Hello, everyone, and thank you all for joining us for the Lytham Partners Spring 2026 Investor Conference. My name is Robert Blum, Managing Partner at Lytham Partners. Today, Luke Norman at US Gold will be taking us through a brief slide presentation. US Gold trades under the ticker symbol USAU. All right, let's get started. Luke, welcome. The floor is now yours.
Thank you. Thanks, Robert. I'm going to take you through what I think is the most exciting pre-development or development-ready mining company in North America, and I'll tell you why. Gold, copper, and silver, all the most important ingredients. USAU, again, listed on Nasdaq, as Robert had pointed out. The project I'm going to focus on here, taking you through the slide deck, is our CK Gold and Copper Project. It's located in Cheyenne, Wyoming. If I have a moment, I may even point to Keystone, which is a very large exploration asset we have in Nevada. A long storied, very strong board. We all come from basically a background of knowing how to make other people's investments and turn them into good returns on capital.
With everything from George Bee, our CEO, who's built some of the largest gold mines on the planet, especially during his tenure at Barrick, all the way through to the litany of other board of directors, sorry, have been involved in the junior mining space for upwards of 20+ years each. All right. Listed on Nasdaq, as we had pointed out. I'll keep repeating that. We have just over 16 million shares outstanding. A very unique share structure, a very unique company overall. I think you'll hear me use that word a few times as I pop through these slides, but very few shares out, so we get a little bit of sticker shock when people see our share price, upwards of the sort of $17-$20 range.
It can obviously carry a bit of shock, when you look at our market capitalization, I think we represent actually a very deep discount to probably our real valuation, and I will show you a good argument as to why that is. We have here at the bottom of the screen what's known as the Lassonde Curve. When you're investing in junior mining companies like ours, you want to know exactly where you are on this Lassonde Curve, and we are here. We're coming out of this trough. We have gone through all of the painful, annoying, dilutive parts of this project, which is taking it from a science test through to engineering and ultimately permitting. We've done all of that work ahead of things. We've raised upwards in the realm of $90 million.
All of that $90 million US capital that's been raised over the tenure of the company is represented in that dilution. A very good time to consider becoming a shareholder of US Gold Corp. We have very recently come out with a definitive feasibility study on our CK Gold Project. I'm going to talk to this, but I'm going to skip ahead and come back to it. These numbers are pretty exciting, very fresh. Our project, CK, again, a gold and copper porphyry system. It's right in the heart of the U.S., 20 miles due west of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Now, I don't expect everyone to understand where Cheyenne, Wyoming is, of course, but everyone knows where Denver, Colorado is, I am sure.
If you landed in Denver International Airport, on any of the multitude of incoming flights that happen every day, you are an hour-and-a-half drive on paved roads from being right on top of our project. It is that close to infrastructure. In fact, that 20 miles due west of Cheyenne, Wyoming, Cheyenne is the capital of Wyoming. It is a resource state, a very resource-friendly state. The majority of people that live in Cheyenne, Wyoming are working actively in the resource industry. There are all sorts of mining operations and different things occurring within the state. We're surrounded by metal fabrication plants, roads, infrastructure, rail, so you could not find a better location to want to develop a project like this. It's not sitting in the high Andes or hidden away in Alaska somewhere. This is two and a half miles off a major highway.
This is the . i-80 highway corridor actually coming through east-west, which rolls from San Francisco all the way through to Chicago. The reason the . i-80 's important actually is it travels through, on its way from San Fran to Chicago, goes through Reno, Nevada, Elko, Nevada, and Salt Lake City, Utah. Those are three additional major mining hubs. Logistics for getting all the equipment we need, we don't have to build man camps to keep people on site. The building of the project's going to be done by what we term gig employment. It's not a fly-in, fly-out camp. That really helps contain and constrict the amount of costs associated with a project like this. Right. What does the project look like from a financial standpoint? This is, again, a very fresh, fully definitive feasibility study we conducted.
You'll notice in bold in here, we've got the base case, which is the low price we use of $3,250 gold to work out the economic viability of this project. What that represents is a wonderful return on capital, but of course, we all know we're looking at closer to a $4,500 per ounce gold price right now. You can see an NPV in the over a billion-dollar range, an IRR well into 40%. With the market capitalization right now we have of around $260 million, an NPV project of up around a billion dollars. You can imagine, again, I think there is a lot of untapped value in our company. These numbers are just being digested by the market right now, so no one's late to the game. This is a very fresh news story and study. Very simple mining operation, an open pit.
We crush and grind the rock, and we sell it off as a concentrate. We're not having to build smelters and smoke stacks, so very friendly on the environment. Post-production, in fact, the pit will be used as a water storage facility. We've got a flotation circuit that we've designed here that we're about to build, of course, for that gold recovery. It sits on a very small footprint. I know this can look a little overwhelming, but that's just 2 sq mi, and that includes our open pit, our processing facilities, our tailings, which are dry stack tailings, and our road in and out of the project. That definitive feasibility study is, of course, derived completely around our gold reserve. The reserve, again, it takes it away from being a science test. It's a bankable reserve.
We know exactly how much, or within reason, how much contained gold we have. What we don't factor for in the value metrics of the project at all is the continuation of that mineralization beyond our reserve. Our reserve is outlined here in this pit. We see potential for damn near double the size of that existing 1.6 million ounces of gold. Again, another huge value metric that's going to be added to the project. We've also worked out, with our very great proximity to Cheyenne, Wyoming, as it turns out, our waste material or our waste rock, if I find the right slide here, is a very valuable source of aggregate. I'll pop back to our map.
As we harvest our gold and copper mineralization, as we crush it, turn it into concentrate and ship it, there is what's known as a strip ratio, about a 1:1 strip. Our strip or waste rock is actually regarded highly valuable within the local community and down into the Colorado Front Range. Much so that a $50 billion materials company just to our south here, Martin Marietta Materials, are harvesting just rock with no gold or copper in it and selling it for $20-$25 a ton. We have about 40 million tons of that rock through our mine program that is bought and paid for through that mine harvesting. Around $800 million-$1 billion worth of material that also has not been given any economic value to the project yet. Exciting times coming through 2026 here as we evolve.
We're building right now. You can see the entry road in through to develop the project. That's what this slide is. We are in the final stages of going ahead and building this project. We are fully permitted. We've completed all the advanced engineering. All the aggregate market studies, et cetera, have been done. That's the waste material I mentioned. We've got lots of interest in financing this project right now. Endless interest in financing this project right now, not a major concern to us. Our pit, post-production again, will actually be used as a water storage facility, which is great. Great for the environment and great for the local community. Final point, we are on our way into construction and production. Now, just one last thing before I quickly hand things back over to Robert, is we have this Keystone Project sitting in Nevada.
It is neighbored by the Cortez Complex, which is Barrick's largest gold endowment on the planet. One of the biggest value drivers to Barrick these days is the Cortez Complex. Well, we have a standalone district, domal district, sitting right next door to them. We have all the same rock packages. You can see in Wenban Formation in this long section. Sorry, the Wenban , that's the host of all the big gold deposits within the Cortez Complex. We have a huge swath of Wenban on our project. Similar intrusives, identical geology, so at some point in time, this project will be receiving light of day, most likely by way of a spin-out from the company. 20 square miles, again, standalone district with endless opportunities for targets along there. With that, I will hand things back to Robert.
All right. Fantastic. Thank you very much, Luke, for the presentation. Thank you everybody watching here. If you have any questions or would like to schedule a meeting with US Gold, shoot me an email. That's Blum, B-L-U-M, lythampartners.com. If you'd like to learn more about Lytham, you can of course, visit our website at lythampartners.com or follow us on LinkedIn to stay connected about future events. We hope you all have a great rest of the day. Enjoy the conference here, and we'll talk with everyone soon. Thank you, Luke.
Thank you.