Usman Saleem - NEXUS Startup Competition Pitch #7: ORO - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

Hi everyone. Uh this is Osman, the founder of Oro. So Oro means gold in Spanish. Um how many of you have bought some gold in the past month? Wow.

Okay, this is clearly a crypto event, right? Um well, I come from a family which has been in the gold industry for almost 100 plus years. Uh my previous backgrounds have been in startups uh as well as spending almost seven years in investment banking. Uh I'm joined by a team which has an incredible experience as well uh from some amazing companies. So gold is one of the stories of the year.

I mean for me it is the story of the year and it is back at the center of financial markets. But even existing financial institutions and traditional gold industry realizes that gold has to evolve and gold is evolving in moving towards digital gold. But irrespective, none of these existing solutions are really solving the three pain points that have plagued traditional users of the asset for millennia. It's a difficult to access asset. There's very few developed institutional market and retail markets in the world.

There's inherent lack of yield in the asset except to a select few and there's generally an inability to borrow against this asset. Introducing Oro. Our aim is to allow anyone with an internet connection to buy, earn, and build on gold. We have two assets. The base asset is gold.

Very similar to what you would imagine a PAX gold or an XA U2 to be one to one backed fully audited, redeemable. And then we have gold plus stake gold, which is essentially a stake version of the asset earning around 3 to 4% in yield. The idea is this yield is generated offchain currently, but we will incorporate more programmatic elements of yield going forward. But ultimately, we're not just a tokenized gold issuer. Tokenization is going to be cheaper and everybody will tokenize everything.

But what we are building is the digital gold infrastructure stack. At the heart of the problem is the tokenized issuer. But we're building an access engine which allows any fentan to offer digital bank digital gold products easily to the users. At the same time, we are also enabling a tokenization engine which should allow anybody with physical gold which is a significant amount being held in walls to access the markets that we're building around the asset. Whether that's liquidity, whether that's yield or whether that's credit.

We went we just went live in public beta last night. Um what's up next is a bunch of integrations over the next four to six weeks. We have agreements with Facet Nunu exchange in Bahrain, Indoad in Indonesia uh and a bunch of bald products and defy integrations with Salana where we're starting with to enable the first use cases of lending and interesting um utility around the assert. Thank you.

So curious uh you mentioned paxis gold there's a bunch of others who tokenized gold what would be the specific nuances of this product compared to the others? I think starting at the issuer level where you'll be barren um which is something which the other issue the the other issuers haven't right there I would say just custody receipts um second piece I think tokenization is going to become cheaper everybody's going to do it I mean I hear like 10 other gold tokens being launched I think who wins is the pipeline right what we've seen is very successful web two digital gold businesses jar just announced last week they've made you know they're a profitable digital gold company in India those models are very good but very difficult to execute in large trust of the world because those local supplies are not deep enough. Tokenization benefits me because I can tokenize out of key supply centers and distribute via the token. And that's why, you know, for us like we're really focusing on the B2B. Think of the B2B angle as bridge for gold essentially, right?

Uh and that's where we win. You know, we're not just winning the tokenization because I think that's the easy bit. I think it's the piping around

Uh how do you make money? because naturally you know uh gold doesn't have sort of yield thin is a plan to sort of take a spread of that and I guess two what's sort of the go to market you talk about it's difficult to buy gold it's difficult to borrow against it in the US buy gold ETF for you know 20 bips what's sort of you know the appeal of of buying tokenized gold

um so there's few um one is our what I call tokenization margin we buy gold from the wholesale market so we get a few dollars maybe depending on the day uh so that's a small thin margin uh then we have the minting redemption fee which is what's called the transaction fee. Obviously if you were going to adapt today it would be a bit cheaper but if you're accessing by an API you know the the end fintech could charge 1% 2% whatever revolute charges as well. Uh and then we have the yield product. Um so we usually get a yield of around 6%. We would pass on three and a half 4% to the users and we would keep the rest ourselves.