Arthur Breitman - Uranium On-Chain: Enabling Access to New Markets - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

So first wave of tokenization I would say was a missed opportunity and let me uh go back a little bit in time what happened around I would say 2019 2020 when you first see a lot of these tokenizations you know now people talk about artu assets at the time they were called security token offerings and uh people really saw blockchains as distribution channels. The previous uh keynote was talking about uh distribution and and people were saying like well I have this project I want people to invest in and you know what there's a lot of people who have a lot of money that just made a lot of money in crypto they're on a blockchain and so if I do my primary offering on a blockchain then surely these people who have made all this speculative gain and all these crazy assets they will want to uh buy my very very safe asset or this second. So that was a I would say one of the primary reasons why they were doing it this way. It wasn't the only reason. I think the technology can do more than that.

Um the technology provide lower friction. It can provide uh global access. There's a lot of things it can do. It does a little bit I would say for uh for issuers. I think it can potentially do more for holders if it can get um to a real network.

Uh however that's not really what they were looking for. they were uh looking at primary issuance not secondary trading even though the technology is fantastic for trading that's you know been one of the main use cases of blockchains um and uh they were also looking at um so they were looking at longtail assets you know in some sense you had like small assets a lot of real estate so like oh here's one real estate project here's another real product so you do that and and somehow you're going to split your liquidity against uh uh many different uh many different assets. There was also not a match between the type of assets that was being tokenized and the interest of the the people on the on the blockchain. So for instance uh you know like you have people who are technology investors who were attracted to uh uh to cryptocurrencies. You had people who were you know real thickers wanting lots of volatility who were attracted to that.

You had people who were attracted to commodities. uh and you know this didn't really fit his box. So you didn't have the investor profile that you wanted. Um you didn't have the liquidity, you didn't have the secondary trading. So I would say like this is not I I call this an independence mismatch.

Um and what I think is like really uh interesting is assets which have high barriers to entry. So they're currently very hard to access. You know, a lot of people have said like, "Oh, let's tokenize gold." that's like zillions of tokenized gold product but you can buy gold anywhere. Um so you want these assets who have high bar entry limiter price discovery so like you don't really have a good estate market you can you can create one um and which also appeal to um to this class of investors and so in 2021 I realized that uh uranium was the best asset for doing this and uh let's let's look at why one is an exciting asset um there are several trends which are I would say pushing nuclear power one is a changing attitude.

So there was a very strong anti-uclear movement um that came out of the cold war uh fear of uh nuclear proliferation, feel of uh fear of radioactive waste. Um that basically has shifted and if you look at younger generations, younger generations are much more open to uh nuclear power because they see um you know carbon-based uh sources of energy as much more of a threat to the environment than nuclear. So first you have shifting attitudes toward nuclear power. That's a big thing. Um then we've seen also the fragility of uh gas supply chains for example in Europe uh which has you know pushed uh some to take another look at at nuclear power.

And third we now have uh a projected massive increase in electric demand um due to AI. And so now people are like actually starting to rebuild um nuclear power plants like a lot of new nuclear projects are starting uh and uranium is the fuel for all of that. So big demand for uh for big tech for uranium. Uh it was a big asset and you could only trade it in very large amounts. Uh you know you had to be buying $4 million clips of uh of spot uranium and there was just like no well established marketplace for doing that.

um you know you had like uh uh ODC uh ODC markets uh for $4 million if you want to have if you have an account with Kamico which is this big depository um you can buy it there but low liquidity you had ETFs but the ETFs would not actually track the underlier uh so you could have you could you could buy the spot ETF for example and you would see that it would have a discount of 15% uh to the spot going on for like periods of six months so not a lot of very good options Even though it's a very very massively important asset and I would say also in terms of independence match looking at the crypto market you have people who essentially when they buy cryptocurrencies what are they buying they're buying a technologically flavored commodity and that is what uranium is doing you're it's a it's a commodity but of course it's also a technological play so you have all of these aspects um and uh so what do we have uh currently in the uh uh in in your new market. Uh opaque pricing. Uh so you don't really see a lot of the trade. Most of the trades are uh ROTC. So this is not really good for price discovery.

You don't have like one electronic market where you can really see the price of uranium and how it's traded. Um there's limited liquidity. It's a lot of long-term contracts. Um there's not really a good access to uh uh to the market. That in turns uh breeds price volatility.

Um and add it turns also creates uh supply chain complexity for people who want to take um delivery. So how uh how we're changing this uh so x308 uh which you can uh is the name of the token you can which you can get on uranium.io. It gives you uh beneficial ownership in physical uranium directly. Uh so it enables uh 247 uh global trading.

You can trade it at any time. Uh it's available on Rex uh which is an FCA regulated exchange in the UK. Uh and it's also available uh directly on a uh on a DAP. So there's a uh uh there's a smart contracts that you can use to buy it 24/7. Uh flexible ownership.

There's no minimum price. It's not $4 million. You could literally buy a penny out of it. So one token is roughly one ounce uh which is about $4 now, but you could you could buy any small amount or any large amount. Um there's no asset management fees.

Um it's only custody fees and only administration fees. Uh so the price structure is quite accessible. Um there's complete transparency. You can see uh the whole uh ledger through the uh uh through the blockchain. Uh there's uh reduced third party risk because the custodian is direct.

You know there's not a separate custodian. You're taking custody of your token or you can um refer to a separate custodian. And then the only other custodian you have to deal with of course is the depository like Kamiko holding the uh um the actual l8 and you can verify the ledger uh on the chain and that's fairly straightforward to uh to access and verify. So how does it work? Um so first you make a decision to uh invest or buy uh uranium.

So you can access uh it uh either with a centralized exchange or a decentralized exchange which is you know the the smart contract. Um there's a uh compliance system uh on the chain where uh the addresses are very verified. So if somehow there's a suspicious address the uh address may be blocked and KYC may be required but that's not always uh most of the time that's not uh necessary. uh and we have a bridge with uh a physical uh broker. So there's liquidity there's about there's a few million dollars right now of liquidity which are on chain which are able to bridge the uh uh the exchanges to uh uh to the physical custodian.

One of the um one of the question that I often get with this is hey can you take uh can you take the token and actually get physical delivery and sometimes people ask it in a jula fashion they say like oh haha can I get delivery of uranium uh and the answer is of course yes uh but yes but so if you couldn't then this thing wouldn't track the price right if you can't convert it you know no convertability no par that's a very important principle in finance uh so you can so how would it work well uh the first thing is like you would take your uh token, you would go to uh the trustee and you would say, "Hey, dear trustee, I have this token. Please credit my account with uh with Kamico um you know, and that would be an increment of $4 million." But like here, credit my account. I want to have uh at the depository uh this many pounds of uranium. Okay, they do that.

Uh and then if you want to go further, you can show up with a truck uh and then they will say, "Excuse me, sir. Do you have a license to take uh delivery of this uranium? Are you running a power plant or something? Uh and if the answer is no, then you will not take physical delivery. But if the answer is yes, then absolutely you can do that.

So it's it's very limited like the number of uh you know the number of parties who can legitimately take physical delivery is limited. But it is actually possible. So you know ultimately there's always an arbitrage loop which is possible which is quite important. Uh so urium.io is the first uh purpose-built uranium trading app.

Um so it eliminates bar barriers to buying and selling uranium. Uh it runs on Ethylink. What is Ethylink? So Ethlink is a EVM compatible layer 2 built on top of Tzos is uh fast, fair and nearly free. Uh so fast because the blocks are under a second uh fair because um there's no uh hard-coded uh sequencer.

The sequencer is subject to uh to governance. Uh and nearly free because the fees are uh negligible. Uh and then you know you can uh you can uh buy it in ounces rather than uh thousands of pounds but even you can do a fractional ounce like really uh the uh the amounts are uh are minimal and so the project has been led by Trinity which is a uh an adoption hub for Tzos in uh in London uh and it's uh being backed by industry uh players and by the Tzos Foundation. Uh we've drawn from decades of experience in traditional finance and web development. Um there's multiple partners and we've partnered with Archax um in the UK for regulatory compliance and um the tokenization.

Anyways, so um key takeaways, uh uranium is a great asset. Uh it's really something worth looking at. Uh it's it's way more interesting, I would say, than tokenized gold or tokenized silver. We've seen, you know, if you want to buy gold, there's just so many ways to buy gold. You could buy physical gold, you could buy coins, um you could buy ETFs.

There's just so many different ways. You can't really do that with uranium. Like how do you have an asset that's globally important and no way to trade it? Well, now there is. And you can do that on uranium.

io. Uh for a quick comparison, you see we got all the green checks and the other people they don't have the green checks. That makes it better. Uh no joke aside, direct physical ownership of uranium. You don't get that with ETF.

With ETF, you own a share in a fund. This is not a share in a fund. This is direct beneficial ownership of the uranium uh underlying 24/7 online trading again not offered by other options. Uh global access no minimum purchase extremely fast settlement time and price accuracy. So we have all of this uh and that's I would say you know a lot of there's a lot of hype around blockchains.

There's a lot of around blockchains. But I think one thing that they're really really good at um is actually making assets globally available. And um here I think we're doing it and we're doing it in an important way. All right, that's my presentation. Go check, you know, go check it out.

Go to urium.io. Um it's uh uh available now. It's running. Uh and uh I hope you uh hope you enjoy it.

Thank you.