Abaxx Technologies Inc

Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. Good evening to all of us joining from Singapore. Thanks for joining us today for the ABEX third quarter investor call. My name is Tara Hayes, Director of Communications at ABEX, and I'll be directing today's call. After years of market infrastructure development, this is our first earnings call since completing our initial ramp up as a revenue generating exchange. We've made a number of format changes as we continue our evolution into the revenue and operating growth phase of the business. With us on the call today are founder and CEO Josh Crum, CFO Steve Frey, ABEX Exchange Chief Commercial Officer Joe Rea, Head of ABEX Technology Products Ian Forrester, and ABEX Digital Title Lead Leah Wald. Everyone should have access to our third quarter reports and Monday's quarterly corporate update press release, which will be the primary disclosures for today's presentations. But we also want to make reference to all filings and risk disclosures found on CDAR+. We have published a short slide presentation to accompany today's call, which is being recorded and will be posted to our investor website, investors.abex.tech, and to YouTube, as we have with prior investor calls and special presentations. We'd like to remind everyone that part of our discussion today will include forward-looking statements which are subject to various assumptions, risks, and uncertainties, and which could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied on today's call. Please find our full statement and cautions regarding forward-looking statements on the slide attached. Before I hand the call over to Josh to update investors on the vision and strategy of the company, we'd like to specifically draw your attention to the highly regulated nature of our products and operations. Given the early growth stage of our ramp up and deep innovation pipeline for listing new products, it's 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 endeavor to point out these cautions as we go, but as of today, our ABEC Singapore entity's regulatory status is that of a recognized market operator exchange and approved clearinghouse in Singapore. We have revenue-generating futures products currently trading in physical delivery LNG, the only product of its kind listed globally, Singapore gold kilobars, two voluntary carbon market carbon futures products, of which our Corsia contract became the first VCM contract to ever go to delivery through FCMs and a regulated clearinghouse this year, our battery materials products in lithium carbonate and nickel sulfate, and new since our last update in August, our first weather derivative contract in German onshore wind, which had its first block trade take place this week and has catalyzed a significant amount of new onboarding from global institutions since our last call. Any other potential products discussed today, including new markets planned for additional precious metals, base metals, additional weather derivatives, smart commodities, or even some of our innovative technology-enabled products in the pipeline, would be subject to meeting all regulatory requirements and disclosures before listing. As we speak about our gold products today, we want to point out that our ABX spot entity was newly incorporated in Singapore this year, but operating under a different branch of the ABX corporate family tree. Not part of the entities regulated by the MAS under ABX Singapore and the Monetary Authority of Singapore does not regulate spot commodity markets. Following Josh's presentation, we will open the call up for Q&A to answer investor questions, which you can submit anytime using the Q&A feature on the controls toolbar on your Zoom screen. With that, I'd like to hand the call over to Josh for some opening remarks and a walkthrough of our third quarter update and KPIs.

Thanks, Tara. And good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. It's very exciting to be presenting this new format today. A lot of hard work over a half decade in the making for our first exchange revenue generating quarter with strong initial volumes in our gold and LNG contracts in particular during Q3. But I want to start off today by acknowledging the tireless entrepreneurial endeavors of Sean May Lim, our Chief of Market Operations and the Singaporean founder of Abex, President Dan McAlduff, who led the build-out of Abex Clearing as a lead designer of all of our futures products, and of course, the always steady hand leadership of CEO Nancy Sia, as well as Joe Rea, Tak Siong, CTO Richard Fong, Xinhui, Celine, Natalie, Alistair, Taff, and the entire Abex Singapore executive team and board of directors. Avex is quite possibly the first ever global market of this potential and scale built completely from scratch. A suite of brand new greenfield physical futures products on a brand new exchange, a proprietary next generation tech stack, and one of the only commodity clearing houses regulated and launched in decades. This is an accomplishment that none of our largest global commodity market infrastructure tiers in their current form can claim, having bought or evolved most of their markets from existing platforms. I can confidently say that our people are unmatched in their grit and determination, combined with an innovator trailblazing mindset that forms the DNA of this company and will serve us well as we make our next moves in this volume and revenue growth stage as we grow market share in the commodity futures business. In this first exchange revenue quarter, volumes in our flagship LNG futures totaled 9,486 contracts in Q3, the equivalent of 27 physical cargoes. This LNG volume ramp-up shows strong momentum with an 83% increase in September over August. And while volume and open interest growth should probably be compared on a half-over-half basis for a while, given the timelines of new institutional onboarding, it has nonetheless been good to see the early momentum growth as the second half of 2025 has progressed. In particular, as our North Asia LNG contract recently joined our U.S. Gulf contract in daily trading volume. Our gold Singapore futures also saw accelerating adoption, reaching 54,128 contracts traded since its launch. It was our first contract to start trading regularly through our club across calendar months, which was key to stress testing our market plumbing, improving and optimizing our new systems. We also have a strong balance sheet designed to support our strategy and growth. After our recent strategic financing, growing reserves and runway, as of November 14th, we had over 50 million in cash, as well as the strong market to market positions of our strategic stakes in base carbon and mine hub. These are assets owned in order to drive long-term operating income in our core markets and software business operations. But our balance sheet affords the company financial flexibility to increase operating budgets into our revenue ramp-up phase over the next 12 months, while remaining focused on minimizing share dilution, as always. We've also realized a significantly improved cost of capital over the course of the quarter, with the ABEX stock price rewriting strongly in response to the Q3 de-risking events and daily volume growth of the exchange and the announcements of our ID++ digital title pilots, a greater than 150% increase in the stock price in Q3. But while acknowledging these significant financial milestones and successfully starting our first transition from a company that builds hard things to a company that sells things, I want to step back briefly to the long-term strategy and roadmap to put this quarterly update in perspective. As I've outlined on previous calls this year, the core long-term asset we're developing with every onboarding and every IT connection for moving data into and out of our systems is that of the ABEX network, the asset which remains the nexus of our markets and software development strategy. The daily trading activity over Q3 was supported by significant network growth. Our connected participant base grew 88% quarter over quarter to over 150 firms, including new onboarding of trading firms, indirect clearing firms, and inter-dealer brokers all achieved during the quarter. Our market maker and liquidity provider base specifically grew 93% to 29 firms, strengthening liquidity across our product verticals. It's through this early network development that we've achieved the first step of our log-scale growth ambitions. During Q3, we achieved our first 1,000 average daily volume, or I'll continue to call ADV through this call, on our targeted log-scale path to 1 million ADV by 2030. We also saw our first trading revenue on a path to significantly higher sales over that time. The combination of 1 million ADV contracts with 50% EBITDA margins is a powerful profit generator. This is the target, and continued execution over the next year will determine the slope and timing of that AVEX path. This kind of growth requires new nodes on the ABEX network, which requires more products to drive more onboarding urgency, particularly among clearing members, opening up more regions to become a true global commodities venue and more data distribution so the market sees our prices and bids and offers, and a general equivalency of traders being able to execute in our markets as easily as taking liquidity in today's existing commodity benchmarks. So we continue to frame our milestone updates in this context for developing the singular asset, the ABEX network, de-risking the blockers to market access and allowing us to grow to 1 million ADV and beyond. And this network isn't just about the exchange. It's the foundation of our full stack strategy. We use the regulated revenue generating exchange as the flywheel to build, prove, and deploy our next generation technology from the inside out. This is where the two pillars of our business strategy converge. And I want to be very specific about the strategic value of this network. We aren't just building a list of trading counterparties. We are effectively building a preloaded distribution network for our future technology products. But by onboarding these 150 plus firms to the exchange, we are establishing the commercial rails to sell them our digital title solutions tomorrow. These clients have a critical need beyond just hedging. They need to solve for the velocity of collateral and in particular to unlock the trap value of their physical commodities. We will discuss this technology again in more detail later in the call, but it is important to understand that every new exchange client is a future user of our full tech stack, positioning us to capture revenue beyond simple trading fees. On the path to realizing that vision, over the quarter, we also made significant progress on the ABX ID++ private digital title and console suite. This technology segment is now moving from R&D to the operational reality. In Q3, we also officially launched Adaptive Infrastructure, our new wholly-owned subsidiary. Adaptive provides the institutional-grade custodial and settlement services that form the foundation of our new markets. It has already been approved as a custodian for our carbon futures contracts and will serve as the custodial foundation for the upcoming tokenized money market fund pilot. This brings me to the private digital title pilot program. I'm pleased to report that in Q3, we completed the core platform development to enable the creation and transfer of legally enforceable digital titles through the ABEX private network. This is the technology engineered to solve that identity privacy ledger trilemma that I talked about in previous calls, which is the key failing most of the blockchain real world asset projects today. We also announced a third pilot with Mindhub to extend this digital title infrastructure to in-transit shipments of non-ferrous metals like copper and aluminum, as well as copper and aluminum. And as a key milestone subsequent to quarter end, Mindhub successfully completed its integration testing our Verifier Plus kit in October. And finally, I want to flag a major macro development that validates this entire technology roadmap. Since our last call in August, with the momentum behind the US Genius Act and the global stablecoin volumes now exceeding $1 trillion a month, the market has decisively woken up to the need for something like on-chain finance. But in our view, they are all hitting the identity wall that we spent the last five years solving and that I walked through in detail in the last call. Our timing here has been impeccable. We are now positioned as one of the only platforms with the regulated rails to be at the forefront of this transition. And I will explain later in the call how we plan to capture this massive shift, but we can get into more of those details as we walk through a few slides detailing our KPIs and path ahead. Tara, can you please pull up the first quarterly update slide? As I mentioned, we recorded our first revenue at ABEX Exchange, which analyzed to just over 1 million in volume-based revenue in Q3. This is a critical milestone, but it's important to understand that it's just the first of multiple long-term revenue streams we were built to capture. Our business model is a full-stack layer cake of revenues when fully executed. We are now live on exchange and clearing fees. We've also been live on royalties, but the model is designed to ramp up over time as we launch market data subscriptions, SaaS license fees for our console suite, and network transaction fees based on the assets in our digital title ecosystem. For the exchange and clearing fees layer, the key drivers for this and our future growth are average daily volume ADV and revenue per contract. The Q3 ADV was built on accelerating momentum in our flagship products. Again, LNG volumes totaled 9,436 contracts in Q3, 27 physical cargoes. But what's critical here is the early momentum, as we saw the 83% increase in September trading over August. This is the first sign of a true physically backed forward curve forming on our screens. Our gold Singapore futures saw even faster acceleration. The contract reached 54,128 contracts traded since its launch through September 30th. To give you more color on that ramp, volumes rove 242% month over month in July to 8,829 contracts, and then a further 167% in September to 23,563 contracts And this isn't just on the future side. Our entire gold ecosystem is being built out. ABEX Spot, our physical in-vault spot platform, has seen strong commercial engagement with 27 companies, including refiners, trading firms, and financial institutions, now either fully connected or in the process of onboarding. Total ADV across all contracts for September showed steady growth over prior months, which continued in October. We're still a long, long way from our 1 million ADV goal, but we're making steady progress. We believe rate limiting items like the CFT's FBOT approval will unlock significantly more growth opportunities in ADV in the near future. And again, I'd like to point out that while initial month over month and quarter over quarter volume has been very encouraging, the true slope of the exponential curve towards 100,000, 1 million and beyond should really be measured on a half over half basis over the next 12 to 18 months. As the key clearing member nodes that open up access to more firms and more taker liquidity and open interest can take more than a quarter to onboard. We can talk a little bit about that onboarding pipeline in the Q&A with Joe. And speaking of onboarding, ADV and RPC are lagging indicators in our view. The leading indicator for future growth are the network KPIs, and these were arguably our most successful metrics of the quarter. Our connected participant base, which includes clearing firms, trading firms, and inter-dealer brokers, grew 88% quarter over quarter to over 150 firms that are now fully connected or in the onboarding process. Even more importantly, our market maker and liquidity provider base grew 93% quarter-over-quarter to 29 firms. This is the fuel for deeper liquidity and tighter markets. It's through this early network development that we've achieved the first step of our long-scale growth ambitions. Again, to maintain this kind of growth requires new nodes on the ABEX network, which requires more regions, more products, and more market data distributions. We are actively building this network in the key strategic regions that matter. First, in China, this is a major strategic focus. In Q3, we facilitated a high-level delegation from the China City Gas Association, which represents over 680 firms, to promote and educate the market on our LNG benchmarks. We are also progressing partnership discussions with Chonggong Natural Gas and the Qingdao Exchange to strengthen the link between Chinese buyers and international suppliers using our platform. Second, in India, our network is also expanding into other key Asian markets. We've begun onboarding our first trading firms from Gujarat province's gift city, which is home to over 1,000 proprietary trading firms. Third, in the United States, we continue active engagement with the CFTC regarding our foreign board of trade application. As I mentioned earlier, this is a critical milestone for our commercial ramp up. While we have already onboarded major global FCMs, including our first bank FCM, many of these partners have significant client bases and trading desks in the US that are currently restricted from accessing our markets directly. Securing FBOT status will allow these existing partners to fully turn on the pipes for their US clients. We view this as a major dormant liquidity pool that we are working to unlock, further deepening the order books for all participants. And finally, in Europe and in new asset classes, over the medium term, we will look to expand the ABEX network into the $2.5 trillion global fine art market. We have just announced a strategic investment in Artex AG, a regulated multilateral trading facility in Liechtenstein. Crucially, this partnership opens the door for an entirely new asset class of hard asset futures products on ADEX exchange, fine art index futures. Right now, banks and insurers sit on billions of dollars of art collateral that they cannot effectively hedge. By listing a futures contract based on ARDEX's transparent trading data, we can offer these institutions the first real hedging instrument for the art market, effectively a beta index for the movement of art prices. But on a side note, talking about the tech again for a second, this is also potentially a major technology development. ARDEX is also positioned to use our ID++ and digital title infrastructure to power these regulated transactions. This drives a unique viral network effect where ARDEX launches an IPO for a famous painting. It creates a distribution event to drive mass adoption of our ID++ wallet nodes, acting as a Trojan horse that puts our identity technology in the hands of countless new users. And finally, in operational talent, to drive this commercial push, we've hired key talent like Russell Robertson as our new Chief Business Development Officer. Russell brings decades of experience in clearing experience from the Gulf Merck, CME Group, and IceClear Europe, and has already been representing AVEX at key industry forums in India, Japan, Singapore, and beyond. This global network growth is also fueled by our product strategy. As I've discussed on past calls, we think about new products in three categories. Greenfield, these are the brand new markets we are building from scratch, like our physical LNG and battery metals contracts. Second, step out. These are improved market structures or regional hubs for existing commodities, like our gold kilopar contract. And third, spreads and lookalikes. These are products designed to plug into existing liquidity pools like the cash settled LNG and energy related contracts we have in development. In Q3, we successfully finalized and subsequently launched a strategically vital new contract in our German onshore wind futures, which, as Tara mentioned, went live and had its first trades this week. This is our first weather derivative and our first contract to be settled in euros and a major step into the environmental products vertical. This is just the start. Our active pipeline includes stage three, which is our final development stage, work on silver market solutions and those complimentary cash settled energy contracts. And we are in stage two development for platinum group metals and even an out-of-the-box thinking uranium product. But before we transition to our technology update, I want to add a brief note on our operating leverage and costs. In previous calls, I mentioned that we had reached peak cash OPEX for our initial launch phase as we were maintaining an incredibly tight balance sheet and dilution until daily volume started to ramp up. However, with our strengthened balance sheet and an improved cost of capital from our recent strategic investor, we are making the strategic decision to ramp up investment again. We had been running a net cash outflow of about US 25 million annualized, which has picked up another roughly 10% over recent months. And we are reviewing additional hiring to come on in 2026 to accelerate the growth curve. Which brings me to an update on how we view our evaluation, some of the parts. With the exchange now live, revenue generating, and on an initial trajectory to our medium-term target, we believe the market infrastructure side of our business is increasingly de-risked and just requires more hands and more patient and steady execution of our plan. However, because our software business is just entering its commercial pilot phase, we feel the market is currently assigning little value other than maybe a blue sky call option. We still see significant arbitrage here. In conversation with many investors, they see ABEX as buying a de-risk by growing a volume exchange and getting a free option on the technology stack. But unlike a typical venture bet, this technology option is also de-risked because it has a pre-built base. We don't have to go find users of our digital title software. We simply have to cross-sell it into clients already trading on our exchange as it provides utility and capital efficiency. We believe the structure offered is one of the more asymmetric risk reward profiles in the market, which is, again, all due to the structure of our business model inside a growing market network. So our cash outlay is all about building the network. We add new nodes by investing in new regions and new products, all of which feed back into our core flywheel and why we see adding budget now a no-brainer as a high return activity and just needs more human capital for more products and more connectivity for liquidity to accelerate. So back to the tech and digital collateral opportunity. It's quite understandable that analysts have yet to sign tangible forecasts as we have yet to release pricing on our rollout guidance. But we have invested roughly 20% of ongoing operational costs over half a decade now with full confidence in what we've built and with good timing on our rollout in 2026 as the world accelerates on a path to financial market tokenization. But to achieve the top layer of business revenue and commercial products, like SaaS license fees and the network transaction fees you see in our revenue model slide, and new exchange products like real-time digital collateral, we had to build an entire full stack from the protocol layers up. This has been a long-term endeavor, and in Q3, this technology segment moved decisively from R&D to an operational reality. Atara, can you please pull up the technology slide? As you can see, our stack is built in layers. At the foundation, we have our open identity protocol, ID++, and decentralized storage. In our current Smarter Markets podcast series, Re-engineering Tokenization, which I would encourage anyone to check out, we refer to this as building a human blockchain of trust. Instead of relying on anonymous algorithms or a central database that can be hacked, we anchor digital identity to real-world accountable parties, like our regulated exchange members, who have reputational skin in the game. This allows us to have a decentralized trust without sacrificing the privacy that institutions demand. On top of that sits our policy engine and our identity applications. In Q3, we delivered key upgrades here. ABX Verifier Plus was upgraded to support in-app approval flows for digital title transactions. Next is the application layer, our console suite. In Q3, we released ABX Sign to a technical preview with new interoperability between Sign and Drive, improving our workflow efficiency and document management for digital title applications. Messenger, Sign, and Drive are the compliance-ready thin applications that let institutions manage assets across this AVEX private network. And all of this enable the top commercial layer, truly digital collateral, which we call our private digital title. This entire stack is now being deployed for our private digital title pilot program. In Q3, we officially completed the core platform development to enable the creation and transfer of legally enforceable digital titles. This technology is engineered to solve that identity privacy ledger trilemma I've talked about. It provides legal finality and built-in privacy, which is what separates our approach from standard blockchain tokenization. And this is where the velocity of collateral business case becomes real. By using this technology, a trader can take a physical gold bar sitting in our Singapore vault and instantly pledge it as HQLA collateral for an LNG trade without waiting days for bank transfers. This efficiency releases trap capital on the balance sheet of our clients. We aren't just offering them a better trade or risk management through our exchange and clearinghouse, but soon we'll be offering them a better capital efficiency. We also announced a third pilot with MineHub to extend this digital title framework to in-transit shipments of non-ferrous metals and copper and aluminum. And as a key milestone subsequent to quarter end, MineHub successfully completed its integration testing in October. We are now in the final phase of the zero to one rollout. We are currently finalizing the legal partner and regulatory work needed to make sure these business layer pilots are not just demos, but real transactions. These pilots will run with our completed tech all the way through the stack starting this December. To provide the institutional foundation for these new markets, in Q3, we officially launched Adaptive Infrastructure, our new wholly-owned subsidiary. Adaptive provides the institutional-grade custodial and settlement services that form the foundation of our new markets. It has already been approved as a custodian for our carbon futures contracts and will serve as the custodial foundational of our upcoming securities pilots. And again, I realize we're covering a lot of ground on the convergence of these technologies and business models today. For investors who want to understand exactly why our architecture wins here and the specific architecture beyond the identity-first approach, I again encourage you to listen to our re-engineering tokenization podcast series found on Apple or Spotify, YouTube, particularly episodes one and two. We also laid out the detailed technical roadmap for this architecture during our August investor presentation. So to conclude, it really has been a transformational quarter. As many years of hard work have come together, significantly de-risking our long-term business model with this early market validation seen over the course of Q3. I want to thank you for your continued support as we execute on this vision. And with that, I'll turn it back to Tara to start the Q&A.

Thanks, Josh. Before I hand the call to our Chief Strategy Officer, Dave Greeley, for the Q&A session, we'd like to remind everyone that questions submitted to the APEX IRN box ahead of today's call will be answered with priority. For additional questions, feel free to submit them using the Q&A feature on the Zoom controls toolbar on your screen. And Dave, over to you.

Thank you, Tara. And thank you, Josh. I think everyone will agree this is a very comprehensive and detailed overview. So detailed, in fact, that I think it will have hopefully answered many of the questions that were already submitted. So I'll be trying to pick out the ones that I believe weren't touched on as greater depth. But if you feel like your question was not answered, please feel free to resubmit it in the Q&A on the Zoom toolbar. I'd like to start with some questions that came in on the Exchange Products and Trading Network. And we have a couple of questions around FBOT. Given the importance of gaining FBOT approval, there are questions on when do we expect it and what will it do for the exchange once we obtain that FBOT.

Hey, Joe, can I hand this one to you?

Sure. Thanks, Josh. And thanks, Dave. F5 is a critical new step in the milestone of the development for the exchange and the clearinghouse. And as Josh mentioned, it opens up the direct access for U.S. customers, not only trading firms, broker firms, clearing firms that want to access our markets. to do that directly without going through a carry broker or having to submit trades outside of the U.S. We won't give any guidance on when that will happen. We wish that it happened a while ago, but the CFTC moves in the path that they move in, and we can't really move that any faster than how they go. We've been interactive with the CFTC on it, and we, as Josh mentioned, we hope to see this come along very soon.

Yeah, I'd probably just add one thing. Both Joe and I just by chance have been able to interact with the acting chairwoman. Yeah, look, unfortunately, I actually think they're doing a great job. They're in a tough spot with where the commission's at right now. But look, we're very aligned with U.S. strategic priorities. And so, as Joe mentioned, we can't give guidance, but we do feel comfortable that we meet the requirements, that our application is complete, and we're just kind of in the hands of the process.

Thanks, Josh. We also had a question on what is the catalyst for the German onshore wind futures launch? And I think we could add on to that. What's the importance for the rest of the exchange products? Joe, can you take that one?

Yeah, sure. Yeah, sure. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Josh. Yeah, the German wind contracts, we started working on that about a year ago when there was outreach from the participants in that marketplace that were looking for a better way to manage their risk on an exchange traded product, which would help just bring many new participants into the marketplace. German wind market specifically isn't massive, but the firms that traded are quite significant to the commodity trading community. And so they even wanted to trade with more counterparties and this allows them to do that. The NWEX set of indices are pretty well, I would say, looked after in the marketplace. The trading community likes to use that as a point of reference for managing their risk in the power output of the wind fields across europe and so we'll be looking to engage with nyx on further potential products um down the road um i think what the significance of it is for the for us um is that it does bring on board firms that may or increase the surface area as we like to say of the firms that made or are still struggling or waiting to onboard with us for other products like LNG, but have their trading desks that trade power and wind generation power wanting to trade this because of the uniqueness and the innovativeness of the product. And so that helps the onboarding with those firms. And we've seen that with this product and looking forward to other products that we can launch using that index.

And this might be a good moment to clarify another question. A question had come in asking if Marex Group PLC is a competitor or would they use your exchange? Maybe that's a good time to clarify that, Joe.

Yeah, Marex is an inter-dealer broker. They're also a clearing firm. They certainly are not a competitor of ours. They're a partner of ours. And they see that and we see that. So they definitely are not a competitor.

Thanks. Thanks. I had another question on the exchange side on how are you competing with ICE CME for LNG liquidity?

Well, I guess the best way to put that is there are no other LNG products in the marketplace. So for lack of anything else over the years, the proxies that were used, Brent crude oil, JCC, Japanese crude cocktail, TTF pipeline gas, and Rehub pipeline gas were really only used as there was no other LNG product that directly correlated to the waterborne cargos of LNG in the marketplace.

uh we don't see ourselves competing with them in this product we see that there there is demand from firms that want that direct correlation to use our product and you see that as a result of the volumes that we're growing thanks maybe i'll take uh one more question that came in on the exchange side before moving over to the technology side for a bit um the question was do you have a date for silver launch now we can't give explicit dates but maybe we could talk a little bit to uh how we're thinking about that

Yeah, I think that's so everything is, we always submit our products and have to submit our products to our regulator, the MAS. We don't give out date guidance on when we will launch it. And we will, people will just have to continue to watch our newsfires for dates once we get to that point.

Yeah, thanks, Joe. I'll probably add a few more comments here that ties into some of my prepared comments. Look, we think we have a pretty deep pipeline beyond just precious metals. There's a number of other actually kind of new innovative products as well. But, you know, there's a couple of things, you know, we... We do think that increasing that connectivity through FBOT and just the wave of onboarding that we've had the last few months since ramping up our products and our daily volumes. I think we probably want to get a little bit further in the sort of steady state before we allocate resources to new products. We want to keep growing liquidity in our existing products and onboarding. We probably, with sort of current Current staffing levels, we're probably in the order of something like 10 contracts a half out of the pipeline we've been building that we could launch. But I think things have changed a little bit and that we want to be a little bit more strategic. Look, I mean, very frankly speaking, I think for four or five years, even as a public company, there was a lot of disbelief that we were going to make it or we obviously didn't have the cost of capital to run a proper budget against this pipeline. And so we were obviously always kind of in a rush. And I think we want to be a lot more strategic as we roll these out with having that critical mass of liquidity. But we do have, you know, some very interesting products in the pipeline that I think can generate a lot of, you know, a lot of revenue, or sorry, a lot of volume and open interest. And, you know, kind of right off the bat, products that have been brought to us by, particularly by some of the market makers in Asia that don't have access to these types of products, you know, very much like the German wind contract. that I think would drive a lot of onboarding. So we really want to focus on products that drive onboarding, broader surface area, and just keep building the critical mass of this network and market depth.

Thanks, Josh. I wanted to turn to some questions on ID++ and the digital title pilot program. We've had a question on the tech stack. Where are we with the pilots and what happens once those are completed?

Yeah, maybe I'll start and then maybe see if Ian wants to chime in a bit as well. So, look, I mean, we like to focus on completing all of the aspects of readiness. I push the team incredibly hard with some of our announcements over August. And what I am pleased to say, as reflected in the comments, is I think we're there from a technology, legal, and sort of initial pilot partner standpoint, particularly on the gold pilots. So we're now kind of in that window where it's under our control when we want to strategically roll these out, the formats out. We have been working, you know, we've been in outreach for a while. We've had, you know, a number of inbounds from our clearing numbers and market participants that saw our press leases and are excited about the potential. We've, you know, we've had outbound, you know, you know, generally extremely well received both by financial institutions and commodity traders with what we're doing. So, you know, we are, we, are in a window of readiness for the execution of the pilots. But we're really taking this week and next as we roll into December and really optimum timing when we want to actually execute these trades and the format just about getting the right information to the market. So we're kind of in the execution and finishing phase with the pilots essentially ready from a legal and technology perspective. Ian, anything else you'd like to add there?

Yeah, sure. I think the legal and technology perspective is great. The thing that we also are very mindful of is the adoption perspective. And the reason for these pilots is for us to be able to sound out the market and figure out where the demand is. Once we hit that demand threshold, of course, we're going to lean hard into it for our first use case. I think everybody's sort of wondering what's after the pilots, right? Well, that's what's after. We sound out that demand and then and then lean hard into it where we find it. We obviously have some very well-developed thoughts about how this will play out, but that's really pure speculation until we run the pilots. And of course, anything we do will be heavily considering and weighting the business at Avex Exchange and clearing and leveraging the unfair advantages that we have with that relationship.

Thanks, Ian. We had another question, Josh, on the interrelationship between what's happening on the exchange side and what's happening on the tech side. And really, in what ways will the tokenization of assets be a risk to AVEX Exchange's business model and moat? And in what sense is it, I think, an opportunity?

Yeah, I mean, just kind of making assumptions on kind of meaning behind that question. You know, I think there's a, you know, kind of a view out there that, you know, centralized exchanges and clearinghouses are at risk because of things that are happening in DeFi and, you know, kind of moving that whole trading exchange, you know, settlement custody, you know, collapsing that all into a blockchain. I think we spent a lot of time indirectly on this in the last call, and that we just don't see that world, particularly in physical commodities and large transactions with large global institutions. We don't see that DeFi world really moving very rapidly into risk management of these types of wholesale businesses. And that's very specifically because of the nature of, you know, what do you actually own? And so, and then if you think about stable coins specifically, yes, there's been, you know, dramatic growth and a number of use cases, you know, still primarily driven by sort of, you know, DeFi, you know, type trading on offshore exchanges, as well as moving monies in, you in global jurisdictions that have less dollar access. But we really have not seen the use case of stable coins into large regulated clearing houses or used as collateral. I think I've mentioned in previous calls, we're sitting at somewhere around a trillion dollars in assets sitting in central clearing houses for clear derivatives. And at least the conversations I've had with regulators, again, at a high level, I think people are interested in the concept of stablecoins. The CFTC has been pretty vocal about a number of initiatives and pilots and reviews taking place. But in the conversations that we've had in the depths of the plumbing with lawyers and clearing members, various jurisdiction regulators, we just do not see stablecoins as ready for prime time for a number of the reasons that we outlined on our last call with regards to the solvency gap and the liquidity gap of holding a US dollar stablecoin, particularly offshore. What do you actually own? And so, yeah, I mean, that's why we're very focused on the infrastructure and roadmap that we set out years ago, looking at identity and privacy first. So we have taken a very different approach, even though a lot of the underlying cryptographic components are similar. We've arranged them in a way to be able to move money markets or securities or even bills of lading and warehouse receipts in real time. So I know kind of a long answer, but the short answer is we don't really see a threat with what's happening in DeFi liquidity pools or stablecoins.

um we we think we've got a a better system to solve you know problems today um and not sort of in a in a world that theoretically changes all the architecture and infrastructure thanks josh and this next question uh you end up me directing to joe given he's been out at the fia in chicago this week but the question is uh what evidence do you have that exchange customers are interested in or willing to purchase the digital title tech

Yeah, maybe just a couple of brief comments and then maybe Josh or Ian could probably follow on to that. And just to your point, Dave, being at the FIA Expo here in Chicago, which is one of the bigger events in the futures industry during the year, particularly from the more operational side of things in futures markets, I would say that if anything there was probably very little spoke about except for tokenization the use of collateral um the use of uh of stable coins it was on almost every single panel and discussion over two days and so it is high on the fias and the customers clearing firms and trading firms uh uh targets uh in the marketplace um but uh i would we'll see how we can um I would say bring the products that we've been, the technology that we've developed to bring to them and see how they react to it. I think that'll be an important next step for us.

Yeah, and again, I want to reiterate that this is different in some software technologies where you're not just trying to take an existing system and maybe run it a little bit faster or a little bit cheaper or something. It's the nature of what this actually does to unlock collateral and velocity. that really, you know, really does change the game. You know, we talk about something like 24-7, you know, trading markets, you know, cleared trading markets. You know, that doesn't exist today. And, you know, and so it needs technology like this, you know, in order for it to exist. And so there will be a situation, whether it's a type of contract or market hours or market regions, there'll be a case where those that adapt our technology will be able to participate in a market that those that don't can't. So it's more than just upgrading your software. It really is unlocking new forms of collateral and new use cases for trading in your business. So that's why we're so excited about it. And again, I want to reiterate the way we've done it. I think Ian made a great comment on one of the podcasts, make paper great again. Whereas as blockchain wallet tokenization needs new legal frameworks, new ways of doing things, new workflows, new IT systems, We've built our tech stack in a way that mirrors the way that things have already been done. It just does it faster, safer, and more secure in the digital realm rather than the paper realm. So we don't have the impediment that a lot of the blockchain impediments have with new frameworks for regulatory, new technologies for holding private keys for bearer assets. So we, again, we're excited about the ability to take up our system much faster than, say, even something like stablecoins.

And I think Dave's interview with Peter Zeman was an excellent distillation of that. They covered a lot of those topics. I just wanted to add, too, that what we're doing with ID++ and DigitalTitle is not mutually exclusive from blockchain. For us to win, they don't have to lose. you know, we're built to work with or without. It's really becomes up to the market participants and the market to really decide, you know, what set of challenges they want to embrace. So we think it's, I mean, personally, I think all of the activity around tokenization is accretive to what we're doing.

Thanks, everyone. I wanted to move on to some questions a little bit more at the corporate or Pubco level. You know, we've had quite a few questions come in around potential thoughts and plans for moving to either another exchange, a US listing, etc. I just kind of like to roll them all up into one question where, while you can't get into any specifics, just Josh, maybe if you could spend a moment or two on your thoughts on other listings.

Yeah, great. Thanks, Dave. I mean, this is an ongoing conversation with our major investors and the board. I should mention we have been added to an MSCI Canadian small cap index, and those types of additions will increase our liquidity. Even our market cap has changed the nature. There's a number of funds, even in Canada, that have market cap thresholds. You know, of course, being revenue generating in our primary business. So there's a number of things that have changed over Q3 that really make our listing very different than it was, you know, six months ago or, you know, and over the previous years. But I've also said in the past that we wanted to be at this stage of revenue growth and not kind of, I've always thought Canada has particularly good markets for sort of long infrastructure investment cycles, given the nature of commodity development and commodity infrastructure. So it's kind of a better market to be pre-revenue as a public company. But of course, we're increasingly getting interest from the core market infrastructure investors, which happen to be in the U.S. So we are now moving into that window where a U.S. listing would make sense. So look, I want to caution, obviously, all of the regulatory work that needs to happen. We did start some of that a couple of years ago. So we kind of know what the roadmap looks like. and, you know, are generally prepared from a, you know, from a corporate perspective. And so we would like to start that process, you know, in Q1, you know, if that's the decision of the board.

Thanks, Josh. We're coming up on the hour, so in the interest of time, I'd also like to start bundling some of the remaining questions. We've had quite a few questions on where the various companies in the ABEX family and companies that we've invested in fit into the vision you laid out in the first part of the call and what specific pieces they may tie into, you know, specifically if you kind of do a minute or two on where things are with base carbon, mine hub, and more recently, our techs and how they fit into the overall vision and development.

Yeah, I touched on it a little bit earlier, but it really comes down to distribution of our technology and sort of credibility and liquidity of our markets. So it's all one integrated strategy. But, you know, particularly if you look at Minehub, for example, you know, they're also building very hard one network effects in a very, you know, look, there is an inevitability about digitizing commodity workflows, which is still one of the most paper-based in the world. And there's been a number of companies, you know, we don't think... The big, you know, kind of the hyperscalers, you know, that a lot of them always get bogged down when they try to move into digitization of commodities. You know, it really takes, you know, very niche understanding when you get into this vertical. And we think, you know, these digitization efforts will eventually hit network effects. That's why we backed Minehub. And then obviously they had become a great partner to distribute our technology as well as, you know, integrate with their customers, you know, sort of one-click hedging and so forth. So we're really helping Mindhub become the nexus of the digitization of commodities. And then similar with base carbon. I know the carbon markets, particularly the voluntary carbon markets, they've kind of gone on the back burner for a number of people over the last couple of years. But we still believe that environmental assets and tracking and tracing and all of the things to be active in that market are critically important. This major trend that's been happening since the clean water and air acts of the late 1960s, trying to do things cleaner and more transparently, that's not going to go in reverse. And so we want to be active in that market and innovative in that market because it's really a forefront for commodities. And so, you know, base carbon, I think, has been a great financial investment for us. And, you know, we took the opportunity after our strategic financing, you know, with relatively little capital, take our position to 19.9. You know, we still think there's, you know, that's been a very high IRR business position. But also, again, the broader strategies around distribution. As far as some of our other investments, again, they're always essentially think about them like customer financing or building networks off of our balance sheet. That's the way we look at them. But we think as a portfolio overall, they've also served us well from a very... I mean, I think overall we've invested... you know, less than $5 million in our total portfolio. And, you know, obviously is now marked the market at much, much greater values than that. So I think it's been a good financial return, but the main priority has always been about, you know, building our network off our balance sheet, so to say.

Thanks, Josh. I'd like to group together a few questions on the topic of dilution. There have been a number of questions, just really kind of wanting your thoughts on dilution and what that could be like going forward. Some specifics mentioned were, you know, potential awards to officers and employees, dilution from the recent $22 million private placement, and the RTX investment.

Yeah. So, I mean, I think most shareholders that know me, you know, realize I'm very, very aligned with minimizing dilution. We've always taken what, frankly, is a much, much harder path. You know, essentially, you know, only giving yourself one year or less of runway to hit a number of milestones. It's forced an urgency and a survival mentality in all of our people. And so we've always run things incredibly tight. I often joke a $25 million budget at the global scale we're operating is really a rounding error, even for some highly speculative tech companies, but absolutely for a major piece of global market infrastructure. So I think we've done an incredible job with the capital that's been afforded to us. And it's having that mentality of minimizing dilution. You know, a comment that I think is important, you know, kind of an indirect comment I heard there was around, you know, stock-based comp and equity. I know we didn't talk about that in the prepared statements. I'm sure in the year-end statements that we present next, you know, I guess around April, we can get into a lot more financial detail on these types of metrics. But it is important to point out that a lot of the heavier grants that took place really waited until we hit some major milestones like launching the exchange last year. So if you look at our sort of 2020 to 2024 equity comp, I think it was very, very reasonable. And a lot of that comp came through for major milestone grants that were more or less one-off. I think going forward, we're going to probably maintain, although it's been approved for up to 20%, we're going to maintain around that 10% on an ongoing. The 20% was really needed for a lot of special grants, including some market infrastructure partners and so forth. And we'll probably normalize closer to that sort of 10% type metric. But again, as sort of a large shareholder and most of our team really operates like owner-operators of this business, almost the entire executive team skews most of their comp to equity because they know the value of what we're building. So we all, as management, think heavily about dilution and minimizing dilution because we know the value that this business can be.

Thanks, Josh. And we're just about at the hour, so I wanted to squeeze in one more question before we wrap up. And that question came in, Josh, on the cost of capital question. Are we on a cost of capital path that accelerates the investments and growth of the vision?

Yeah, yeah. Like I said before, look, we're going to take this back to the board and, you know, we've been in conversation with our, you know, strategic investors and, you know, I think the key thing is where our technology rollout kind of plays out. I mean, again, I think our exchange opportunity to reach 1 million ADV by expanding regions and products, I think that's a very high IRR, you know, much lower risk investment at this point. So we do see some ramp up in the sort of the current budget. And again, at our market cap, you know, running at this type of budget against that kind of opportunity. You know, this is sort of a multivariable equation that the market cap would suggest that we should be probably more aggressive in that slope towards a million ADVs. So I think that one's a little bit of an obvious one where we can increase some spending. But the piece on the technology side, I think we probably want another quarter or two under our belts of getting the pilots completed. As Ian said, having that customer feedback. before we accelerate into it. So I would say the increased spending right now will be gradual and really focused on de-bottlenecking new products and new sales of our exchange products. And then we would probably look more like something like Q2 before we start reassessing the budget on the technology side. But yes, the cost of capital is a major variable there. But so is minimizing dilution, as we just talked about. So those are the variables we're working with. And again, I think we're very aligned with shareholders on making the right choices there.

Thanks so much, Josh. That's the Q&A for today. If you have a question that wasn't answered, feel free to email us at our investor relations email address. And with that, I'll turn it back, Josh, to you and Tara to wrap up.

Thanks, Dave. Nothing else from my end. So thank you, everybody, for joining us. And as usual, we're pretty active and accessible for questions and further comments. So thank you for your time.

Thanks all. And just a short note before we close, a recording of today's meeting will be available on the ABEX Investor Relations website and the ABEX Tech YouTube channels by the end of the week. Thank you for joining us. Have a great day.