term value asset we're building for shareholders. Not just the exchange and clearinghouse, not just the ID++ enabled digital technology stack, but the integrated Abaxx Global Market Network as a whole, the platform to launch near endless competitive products and services for our clients over the long term. Over the next few quarters, our goal is for it to become increasingly clear how the technology that I present today is central to our strategy of adding network value and generating new revenue streams for our exchange and clearing businesses, as well as independently in the Abaxx technology business.
For that reason, I think after today you'll start to see why the company was named something so audacious as Abaxx. Tara, can you pull up the agenda, please? On today's call, we will begin with a deep dive into the technology, the problems it solves, our pilot program roadmap for Q4, and new business revenue models to kick off in the first half of 2026 from this business line. From there, we will discuss the continued development of our exchange and clearing network, a core strategic asset and platform for our business, and provide updates on the significant progress in our listed products, particularly LNG and gold. Joining me on the call today are Chief Commercial Officer Joe Raia, Chief Strategy Officer David Greely, and my co-architect of this very big tech vision, Head of ID++ and Digital Title Products, Ian Forrester.
For institutions and analysts who are new to Abaxx on the call with us today, I'd encourage you to listen to our previous project update calls, which are on our IR website and YouTube, for deeper context on our strategic approach. Our strategy has always been to first develop a commercial footing with an entrenched, highly regulated commodity markets, which is now ramping up as of this quarter, and then push software innovation from the inside out to lower customer friction and intermediary risks. The exchange provides the real-world plumbing and the distribution network, while our technology suite provides the tools to unlock new efficiencies and ultimately entirely new markets. These two parts of our business are now converging in a powerful way.
The technology we've been developing is not just a tangential service, but is core to the strategy of adding network value and unlocking the full potential of our exchange. Today, we're going to start there. Tara, can you move to the next slide? Thank you. To begin, let's get to the technology, as we get into the technology update and why everyone has been so excited about our Q4 pilots and what we've announced. We've had an extremely busy few months since our last call. While the exchange progress has been transformational, anyone who knows me knows that I've been working six or seven years to make this presentation today about the breakthroughs in our technology stack and what this truly sets the stage for Abaxx's future.
To understand what we built, we first have to understand the core software and tokenization problems that the entire financial industry is trying to solve. Don't just take my word for it. Let's start with a couple of quotes from the very top of the market. First, from Larry Fink at BlackRock in his February annual letter, "One day, I expect tokenized funds will become as familiar as ETFs, provided we crack one critical problem: identity verification." From Fidelity's Head of Digital Asset Management, "In order to engage in a transaction, in order to be able to transfer an asset from one holder to another, there's a set of terms. It is a contract that is effectively being created and executed in order to transfer the asset.
We must find a way to automate the verification of your counterparty so that you can transfer the registered security to a verified counterparty in an automated way that is secure and is not going to require you sending individual personal information across every single transaction." These statements from the world's largest asset managers, who also happen to be the largest money market fund managers, perfectly frame the challenge. This is the conversation happening at the highest levels of finance in real time right now, especially since the U.S. passing of the Genius Act on stablecoins and the administration's strategic pivot to on-chain finance. I can't help to be an engineer for a minute here, so I'm about to get a little bit technical for the next few minutes, but I'm doing that intentionally.
We feel it's critical to put our unique solutions and the claims we're making on the record for now, for your reference later. I promise I will bring this back to the massive commercial opportunity and our business and revenue models both inside and outside the exchange. Tara, next slide. The opportunity is best understood with a simple visual. Blockchain-centric businesses are starting at the little box and trying to expand out, likely doing so faster now after the Genius Act and U.S. strategic pivot to tokenization. Abaxx, focused for the last half a decade not just on commoditized distributed ledgers, but on ID, privacy, and legal finality, with all of our highly regulated market infrastructure in place, has an opportunity to absolutely landgrab in the big box. This has always been the inside-out strategy of Abaxx.
We built our market infrastructure to act as a flywheel for Abaxx Technologies, a deliberate design based on our conviction that the rise of decentralized finance was inevitable. We began over a half-decade ago with the golden insight that digitizing real-world assets would also mean solving the hard problems of digital ID, legal finality, and privacy, not just the ledger state. It comes down to a single foundational idea. With bearer digital assets, e.g., Bitcoin, code is law, and ledgers seek a reconcilable ledger state or finality. In real-world regulated assets, law is finality. Ledgers can always be reversed. The engineering challenge can't just be on the best execution of a real-time reconcilable ledger state, but also in real-time reconcilable legal finality. This one idea is the key to everything we built.
It's the architectural principle that separates us from everyone else trying to solve this problem, and it's built on three core pillars. I'll leave this slide up for just a second for anyone to screenshot or look through it. Next slide, please, Tara. Getting into the pillars of our technology approach. Pillar one, identity as foundation. You cannot have legal finality in a fast digital world without trusted digital identity. In the institutional world, digital identity is still seen as an inferior form of identity to paper documents and offline workflows. In many ways, this may not change for a while yet. We believe that much of the market has been chasing the wrong solution and wrong approach to tokenization workflows using blockchain wallet addresses as the foundation of identity, be it opened or permissioned. In both cases, surveillance is the foundation of digital identity reconciliation on a blockchain.
Surveillance of logins and credential databases with a permission ledger, or surveillance of public wallet address records for identity proofs. Our approach isn't about more surveillance tech. It's about what we call a human blockchain of trust. This means we anchor digital identity in our real-world accountable parties, like law firms, notaries, or regulated entities. Professionals who have real skin in the game and stand to lose big time if they make a false claim, just like in our legal system. Think of it like a digital bouncer at a high-stakes event. Your decentralized ID stands in for you, and you can claim to be whoever you want when you walk up. The bouncer needs proof. If you left your driver's license on the nightstand, you might need a credit card, call a manager, or a friend inside to vouch for you.
Our system allows digital trust to build the same way it does in the real world, privately, but from real-world credentials and attestations made by legal or regulated entities making claims that put their reputational skin in the game. For example, one such foundational credential in the ID++ stack is the attestation that, yes, this person is a regulated member participant of Abaxx Exchange. As more and more of these third-party claims and proofs are held in a user's ID wallet, the probabilistic real-world identity becomes a fly trapped in amber, layer upon layer of skin in the game, third-party proofs built up around the user, giving decentralized probabilistic finality that the digital identity matches the real-world identity without the need for surveillance.
To us, it is self-evident that this version of digital identity will one day take the place of surveillance-based systems and eventually become lower risk than our current identity proofs, such as a forgeable wet ink signature or the single skin-in-the-game claim of a notary. As a side note, I still have no doubt that this is the inevitable future of the internet and an absolute essential technology to validate humans in the age of AI and digital fakes. It is going to take companies like Abaxx and our early partners to engineer it and will it into being. Our long-term goal is to be the first in building this longest chain of identity proofs, not through selling crypto tokens or scanning eyeballs, but by building the long, slow, compounding proofs of the human blockchain through traditional contracts and regulated workflows.
This is also where our business model is completely different from most people working on DIDs, decentralized identities, and verifiable credentials, many of whom have thrown in the towel or back-burnered this theoretically superior technology as there's no obvious standalone product. As we built Abaxx Digital Title, we realized that ID++ identity itself was never really the product. It's the enabler of other products, exactly like Abaxx Digital Title. We must start there first, with the product as a full stack ecosystem embedded with the enabling technology of ID++ from day one. With Abaxx ID++, identity isn't the product. It's the bouncer that lets in that CAD 42 trillion party at scale, just as Mr. Fink alluded to. Pillar two, solving the legal finality first. This brings me back to our second pillar, which comes directly from our main thesis.
For real-world assets, commodities, money market funds, equities, and bonds, the ultimate source of truth is the legal system. The law is the finality, not the ledger. The law can and does reverse ledger entities all the time. While others focus on the technological finality of a ledger, we are focused on creating a real-time, reconcilable legal finality. The technology must serve the law. The law does not serve the technology. We put identity and the law at the core of our Abaxx Digital Title system, not the blockchain. Pillar number three, privacy that is built in, not bolted on to an open ledger. Finally, pillar three, institutional participants require privacy, not anonymity. Public key wallet anonymity is a risk, one of the main risks that has kept blockchain assets outside the party for 10 years when it comes to institutional assets.
When transactions are based in law, legally, you have to know who's across from you signing the transaction. You have to know your counterparty. Privacy around the terms of that transaction, or in some cases even that you're even doing a transaction, is a non-negotiable requirement for commercial markets to remain competitive and not overly centralized. One has to look no further than the commodity market to understand the need for absolute privacy. This is and was a hard, hard problem. It's taken us years to solve at least three iterations of our protocols and software stack and an architecture combining multiple cryptographic methods into a single stack, including some of the latest cutting-edge encryption standards. Our approach demanded reconciling seemingly incompatible requirements, robust compliance, transaction privacy, and real-world legal enforceability, all without relying on a central surveillance or central database.
The result is a system where advanced cryptography operates in concert with regulated financial infrastructure, a technical feat we'll detail further in upcoming disclosures about the Abaxx Trust Network. I often joke that Abaxx has been building an extra transport layer to the internet just to solve this problem, which, as you'll see when we present the technology more in the future, might actually be true. This is how we do multiparty reconciliation of legal claims while maintaining need-to-know privacy instead of taking a transparent public ledger and trying to bolt on additional privacy ledgers, or our privacy is an inherent feature of our legally grounded off-chain digital title token system. This architecture allows us to move from the old model of permissioned ledgers, which created data silos and fragmented liquidity, to a new, more powerful model of permissioned assets.
This means the compliance and privacy logic is embedded in the asset itself, allowing it to move across different networks without sacrificing security. This is the key insight. Many of those in the market are trying to fix the inherent problems of blockchain by adding more complexity, more fee tokens, and more layers. We think it's self-evident that you can't solve blockchain's problem with more blockchain, and that we've developed a better approach that doesn't rely on blockchain, while still being able to use distributed ledgers as an underlying composable ledger or execution environment. To be clear, ours is a new parallel tokenization system where privacy, identity, and legal certainty come first and at a premium. When we say token, it's more than just an ERC-20 or a Solana smart contract.
It's a proprietary technology from Abaxx that is foundational for unlocking that CAD 42 trillion big box, and we plan to prove these claims over the rest of Q3 and Q4 so we can landgrab and go to market early next year. Next, please, slide, please. Thank you for staying with me through these architectural underpinnings. I know it's a lot. Of course, we'll post this video later for review. It's critical groundwork because it's the technological and proprietary foundation for what comes next for Abaxx and Abaxx Exchange. What does this all mean in practice? What is the first most powerful application of this technology? From a business and market perspective, it's about winning the race to create real-time, legally enforceable global collateral. This isn't just our opinion. The entire industry is focused on this.
The Futures Industry Association, or FIA, recently published a paper called "Accelerating the Velocity of Collateral." They laid out the core challenges perfectly. The movement of collateral is inefficient, the system isn't built for 24/7 global markets, and most importantly, current tokenization models have critical gaps in legal certainty, liquidation certainty, and institutional privacy. The three pillars I just walked you through are not a theoretical exercise. They are the specific engineered solutions to the exact problems the FIA just identified. Many people may not know this, but I was actually at the ground floor of enterprise blockchain well over a decade ago. I had been anticipating these problems for a long, long time. Our Abaxx Digital Title, built on a foundation of a human blockchain of trust, legal finality, and built-in privacy, is the architecture that can finally unlock the velocity of collateral that the industry needs.
This brings me to the most important point, which I've been highlighting in our last few calls. Our first and most demanding client for this technology is our own Abaxx Exchange. It will be the toughest client we ever face. This is the inside-out strategy in action. We are building these tools to solve the real-world friction that our own clients face in our own regulated environment. This creates a powerful flywheel. We aren't just a software company hoping to sell to a bank and endlessly wandering those halls for an enterprise deal. We are building the tools for ourselves and our clients to our own exacting standards. Now, to be very clear, and I will keep repeating this, this is the vision, and it requires a methodical and respectful process to our partners and our regulators.
That is precisely why our first pilots will take place outside of the live clearing system. The destination is clear. To integrate this technology and turn our clients' physical assets, be it gold, LNG, oil, copper, money market funds, or even art and other real property from static inventory into dynamic, real-time financial resources. We believe we are only a few steps away from prime time, as we've spent years building Abaxx Digital Title as a separate and final piece of the puzzle for real-time collateral. Based on the conversations we've had with many major players, we believe we may be the only ones who have a fairly good head start on that big box of assets once we go live early next year, the landgrab for assets on network, or AON. That brings me to the roadmap. How do we get there? Our approach is divided into two phases.
Phase I, which will take place in the fourth quarter of this year, is centered on our pilot transactions, which we recently announced, and therefore a broad peer review. The goal here is not just to prove the technology works, but to validate our ambitious legal and technological claims with the entire ecosystem. These pilots are designed to create legally enforceable digital documents of title that align with the global standards, like the UNCITRAL, a modern law on electronic transferable records, which is a critical step for institutional adoption. This isn't a closed-door test. We are inviting government stakeholders in Singapore and beyond, our FCM partners, key industry bodies like the FIA and World Gold Council, and our commercial partners, and even some of our key institutional shareholders to participate, some of whom I'm meeting this week just after this call, and why we wanted to have this call today.
This broad peer review is critical for building the market-wide trust necessary for adoption. Following successful pilots, we'll move to phase II, our go-to-market in the first half of 2026. This will begin with a fully managed service where clients can access the ecosystem through our Abaxx Console applications. For those of you who have followed us for a while, remember my description of this as our full stack product layer cake. We believe that every point in the trust triangle, identity, ledgers, and privacy, need to be distributed and competitive in the long term. We are starting by providing the only software application that lets people into the digital title asset ecosystem, our own front-end software tools and software as a service tools. This is like all of the easy-to-use software built on top of Ethereum or Solana protocols over the years.
We have the first managed service that can stand up to an enterprise-grade onboarding. Again, the Abaxx full stack is built in layers. At the foundation, we use open internet standards for digital identity, credentials, data transport, and data privacy. The next layer is ID++. Our proprietary protocol implements these open standards for a highly regulated environment, which becomes our competitive advantage in the long run. On top of that is our service and policy layer, which implements the ID++ protocol as a set of APIs, services, policies, and core applications that form the foundation of the Abaxx Trust Network, including our identity management applications, like the Abaxx Verifier Plus app, which is live today, and Abaxx One this fall, which will allow corporate identity services and single sign-ons right through the fast lane of the ID++ passport office.
Next come the workflow applications, Abaxx Messenger, Sign, and Drive, which are common enough-looking user interfaces and SaaS tools, but are also thin application suite built on a completely private backend, the Abaxx Private Network, with decentralized identity and deep data privacy for users of the SaaS to create and manage Abaxx Digital Titles. Abaxx doesn't even have to be in the loop for non-regulated transactions. We become a pure platform service on top of private protocols and APIs. The big vision we presented years ago where ID++ and user data are decoupled from the application layer and live privately just above the internet transport protocols. Again, an architecture that will be absolutely essential in the age of AI.
Finally, at the top layer, where we get back to the business applications, is where these tools give us competitive advantage to launch products at Abaxx Exchange, like digital title margin, collateral, and eventually the green premium smart commodities. In 2026, we are starting with a fully integrated managed service because it's the only way to ensure the integrity and legal finality of the system from day one. Our long-term vision has always been to define the protocol and own the service layers, allowing others to compete and build on top of our ID++ and digital title network over time, which leads us to a straightforward business model for our technology. First, a simple user interface SaaS licensing fee for seats in the Abaxx applications, such as Messenger, Sign, and Drive, which is for now the only way to access the protocols in the Abaxx Digital Title platform.
The far larger, longer-term opportunity is in the network and transaction fees, where we generate revenue based on the value of assets being managed and transacted within the Abaxx Trust Network. I should note, you know, some of you have probably seen that big box, little box slide before. I think JP Morgan also used a very similar slide with CAD `30 trillion. We've added some additional capital, and that's the collateral of gold. We think gold can be quite a significant asset in there. This is how we monetize the full stack and build scalable, potentially very high-margin software businesses alongside our exchange, when this collateral is being used in the network, and we're able to earn basis points in both transactions and assets on network.
I know I've covered a lot today already in the technology, and I plan to go into more detail in the Q&A, but let's leave the technology discussion there for now. What I hope is becoming clear to all our shareholders is how this is all one big integrated strategy. The technology we just discussed will help us grow market share and create unique products for the exchange, and in turn, the exchange bootstraps the credibility, the distribution, and the go-to-market for the technology. It's a powerful, self-reinforcing flywheel. This brings me back to the dual mandate I've discussed on previous calls. The technology is driving the long-term development of the Abaxx Network as a strategic asset, creating the proprietary moat that will define our company's future. As you'll see now, the traditional exchange, as it exists today, is delivering on the near-term objectives of volume and liquidity growth.
Executing on both of these mandates is critical to achieving our medium-term goal of eventually joining the ranks of a million-plus average daily volume club. The technology reinforces our path there by creating unique utility for our clients, products and services to manage risk and unlock capital that no other exchange has today, helping us gain and win market share in ways that other exchanges simply won't be able to replicate in the near future. To be clear, we still have a path to that ADB scale already that exists in the massive opportunities like our core LNG, metals, and carbon markets, even without additional technology. The demand for these benchmarks and better risk management tools in these sectors is immense. The technology we've developed is what reinforces and accelerates that path. It becomes our strategic moat.
By potentially integrating Abaxx Digital Title as soon as next year, we can offer additional services and real-world utility for our clients in gold and LNG that other exchanges simply won't be able to replicate. This isn't just about building new tech. It's about building better tools for our core markets that will help us gain market share and win the benchmark status in some of these markets. Now, let's get on with a few business updates at the exchange and see how we're pulling this all together. Again, I'll start with the network, even when we talk about Abaxx Exchange and clearing. As I've said before, the core asset we're building for the long term is the Abaxx Network itself. The daily volumes at Abaxx Exchange are important, and they are growing, but the real strategic value comes from building out the market plumbing.
Every new clearing member, every new trading firm, an ISV that connects us to new trading desks, and every new data distributor adds another node to our network, making the entire platform more valuable and harder to replicate. This is how we build the foundation to eventually join the million-plus ADB club as we add new nodes, new products, and expand liquidity in our existing products. On that front, our onboarding and distribution continue to show strong progress, which we can talk more about in the Q&A. We will update our formal operational milestones with a quarterly report very soon. As of our last market update that we presented back in April, 29 trading firms, 14 inter-dealer brokers, six direct and indirect FCMs are fully onboarded and live with a number of data partnerships that are imminent and more in the pipeline.
As far as product milestones and developing liquidity, we've also had some transformative breakthroughs since our last call, starting with LNG. After the initial launch of our markets last year, it's taken about a year of onboarding various parts of the trading ecosystem. Over the past week, we've started seeing daily trading activity on the Gulf of Mexico contract, and we recently had our first calendar month spread trade executed in the market last week as well. This is a huge milestone. It's the first sign of a true physically backed forward curve for LNG forming on our screens, driven by real commercial interest out of Asia. This isn't a synthetic index.
It is the market discovering the future price of real LNG, which we believe will be one of the top 10 global benchmarks and most active global futures products globally, as LNG becomes the world's most important and most traded energy commodity. In gold, the launch has been a phenomenal success. Even before we add the second and third layers to the stack with the real-time in-vault market at Abaxx Spot and the Abaxx Digital Gold Title, where we can unlock trillions of dollars in gold as real-time collateral in a treasury-like basis trade ecosystem, which will only exist at Abaxx. On the futures contracts, we've seen a rapid and accelerating ramp-up in volume.
Average daily volume grew from around 200 lots for June, where we launched the exchange in the back half of the month, to about 384 lots per day ADV in July, with consistent 250 to 500 lot days. Now we're regularly seeing 500 to 1,000 lots per day, with consistent days over 1,000 here in August. More importantly, we have now an active curve across four months. The market is using our contract not just for spot transactions, but to build a curve for forward risk management. In carbon, we also had a world first. We successfully completed the first ever physical delivery of a regulated exchange-cleared voluntary carbon contract. This was a live commercial transaction between major participants like Nokeria and a U.S. counterparty, facilitated by a division of Merrick's and cleared by firms including KGI Securities.
This transaction validates our entire end-to-end infrastructure, from trading and clearing right through final settlement and registry transfer. Stay tuned for the next pieces of that market infrastructure stack with our next regulated entity going live, Adaptive Finance, which, similar to our gold infrastructure, can open up the nexus between real-time spot, futures, and Abaxx Digital Title collateral markets for global carbon. Finally, I realize we have already had a number of questions on the FBAT process, new products, and more detailed questions on the ramp-up of LNG, gold, and our progress with partners, particularly with LNG in Asia. Let's actually move to the Q&A portion of the call, and we can better address those and more. Tara, can you please put up the summary slide from the call and bring Dave, Joe, and Ian on for the Q&A?
Thanks, Josh. We have a number of questions that have been submitted over the past few days since this call was announced. Also, for everyone on the call now, you can submit questions using the Q&A button at the bottom of your toolbar on your screen for Zoom. We'll dive into the questions. I know there was a lot of ground that Josh covered during this call, so some of the questions will probably be a little repetitive to some of the things he said. I'm going to leave those questions in simply because I think it's worth repeating and making sure that everybody hears the answer clearly and concisely. Let me start getting into the questions. I'm going to take the first group of questions on the tech side. Josh, the first question we had was, how do you make money on the tech?
Yeah, I agree. I kind of ran through it somewhat quickly in the script. This is obviously very important. Again, when we're talking about the digital title technology, this, in the medium to long term, is a decentralized system completely parallel to what you're seeing in what's sort of known today in particularly the Ethereum or Solana type ecosystems, where we really have a decentralized title technology where the reconciliation is, which, by the way, embeds decentralized identity. You know this really can be as powerful as blockchain as a whole, in our view, as something sort of separate and working together with blockchain. In the early days, we are the full stack. We are the managed service to get there.
The first way for people to actually be able to use this, say someone wants to move collateral in real time, their firm and their members are going to have to have monthly or annual subscription services to the actual software suite that allows them to create, transfer, and manage these titles. That will look like a traditional software business where you have seat licenses for a software as a service to use the front end that we've created. The second and the longer-term business model here is actually the way that our protocol and the way we participate in that network and the service layers that are there, it's actually having a piece of the assets on network or the transaction fees.
If we think about it, in a very commodity use case, right now, when a client posts margin to the clearinghouse, that margin is typically, if there's cash, if there's interest earned on that margin, typically that's shared between the clearing members and the clearinghouse. You could think of this in a very similar way. If someone is using our technology to pledge title, that can be shared within the ecosystem, particularly right into the clearing ecosystem. As we go through these pilots, I think that'll become more obvious as you see the use cases. Essentially, it's basis points on the assets on network, it's basis points on the transaction, and then because we also have the clearinghouse, there'll be potentially just fee-related services if you use it for margin.
In the early days, starting when we launch the service, anyone getting in there is going to have to pay a monthly SaaS license.
Thanks, Josh. Second question that we had come in is, how is the technology you're presenting different from others working in this space? I imagine they're referring to blockchain, stable coins. The question is, do you feel like you have a head start? They understand that ICE is also working on a pilot as are others.
Yeah, I mean, I really do. Obviously, like I said, I've been in this enterprise blockchain. I think I joked with one of the founders of Digital Assets and the Canton Network that I was there in that freezing cold hangar in San Francisco at Construct. I think that was like 2015 or 2016 when all of the enterprise blockchains were basically just white papers. I've followed this quite a long time. Founding Abaxx, the whole idea of founding Abaxx is we believe that decentralized identity was going to be core to the whole system. It was really only after two or three iterations of our software when we really got into how we were going to pull together essentially five different cryptographic systems, how we were going to pull that all together to create this asset that solves all of those hard challenges.
I don't even know anyone working on this. There's obviously people working on decentralized identity and verifiable credentials, but I think it's very, very unlikely people have pulled together the five puzzle pieces to create this system. Like I said, I really do believe that this is equal and as important as blockchain itself. Of course, you want to marry those together in an execution environment. That will take a whole other layer of technology for oracles and smart contracts and everything else. I think there's going to be pieces of this, obviously, that people can probably try to replicate. The privacy piece itself, I think, is one of the hardest. You really, really have to be working with a lot of systems to pull this all together. I think I put it on Twitter. I think we've got a multi-year head start here once we prove our claims.
Thanks, Josh. We just had a question come in now, but I think this is a great time to hit it. The question is, is it fair to say that the Abaxx technology is a blockchain that is legally compliant and can be used for legal purposes as compared to Bitcoin, where it is mainly used to hide identity?
Yeah, that's one way to put it. Again, I think, look, I use things like tokenization. I use things like blockchain because that's obviously what people are familiar with. What we've built, what blockchain is to a ledger reconciliation, Abaxx Digital Title is a legal reconciliation, which I think is much harder. It really is separate. Like I said, in our architectural foundation, we think law trumps blockchain. Ledgers can always be reversed by law. If we can prove law, like we are the foundation of the system.
Thanks. Let's take one more question on the tech side, and then we can roll into some questions on the exchange side. For the, and we'll come back to tech. We've got a lot of questions here. Another question is, are you able to articulate at a high level how Abaxx may be able to monetize money market fund products so that analysts and shareholders can grasp the potential TAM and revenue this product could generate for stakeholders?
Yeah, I mean, look, the opportunity is just enormous, right? I mean, anyone that's tried to move US dollars and collateral in real time across Asia, or move it from New York to Asia, move your margin from one market to another, that is not a fast process. That is not a simple process, right? If we get a head start where firms are able to move money market funds, not like a stablecoin, but actual sort of a chain of what's known as the provenance gap, right? Just to dive into that for just a second. If you have even a regulated GENSX stablecoin, ultimately, it's tied to one issuer, right? It's one sort of single counterparty that's issuing that stablecoin. They themselves are trying to back up the stablecoin with their own basket of money market funds, treasuries, managing short-term duration.
If you're sitting on a stablecoin in collateral, say in a clearinghouse, you may be two or three steps away from the actual underlying cash. We've all seen what happens in financial crises. Even good money market funds can break a buck. Now you're an extra hop. What do you actually own if you've got a token on a blockchain? You still have to go to that issuer who has to go to the underlying cash. If we can daisy chain that right to that cash, right to the cleared level, that really solves massive problems. Back to the revenue perspective, yes, people using this will have to pay licenses to get into our system. If they're pledging it on the exchange, instead of cash, if you're pledging money markets, for example, which I need to make very clear, we need to get all of our regulators comfortable with this.
I don't want to get too far ahead of others, like we have had the initial conversations. That's the point of the pilot. To the extent that a regulator is comfortable with this system, this now allows people to post that money market. Abaxx itself, both as a clearinghouse and as the technology provider, could share in the interest of those assets. Not too different than the way stablecoin issuers now make money.
Thanks, Josh. I know I said we'd flip to exchange, but a question just came in that I think is a really good one, in that it gets to, I think, a way people might kind of misperceive some of the conversations around the chance of success that's been priced into the stock over time versus how you would think about the chance of success. The question is, I'm a strong believer in Abaxx for four years now. I have read multiple times there is a 10% chance of success. Do you think this percentage has changed?
Yeah, look, you're talking to entrepreneurs' bias here, of course. Like I'm never going to quit. Yeah, look, I mean, just basic math here. As I mentioned in our script, on record, we totally believe that our addressable market for our products and more is one million lots per day ADV. Again, just use very basic industry, like not our specific numbers, very basic industry numbers. If you're looking at a CAD 1.50 to CAD 2 ADV, that's something like somewhere between $300 million and $500 million a year in revenue. Industry margins, let's call it two-thirds. You kind of do your own probabilities of what's priced in based on the time of us getting to one million ADV. It's not a very high percentage priced in. That's just the exchange. You add the technology piece to it. It's obviously priced in zero right now.
Of course, this was really our big reveal today. We'll get further into that. Again, I just want to emphasize it's the combination of the two. It's not just one. It's not just the other. If we're the only one in the world that can run a basis trade on gold, then what is the opportunity for that to really become the gold? Sorry to define that a little bit more. Treasuries are used as collateral, but you can also basically perfectly hedge treasuries. You can't do that in gold today. Today, even the exchanges and clearinghouses that use gold as collateral will typically haircut it upwards of 20% or more. The reason is, what gold do you actually own? Do you own a deliverable gold contract? Do you own LBMA? Do you have an LBMA bullion account at your bullion bank in London?
You're hedging COMEX or Hong Kong or somewhere else? For a clearinghouse, how quickly would we be able to turn that gold into cash? These are all the things that affect margin calculations, not just on the clearinghouse, but also the FCMs. Even if the clearinghouse and the regulator says, yes, we can accept gold, it's still incumbent of the FCMs to also accept it. That's why a lot of these assets that are non-cash get haircutted. Even money market funds typically have haircuts, because in financial crisis, money markets can break a buck. How quickly can you actually get your redemption in cash if that money market's holding a slightly longer duration paper? By creating all of this stuff in real time, we can give utility to both commodity firms and others, but it's just simply better than the competition once we can prove all these claims.
That will obviously increase the flywheel for ADV. I think we're pricing a very, very low probability of success. If you look around our team, our technology, our timing, I think that probability is off. That's me.
Thanks, Josh. Thanks for the question. Onto the exchange. The first question related to the exchange we received is, on social media, Josh coined the phrase black hole liquidity. Can you explain what you mean by that in terms of both the gold and the LNG contracts?
Yeah, maybe I'll take the first shot and I'll turn it over to Joe to actually explain how this works. When I say that, particularly with LNG, it's hard to build liquidity on brand new products, particularly physical products. That actually goes all the way back to WTI and Henry Hub and a lot of these things. They took years to develop liquidity. What I mean by that is, once you do have liquidity, it becomes best execution. A firm can't just simply choose to, I use the example, like you can't just choose to price Apple stock on a price and volume that's totally off market. You're really going to, I mean, sure, bilaterally, I guess you can do anything. In most companies, that's going to raise a lot of flags for auditors. Obviously, there's even regulatory requirements for best execution in a number of markets.
Once our contract for LNG has enough liquidity, it becomes a matter of best execution. That compounds the liquidity. People have to then use the contract. That's one piece. I think that same thing can apply for gold basis and managing risk. If we're the only fully integrated futures product, spot product, and real-time title transfer, there's even a chance for our gold contract to be the best execution for liquidity pricing and risk, particularly since the largest market is actually Asia and Kilobars. It's not the United States or Europe. One of the big problems why Europe and the U.S. still dominate in liquidity is because of collateral and capital. If you free that collateral and capital and move faster, like things like Abaxx, the size of the market's going to naturally gravitate to Asia, where the fundamental demand is for commodities.
Anyways, Joe, do you want to, that's my theoretical, but Joe, do you want to talk about how you're building liquidity?
I will talk about the black hole of liquidity, but I think what we're really looking at is how liquidity does beget liquidity. You hear that all the time. We talk about it. Everybody talks about it. It's truly how markets develop. In the instance of LNG and gold, you have two totally different and opposite markets that, with gold, you had an existing global marketplace in, almost like a brownfield market. In LNG, you have truly a greenfield market that never ever traded before from a physical futures perspective. The only thing that was available in the market, unregulated index-related products that the market just, as we used to like to say, would use because there was nothing else available in the marketplace. What you're seeing now is a gravitation to best execution, as you said, and tighter markets.
Just look at the spreads on gold, how tight they've become over the past just several weeks, just since we launched. That's because we have liquidity providers, market makers, commercial firms trading it. The market is just starting to grow organically from where we launched the contract. In LNG, you really started with a market that didn't exist. We're bringing in firms to provide liquidity. Again, you're seeing those spreads tighten. We're getting interest from global participants in the LNG marketplace to look at it. I think, Josh, as you used to like to say, we had 200 firms that used to like to trade second. We're starting to see those firms start to come out of the woodwork and say, hey, you guys are executing. This is, some of them saying, a monumental success. We think we'll see some great follow-through with the marketplace on those products.
On other products too, in carbon, in our battery materials, and some of the other ones that we have that maybe we'll get into in some of the additional questions.
Thanks, Joe. I kind of wanted to come back to some of the things you've been saying. We have a number of questions that have come in where it's really asking about our outlook and anticipated volume growth over the next six to 24 months. In some ways, it's a very natural question, but getting those numbers, like this isn't a linear process. I was wondering if you could just kind of walk people through, you know, how should they be thinking about how our volume should grow and what just that process looks like and what we're doing. We've seen gold take off recently. We've seen trades picking up in LNG.
Maybe a little bit of the behind the scenes that leads to the numbers that people are so interested in and that are so important.
I won't get into the projections. You know, naturally, we're really thrilled with how the market is starting. As we like to say, we're really just at the beginnings of growth stage of those products. I think what we're seeing, though, which is the most encouraging part, is again, the firms that have reached out to us, the onboardings of new firms, the surface area that we're creating across trading firms, broker firms, FCMs, clearing firms. That will organically help grow the products. We may have one firm that's going to be trading, that's looking at trading some of our weather products. There's also their traders that may try to onboard with us because the weather guys are coming on board.
You're starting to see ways of firms that they want to access our markets are becoming very creative in the way that they do get through our markets. That is very encouraging. We grow again, as we've always said, because we control the clearinghouse. We look at products that we can launch over the next few months. I think we talked about significant new products in the pipeline. We're hoping to keep on track with the ones that we, if not even further, surpass the product growth opportunity. There's no lack of inbounds from trading firms asking us for new products across all different asset classes. We're very excited about it. We know we picked the right location in Singapore, as we've always said, because that is the growth area of markets in precious metals, battery materials, base metals, and energy.
Just watch the space and follow us, and you'll see the new products that we will be launching.
Thanks, Joe. Hey, Josh, I just wanted to check in with you. I know we're coming up on the hour. We have a large number of questions left on exchange. We have tech questions.
Yeah, no, my script went a while and we're after market, so I'm totally happy to stay on longer if people want.
Okay, perfect. Maybe I'll take a couple more exchange questions, then circle back to the tech. A question that's come in from a couple different people is trying to understand a little bit of how things are going and our regional strategy within Asia, so different countries. Some questions about what's happening in China, what are you doing broadly to kind of get penetration into different countries. I think there's a bit of this that this is a global exchange. We already have people trading from many different countries within the region. Maybe, Joe, you can talk about the commercial strategy there.
Real quickly, we just want to be careful about how much we talk about as far as new growth opportunities that we haven't announced yet. China is obviously an important part of our region of where we're domiciled.
There are very large traders in pretty much every commodity, including LNG and also gold. We announced not too long ago that we have an office open in Beijing. We didn't do that just because we want to visit there. I think that there are opportunities that we want to take advantage of because of the relationships that we have both existing from some of our senior staff that spent time in China, but also just again from the inbounds. The marketplace is looking for new opportunities across different asset classes and not necessarily to trade onshore China, but potentially to trade products that are in China outside of China. There's just general opportunity there. You look at some of the other exchanges and how much volume they're generating from China alone, mainland China, it's quite significant.
I would look to that and say that's a pretty good roadmap as far as what we see and some of the new opportunities and new products that the other exchanges haven't even looked at. We're very excited about the potential for growth there.
Okay, maybe one more exchange question, then I'll circle back to tech. This should be a short and sweet one. People are asking for an update on timing for FBAT. For those who may not be as into exchange intricacies, that's recognition by the U.S. government as a foreign board of trade, which would allow U.S.-based clients to trade on our exchange. Correct me if I got that wrong, Joe, but what's the timing and update on FBAT?
It's what's called a no-action relief letter. That means that, as you said correctly, Dave, customers, trading firms, and FCMs, brokers that are domiciled in the U.S.
access our markets directly without any fear of regulatory action against them. That allows trading firms to trade electronically. It allows brokers to submit block trades directly. It allows clearing firms to allow their customers to clear and access our markets. We obviously announced that we submitted our FBAT application several months ago. We're just waiting for the CFTC to issue the no-action relief letter. We've been working with them very closely to answer any questions that they may have. We're excited for the customer base in North America to have access to our markets because they've been asking for it quite aggressively.
All right, thanks, Joe. With that, let's circle back to tech. We've had a question, Josh, that you've referenced AON or assets on network a couple times during the presentation. What do you mean by that?
How does it compare to AUM, assets under management, and relate to your monetization strategy for the technology?
Sure. AUM, assets under management, is obviously a common acronym for financial assets. If you look under the hood of AUM, typically it's not just the manager. There's also basis points going to the custodian, to other pieces of the market infrastructure ecosystem. When I say assets on network, I think it's important to just differentiate between AUM because the assets on network could allow a similar type of market infrastructure fee, maybe not too dissimilar to a custodial fee. Even holding gold, a custodian gets paid 5 basis points to 10 basis points at the wholesale level or something like that, right? We think it's something similar where the assets on network, again, this isn't just Abaxx as a centralized system. This will be a network. That can be something that's shared almost like an interchange fee between different players. It could be custodians or omnibus managers.
It could be brokers and distributors. It could be FCMs in the clearinghouse with the clearinghouse. I wanted to differentiate it. We're a bit like the AI guys. We've got a lot of naming conventions going on here when we're inventing things. It was just one way to think about it because it's a little different than traditional asset management in the status quo system for AUM. It's a little different than, say, assets on chain or whatever you want to call it in the blockchain ecosystem, which are never really on chain, right? They're always bridged to some issuer. I'm just thinking of a new way to describe it that can explain exactly how we make money and how the network values by bringing assets into the Abaxx Digital Title ecosystem.
Thanks, Josh. We've had another question: what instruments does Abaxx Full Digital Title work for? Everything? Treasuries, bonds, et cetera? What sector is Abaxx starting with as an initial focus?
Yeah, I mean, I would say everything. I think the two most important, again, like I said, kind of the land grab and the big box is money markets because money markets essentially become that institutional stablecoin. All of the things that people are talking about with all of these things will move on chain once you have the liquidity and the dollars that don't have to go in and out of the banking system specifically. Your money market funds essentially become the stablecoin for this network. That's probably the most important thing. Also, gold. Obviously, gold is where we started because this is actually something, and if you look at our pilots, this is something that's almost completely in our control or like in our ecosystem. They'll be. Entities
and so forth. You know, gold, obviously, we would work with our partners, work with our Abaxx Spot, and so that one's a little bit easier. With money markets, you obviously have to have a partner, an actual underlying money market manager. Those are the kind of discussions we're having now. That's really where we're starting. To answer your question, everything can go into this network. Like I said, it's really a separate identity and legal ecosystem that's kind of separate from blockchain, and it can work completely with blockchain. Right? Someone may want to use Abaxx Digital Title, and people can use Abaxx Digital Title for what they're doing on chain and then Solana or Ethereum or somewhere else. It's not that our assets won't work with blockchain. It actually works extremely well.
I'm just saying that it's separate, and like I said, I think it's superior because we're working on legal and identity finality rather than just ledger finality. Yeah. In money markets, just to simplify it, if stablecoin is the digital cash, our tokenized money markets funds is like an institutional digital certified check. It's not just the certified check. It's also all the legal claims, the buy sell agreement, the identity and the passport, and the settlement instructions. It's kind of the whole thing. This is sort of the digital cash for our ecosystem.
Thanks, Josh. We've had another question come in, which is related, so I'll go to that. You know, one of the listeners is still a little unclear on the opportunity and how it's differentiated versus a lot of the stablecoin hype that they've been hearing, specifically as it relates to the money market fund opportunity.
Yeah. I mean, look, if you look at the market cap of the two largest stablecoin issuers, and again, they're in that little box down in the left corner of our infographic, I think it's like a CAD 200 billion market cap between the top stablecoin players, one public and one private. I think being first to move money market funds in institutional and regulated markets can be a very, very significant opportunity.
That's great. I think we got one more question right now on the tech. Getting back to the pilots, are there partners committed to each of the two pilots, and will Abaxx be disclosing pilot participant names before the pilots take place?
On the gold side, we've got basically every piece of the gold puzzle but one locked down. We've even had some major banks that want to be observers. I probably didn't get into that detail just because there was so much to cover. There are really kind of three work streams. There's the technology work stream, which is essentially done. Obviously, technology is never done, so we'll tweak up until the point of pilot, but the core system works. That's why we wanted to start putting out those press releases, and it is going through the main QA. Then there's the legal work stream. What are the actual legal pieces to it? That's going to be slightly different for money markets and securities than it is for bail-in assets like gold and commodities. Then there's the actual pilot process itself: the NDAs, managing the schedules, the transactions.
I describe it a little bit like people looking in on a surgery. There will actually be two or three participants, or probably, in our case, three or four participants in the actual transaction. Then you have a room full of people up in the window, watching and taking notes. That's how it's going to play out. Yes, on the gold side, we're more or less there. On the money market side, that's going to come a little bit after because that's the little bit harder part, obviously, which is which money market manager to work with.
Thanks, Josh. I think we have one more question, and we can close it out. This is more, we've had a number of questions come in at the corporate strategy level. You know, it's always a question how much detail to go into. I'm going to throw out a few of the questions. I think broadly, there's kind of the ask of, you know, how are investors thinking about the stock? What is the strategy for engaging investors? For example, some questions have been about potential U.S. uplisting for the stock. There's been a question about that BlackRock's an investor, is Fidelity also? Maybe we could just finish out with you giving some of your thoughts on where you're thinking of taking the company from an investor perspective.
Yeah. Look, I mean, we are obviously always thinking about that in the stage and the scale of the opportunities we have. I think that a lot of people questioned our decision at the time, but I think quite an attractive financing structure that brought in, you know, again, those same, well, it's publicly now filed. You can see those investors like BlackRock that came in to support us in our March April financing. Look, I mean, we continue to attract top investors in all of our private placements. I'm not too worried. Access to capital has never really been my biggest worry. It's always about cost of capital and what share price and what terms. Of course, always getting in front of more people. This is again, this is why I had the call today.
The types of conversations I've had over the last two weeks since we put out those press releases, particularly people, anyone that's worked in enterprise blockchain, when they saw the claims that we made around the solvency gap, identity, legal finality, these are the big problems. Yes, I would say the tenor of my conversations with major institutions has changed significantly since those press releases, which is why I wanted to have this conversation and continue to talk to these institutions, both as partners, potential investors. Yes, of the top, call it three, four money markets in the world, we've got very deep relationships or even shareholders in basically all of them. We're in the right rooms to execute this.
Right. Thanks, Josh. Those are all the questions we have. I'll turn it back to you to finish out the call.
Thank you, everybody, for, you know, I think we had almost 500 people sign up, you know, in the middle of the summer, after market on a Monday. I appreciate your time, and, you know, feel free to reach out, and thank you, everybody, for talking to me.