Abaxx Technologies Inc. (ABXXF) Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Good day, and welcome to the ABEX Technologies First Quarter 2026 Earnings and Business Update Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. For cell-side equity analysts on the call with us today, there will be an opportunity to ask live questions following today's management presentation. To ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on your touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then 2. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. Please note that the live questions will not be addressed until the Q&A portion of the call begins. Following Prepared Remarks For those on the webcast, you may submit questions throughout this event by typing in the Submit a Questions box on your screen. Questions will be addressed after the formal presentation has ended. For any participants who are not able to see the slide presentation, please refresh your browser and begin the slide presentation. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Tara Hayes, Director of Communications. Please go ahead.

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to those dialing in from Singapore. Thank you for joining us today for the ABEX Q1 Earnings and Business Update call. My name is Tara Hayes, Director of Communications at ABEX, and I'll be directing today's presentation. With us on the line are Founder and CEO Josh Crum, ABEX Chief Strategy Officer David Greeley, and ABEX Exchange Chief Commercial Officer Joe Reyes. ABEX CFO Steve Frey and Chief Legal Officer Jeff Lipton are also on the line and will be joining us for the Q&A period following today's prepared remarks. Emron should have access to our 2025 year-end reports and annual information form, along with our Q1 financial statements and corporate milestone press release, which will be the primary disclosures for today's presentation. But we also want to make reference to all filings and risk disclosures found on CEDAR+. We've published a short slide presentation to accompany today's webcast, which is being recorded and will be posted to our investor relations website, investors.abbex.tech, in the coming days. 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 David Greeley to update investors on key milestones and updates from the last 45 days, 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 respective 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 ABEX Singapore entity's regulatory status is that of a recognized market operator exchange and approved clearinghouse in Singapore. As we speak about our precious metals products today, we want to point out that our ABEX spot entity was incorporated in Singapore last year but operates under a different branch of the abex corporate family tree and not part of the entities regulated by the mas under abex singapore as the monetary authority of singapore does not regulate spot commodity markets any other potential products discussed today including new markets planned for additional energy environmental precious metals and base and battery materials products as well as our innovative technology enabled products in the pipeline would be subject to meeting all regulatory requirements and disclosures before listing. Following the management presentation, we will open the call up for Q&A to answer investor questions, which you can submit by typing in the submit a question box on your screen at any time. With that, I'd like to hand the call over to Dave for some opening remarks and a walkthrough of how ABEX is solving core structural inefficiencies for global commodity markets through our fully integrated market ecosystem.

Thank you, Tara. It's only been about 45 days since our last call, and, sir, we're going to endeavor to keep our prepared remarks short and leave more time for your questions. On our last call, we discussed in depth the generational opportunities that we are pursuing in both markets and digital infrastructure and our strategy for seizing those opportunities. You can find the recording and transcript of that discussion on our investor relations website, investors.abex.tech. That strategy remains the same. And so today, I'd like to walk you through the results and accomplishments produced by that strategy in the first quarter and more recently. First, our results. We remain focused on de-risking our path to $1 million average daily trading volume on AbExExchange over the next three to five years. In the first quarter, our total trading volume on the exchange was 236,138 contracts. That's an increase of 145% over the previous quarter. That growth continued in the second quarter. In April, 255,645 contracts traded on the exchange, exceeding total first quarter trading volume by 8%. And on May 14th, trading volume exceeded 50,000 in a single trading day for the first time, setting a new single-day record of 50,277 contracts traded. Much as our trading volume growth has traded, so have our accomplishments in building connectivity and liquidity in our markets and commercializing our technology. On the market side, in the first quarter, we launched four wind index futures contracts, including our first U.S. contract for the ERCOT, Texas region, which produces roughly one quarter of U.S. wind power. We continued to expand our weather index futures contracts in April with the launch of German Solar Futures. In the first quarter, the first delivery under the Gold Singapore Futures contract was successfully executed. In April, the first trades in the ABEX spot gold pool were executed, and in May, just yesterday, we announced the launch of a 1,000-ounce 4.9s Fineness Silver Singapore Futures contract, which will begin trading this Friday, May 22nd. In Q1, we integrated our contracts with TMX TradePort's dual platform to enable cross-market trading alongside existing benchmarks for over 9,800 participants, which deepens our connectivity into Europe. In April, ABEX Exchange was also registered as an organized marketplace with the EU Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators, or ACER, which allows the exchange to provide the transaction reporting required for participant compliance under EU remit standards. And these efforts have been increasingly recognized. In the first quarter, ABEX joined the Singapore Bullion Market Association, and in May, ABEX Exchange was awarded Newcomer of the Year at the Energy Risk Awards.

On the technology side of the business, in the first quarter, we introduced MarketOS at FIA Boca.

MarketOS positions our console applications, Verifier Plus, Messenger, Sign, and Drive as a transaction productivity suite for market participants built on our ID++ protocols. protocols. In May, we continued to push market OS towards commercialization. We signed a memorandum of understanding to support the development of market infrastructure and the application of this technology for the Cambodian National Futures Exchange. In Q1, we announced the late December completion of two digital title pilot transactions for physical gold and money market shares, validating a framework for T plus zero collateral mobilization to accelerate collateral velocity in cleared markets. In May, we advanced digital title toward commercialization, announcing our partnership with Alta Internative Investments to advance the use of money market fund shares as T plus zero collateral for margin at ABEX clearing, subject to regulatory approval. Also in May, we launched ABEX Labs as our center for building our network by engaging with the developer community through the release of open source software. The first release is Agents++, a subset of the ID++ software development kit that has been tuned for use with AI agents. And at the corporate level, in May, Jeff Curry expanded his role to become executive co-chairman of ABEX Markets, where he'll continue to support the development of global commodity markets, the Market OS technology suite, and Agents Plus Plus for Igenic Finance. He will also contribute regular market research and commentary and serve as a senior advisor to the boards of ABEX Exchange and ABEX Clearing. And finally, in May, we announced that we will be listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange, the TSX. The first day of trading will be this Thursday, May 21st. Concurrently with listing on the TSX, ABEC shares will be delisted from SIBO Canada. There will be no change in the trading symbol or QCIP for the common shares, and shareholders are not required to take any action or exchange their certificates in connection with the listing. In summary, we're seeing the growth in our trading volumes, building liquidity, and commercializing our technology all accelerating. As we said on our last call, while these may seem like separate efforts, they're all complementary, they all work together, and they're all coming together in support of one vision. In a moment, I'll turn it over to Joe and Josh to discuss in more depth how we're building liquidity in our markets and commercializing our technology. Joe will also discuss, Josh will also discuss how he's thinking about our valuation and his plans to scale the company. Before I turn the microphone over to Joe, however, I'd like to take a brief moment to discuss the headwinds and tailwinds being created by the current macro environment as it pertains to our business. While much remains the same as 45 days ago, the macroeconomic environment has become increasingly risky due to the effects of the conflict in Iran. Everyone who's been listening to Jeff Curry or Smarter Markets will appreciate the gravity of the situation and the risk. The IEA states that the conflict in Iran is causing the biggest energy crisis in history, and The Economist summed it up well in their recent headline, Global Energy Markets Are on the Verge of a Disaster. Scenarios now range from bad to awful. The current situation has highlighted many of the problems in markets that Abex was built to solve. The growing disconnect between financial markets and physical realities, the need for better hedging and risk management tools, and the need for greater collateral efficiency. We believe all of these will ultimately provide a tailwind to what we do. However, we're taking the risk and managing the risk in the current environment very seriously. And with that, I'll turn it over to Joe for a deeper update on our markets.

Thanks, Dave. This next slide gives a good visual on the continued strong and record growth of our overall exchange volume reflected at the end of Q1 26 and including the full month of April. Once again, this growth shows the power of the exchange's ability to launch new and relevant futures products utilizing the Apex Clearinghouse and also our global commercial customer commitment and reach and relationships. It also highlights the infrastructure that we have invested in and built that has the capabilities to handle today's high frequency ADV performance. There are numerous new volume records that were included in our fresh release from last Friday and I will lay out some of the relevant numbers here. Our April 26th volume bested our overall Q1 of 26 volume and also surpassed all of our volume totals across all products for 2025. Total exchange volume increased 145% in Q1-26 over Q4-2025, and here are some comparative average daily volume numbers. Our Q4-2025 overall ADV was 1,500 contracts. Our Q1-2026 ADV was 3,800 contracts, a 157% percent growth over Q1. And our April 26 ADV was 12,174 contracts per day, a more than 200% increase over Q1 of 2026. Specifically, our gold deliverable Singapore futures volume increased 154% in Q1 26 compared to Q4 of 2025. And on May 14th, as Dave mentioned, our exchange-wide volume reached a single-day new record of 50,277 contracts traded. And also on May 14, 2026, the GKS gold contract also reached a single-day new record with 45,501 contracts traded. And on that day, the ABEX GKS record volume was one-third of the total recorded volume of the COMEX GC contract on that day. In our LNG benchmarks and for the month of April, we traded the equivalent of over 110 full physical LNG cargo equivalents from the U.S. Gulf and North Asia, with the NPA or Asia contract now closing in on the cash settle JKM volume numbers, with Apex NPA at one point in April representing over 40% of the total JKM volume. In fact, our LNG futures, physical futures volume is so significant that our global ISV partner, Trade Board, designated our Gulf of Mexico contract with benchmark status in a recent white paper. Truly a significant global milestone. And lastly, in LNG, our GOM, Gulf of Mexico, and NPA Asia LNG futures benchmark volumes increased 84% in Q1-2026 over Q4-25, and our April 26 volumes reached 64% of total Q1-26 LNG volumes. Switching to our product innovation pipeline, as has been our messaging since the exchange launched, our growth in liquidity continues to bring new market participants across product groups, and these new relationships have brought us new and innovative ideas for many new products. Adding new ISD partners such as Trayport has not only brought many new requests for access to our markets, but also many new requests for new products. There still remains a distinct lack of innovation in commodity markets for most of the legacy global exchanges. Our pipeline of new products remains robust, and we are excited about introducing many of these new and innovative products in power, environmental, ag space, and precious metals in the coming months. We have the best global team to develop these sorely needed new risk tools in commodity futures markets, and will continue to innovate and launch industry-leading products that real market participants request, further establishing ABEX Exchange as the global leader in new commodity futures products. And there is no better way to acknowledge the ABEX team's accomplishments than peer industry Awards. And as Dave mentioned, ABEX was honored just recently in Houston at the Energy Risk Awards by receiving Newcomer of the Year Award by Risk.net, a widely respected and followed industry publication. In our precious metals markets, we announced yesterday the upcoming launch of yet another new innovative physically deliverable futures contract with our launch this Friday, May 22nd, of the deliverable 1,000-ounce silver futures contract at 49's Purity. This contract will once again prove the point that we can develop with industry partnerships the right products at the right times we are excited about this new product as in addition to our existing suite of physical precious metals markets and look forward to helping our market partners manage their global silver risk with this innovative new product and moving to our growing list of new partnerships our announcement of our mou with the cambodia national national futures exchange two weeks ago may sound insignificant to some, but we know that this strategic relationship will open the door to many other opportunities in the region and will give ABEX another global platform to showcase our futures markets and our clearing technology. We also in Q1 announced our relationship with iPushPull, an innovative platform that speeds the distribution of ABEX market data and also is being used by numerous leading trading firms for better post-trade management. We also extended our partnership with our PRA partner, NWEX, by launching in Q1 the first-ever German solar power futures contract. This innovative and much-needed new risk management tool will complement the existing suite of NWEX-priced ABEX wind futures in Europe and the U.S. power markets. The ABEX new product team is working with various European and U.S. trading partners to develop and launch new innovative power hedging products for customers to manage daily risk in the increasingly active global BESS power markets. We're excited about the prospects of the many new futures products, risk management tools, and technology solutions that we continue to bring to market and greatly appreciate the continued support of our clearing members, our trading firms, and our brokers. So now over to you, Josh.

Thanks, Joe. As David said at the top of the call, it's only been about 45 days since our last presentation, but it doesn't feel like that given the fire hose of updates and corporate milestones that we've had recently, which has served as an important confirmation that all the puzzle pieces of this full-stack strategy are coming together. But turning to the 45-day tech update, after reflecting back on our previous calls, we spent an extraordinary amount of time detailing the technology infrastructure from the full stack layer cake, from protocol to application framework, to why ID++ is a key primitive for legal finality. And finally, just six weeks ago, when Leah started to outline the business models and steps being taken this year to unlock the next network effect within AVEX. But as I've spent a lot of time on the road with institutional investors over the past month or so since our last call, especially on the back of some new initiating analyst report that have come out on the company, there are two pretty important takeaways that I want to address here publicly as we continue to present both sides of our business going forward. The first is that I think that we went a bit too far into the weed in some of the technology details in the last calls, trying to explain how we're building a better watch and investors are still missing the bigger picture of why the new watch matters as a fundamentally better way to tell time. And related, I've been spending a lot of time with investors on how we therefore think about budget allocation to tech and exchange and relative valuation. To start, if I step back and look at our capital market strategy over the years, probably the biggest thing that we got wrong since listing this company probably too early in 2020 is that public venture markets, particularly Canadian markets, readily value long-horizon physical commodity infrastructure, drill hole de-risking and feasibility studies on a mining project that probably won't produce a single dollar cash flow for 10 to 20 years. Yet the market was simply not affording us the same type of forward-looking valuation for an institutional commodity market infrastructure build, even though we are operating in one of the most highly profitable sectors in all of finance. We assemble an exchange executive team that is not only comprised of people who have done this before, but is effectively the commodity dream team. And we really just were not getting the valuation of what building a global scale clearinghouse for a 1 million ADB exchange and clearinghouse could look like. So five years in, late last year, look at the massive corporate re-rating that the company has gone through since the fall of last year. Just having regular daily volume, even if minimal to start in the thousands of lots per day range, took us from effectively being valued at zero probability of having any global benchmark contracts, 100% discount on future value of trading revenues for a 1 million ADD exchange. And we quickly ran to somewhere in the 10% probability range with the first strategic placement we did around the U.S. 1 billion market cap last fall. And then, of course, as volumes jumped up significantly at the end of Q1, and we went from an early, call it 2 million in annualized volume revenue run rate to the 5, 10, and 20 million type volume revenue trajectories we've been seeing of late. So we've gone through another minor re-rating here in Q2. What we can probably, what we can obviously take away from this is that the public markets are clearly a show me, not tell me type of market for what we've been building. While I can appreciate that perspective from a fund that's strictly valuing companies on historical multiples or trying to find an analytical edge on the financial metrics over the next 12 months, it seems that this type of multi-year investing out ahead of the curve that ABEX has been doing was just not being rewarded by public markets the way it routinely is in private tech or venture equity space. Perhaps that's just a function of where we are as a capital market structure overall, where increasingly index and passive funds dominate public markets, while private venture funds are left to fund the disruptive technology through the 2030s and beyond. So on the LNG benchmark and exchange side of the business, we essentially were running operating losses, which I'll choose to call upfront investment for about five years that really nobody in the market was paying for. Equity markets weren't paying for it, market participants weren't contracting us to do it, and we weren't making matching revenue yet, but we were investing heavily in the products, licenses, and market plumbing software that clients would eventually use for liquidity, a massive positive externality for the industry. And that's okay. That's our role as entrepreneurs. Our job as entrepreneurs is to look at the market, interact with customers, and then say, you're wrong, market, and we're going to do this and prove that we're right. So, with that context, I want to review where we're at in our technology development, and these transition quarters to commercializing and the show me, not tell me stage. We won't go into any more technical detail today on the product layer cake or our engineering of legal finality over ledger finality. All of that, of course, is on our website and our presentation videos for your parse out via your favorite LLMs or revisit independently. But I do want to simplify the discussion of today's technology on one basic idea and then roll that directly into how we think about spending capital, how we release technology updates and disclosures, and how we're building markets for the 2030s. We continue to believe that the global commodities futures industry, although populated by some incredible incumbent businesses, is very slow to innovate, particularly when it comes to buyer and seller of last resort physical delivery futures markets. These incumbents are operating very, very good businesses that are highly incentivized to not disrupt themselves. If you've got an operating commercial franchise like the Henry Hub or Brent Food Oil or TTF Gas, which are the proxy markets that the growing LNG market has had to depend on, why would you want to disrupt that and fragment your own liquidity? Why would you want to put in the years of grueling client development work required to execute that change? One day, we will likely be in that exact same enviable position of owning incredible product franchises and sticky benchmarks. But what I'm getting at here is that the existing market infrastructure from the benchmarks to the tech stacks that underpin them is still just adapting incrementally from the major radical changes of the early 2000s when trading pits moved to the screens and electronic order books and commodity derivatives went global. The incumbents are still structurally driven by that primary transition and the global liquidity nodes and profit incentives that emerged out of that transition. But AVEX has been building for the next generation, both a new benchmark liquidity nodes as well as technology. In a deck we put out as early as 2018, we showed the step functions of how personal computer and internet changed global commodities and financial markets. And then how mobile plus cloud enabled additional types of marketplaces like Uber and Airbnb. We forecast the next development horizon to be based on cryptography, distributed and decentralized computing, decentralized identity, and the early AI primitives emerging from machine learning and natural language processing. Today, where our tech stack is emerging alongside the revolution in AI, I can confidently say that we are standing natively on the edge of the new horizon as a first mover, whether it's being properly valued inside our stock price or not, and right now, in our view, it's not. We are not a PC and web company. We are not an on-premise company running legacy data centers and co-locate markets. We're not even a Web2 cloud-based fintech. We are token native, content addressable and distributed data store native, AI native, and the first to be decentralized identity native. And we're looking to solve massive bottlenecks as a commodity native markets team with the best emerging tools. So how do we use them to our unfair advantage? Tara, next slide please. Just this past weekend, I came across a mainstream financial interview with one of the major exchange group CEOs, and frankly, it was a light bulb moment for how we need to be explaining our tech to investors going forward. First off, I have nothing but absolute respect for the CEO and what he's built over his career as a first mover to the solely electronic order books. But our tech approach and structural vision are very different as the technology frontier that we're facing. When talking about 24-7 markets and the global distribution network for capital markets over the internet, a shared meta goal, an endpoint for both of our companies, this is what the CEO said when talking about blockchain. We're not only going to have to change our technology, but we're going to need to change how our legal contracts work, how things settle, and what happens in bankruptcy. This quote articulates what I believe is the impossible part out loud, which we've been talking about extensively over the last year. Think of the weight of that statement. Not only does the popular blockchain RWA vision require more risky and less efficient technology systems to be distributed and sold into conservative financial institutions everywhere, adding more tech operations and more layers of fertility to the existing system as it's made to handle bearer asset blockchain tokens in centralized systems. But we're also going to need to rewrite settlement laws and commercial bankruptcy laws in harmonization across the whole global daisy chain of distribution just to prevent massive cross-border insolvency gaps. For what end? To maximize the value of blockchain bearer tokens held by crypto funds? To try to backfill underutilized block space markets for an exploding number of pseudo-decentralized but legally reversible L1 and L2 surveillance chains? At ABEX, we have a totally different engineering path to reach the same end state, 24-7 global digital, while we engineered a system that needs no replacement infrastructure and no new laws. How? Because our core design primitive is built on decentralized and resolvable private digital identity and real-time cryptographic evidence of legal finality, which is always more important than ledger finality. As I've been tweeting, lobbyists ledger just like rock beats scissors. In the real world of regulated assets, securities and asset laws can always overturn ledgers pointing at real world assets. And our systems work directly on existing regulated ledgers, be it centralized databases, regulated accounts, or even private blockchains, public blockchains, whatever you have, and existing laws. Carol, let's flip to the Alta slide, please. So this month, we took our first commercial step in realizing these major architectural claims by announcing our partnership with Alta, alternative investments. What we're building for our Transaction Productivity Suite, MarketOS, is essentially an ABEX all-to-money market fund that uses our next generation of tokenization for T plus zero collateral pledging use cases. By establishing a Singapore-regulated variable capital corporation company, VCC, and a dedicated USD-denominated subfund, we provide the precise legal structure to recognize fund shares of yield-bearing collateral. And as the fund gets established, we're also in the process of seeking regulatory guidance on use with ABEX clearing and beyond. Combined with our technology, the use of this fund as collateral can eliminate bank hour delays and prevent forced liquidations of derivatives. It doesn't need a blockchain, it doesn't need brand new tech stack for any of our exchange or clearing partners, and it doesn't need to rewrite legal frameworks across multiple jurisdictions. Now, I don't want to steal any more of Leah's thunder before our next August call, as she's currently away on leave, but you're really going to like where this is headed as we roll out later this year, subject to meeting all regulatory requirements approvals, of course. So while I'm hearing that the market will perhaps see stable coin margin pilots and other sandboxed, geographically limited attempts at blockchain collateral and cleared markets later this year, at Avex, we can now see a path for our technology to solve problems. global collateral problems without sandboxes or new laws stinked up across jurisdictions. And we'll be able to scale via our market OS commercialization out of the gate later this year. And finally, the other technology update I wanna touch on briefly before we open the floor is Agents++. Right before our last call, we released our formal technical paper and candidate model to NIST regarding agent identity and authorization standards. Between then and now, we formally formed ABEX Labs so we can open source a lot of the structural work we've been doing around agentic compliance controls, zero trust authorization, and institutional accountability when using CLI agents. We are intentionally going down the open source route for the first phase of tooling release so we can help develop international standards and solve structural problems early given the half decade of work we've already put into developing high credentialed context and human anchored skin in the game identity with ID++. But eventually, the AveX1 network and our regulated markets is where we can monetize and organize these autonomous agents to communicate, settle, and safely transact together using our core trust architecture. Every tool built on the free library is a natural funnel into paid market OS enterprise accounts, and perhaps the next generation of agentic exchanges and clearinghouses. So one more time, let's map this directly back to valuations, capital intensity, and how we think about our budget, say, over the next 18 months. According to one of the recent sell-side initiating reports, the public market is currently pricing our exchange success to become one of those elite benchmark exchanges at roughly 20 to 25% probability range, which again leaves exactly zero value for our entire technology suite as a standalone. This is identical to how we felt internally about our exchange valuation up until mid-last year, when we were valued near the salvage value of our regulatory licenses and infrastructure, with almost zero forward NAV assigned to our actual futures contracts trading before it ramped up. Well, because we are owner operators, we do everything we can to improve our cost of capital and explain the vision, but ultimately we have generally been price takers and skeptical public equity markets, no matter how much detail we've laid out on the vision and the path of these calls. So the way I look at the business overall today is that we have successfully entered the show me, not tell me phase of our exchange from Q4 of last year. We will spend the rest of this year on the exchange side, growing volumes, growing products, growing regions, and onboarding new members and further de-risking that path to 1 million ADV scale. But I still think the exchange side of the business is mostly in what you'd call pilot stage. We have not yet opened up major commodity trading regions. We have not yet fully onboard, opened up the major global commodity banks to our market and our central limit order liquidity. And we've not yet having our prices natively referenced by every financial anus when they're producing macro charts and price reports on LNG, lithium, carbon, or Asian practice metals. The goal of exchange to the end of this year is to continue ramping up the onboarding so that we can spend most of next year actually earning those high margin revenues, the taker volumes without relying so much on early market maker incentive volumes and programs and rolling out more products for more surface area. Within the next six quarters, we want to see the emergence of one, if not multiple new benchmarks as ABEX prices. The price is sitting behind the trading screens every time our markets co-chairman Jeff Curry goes on Bloomberg or CNBC to discuss discuss commodity markets. That's the definitive roadmap we see for the rest of this year and calendar next year. Deriving the path and showing that we will have benchmarks and that we are on a more certain glide path to our 2029 goals. That's the hard challenge we have set out for ourselves as a team. And at this stage, we shouldn't need to increase our cash burn materially to get there. And in some similar ways, just like we felt last fall when we moved into the show-me-not-tell-me stage of our exchange ramp-up, we look to be spending this upcoming fall and towards the end of the year moving into commercializing our technology suite. And so I believe we're going to be spending a lot more time on that on our August call, very similar to how we spent a lot of time on technology last August. As we list on the main board of the Toronto Stock Exchange this Thursday, May 21st, we will be entering a marketplace with broader investor visibility, and we are working towards additional global venues as well, subject to meeting all regulatory requirements. So by this time next year, we expect to be increasingly valued for both interlocking parts of our business, helping both sides come together to create something truly special and native to the global markets of the 2030s. Ultimately, we are building one of the most valuable networks in global finance, but the nature of that scale and the institutional complexity often make it difficult to deliver timelines. But ABEX is proving that we can deliver outcomes. Without operator, let's open up the floor for questions from our analysts.

We will now begin the cell-side question and answer session. For those on the phone to ask a question, you may press star, then one, on your touchtone If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. For those on the webcast, you may submit questions by typing in the Submit a Question box on your screen. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question today comes from Etienne Ricard with BMO. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, team. It's great to see the continued increase to volume activity for your gold futures. from what participants have you seen the strongest interest from?

Hi, Joe. Do you want to grab that?

Sure. We don't, as a regulated exchange, we don't normally disclose, we can't normally disclose the names of the participants. We have seen continued a large amount of new interest from the prop trading firms. We've spent over four visits in the past six months to India, and that's pretty indicative of the opportunities that exist there. So the amount of volume that we're coming from new regions like India and in Asia has helped grow our volume. And I think we're still seeing significant level of interest for trading from that region and other regions and onboarding from an entirely new group of customers. I'm really excited about expanding that.

And, Joe, just to follow up on your comments regarding the silver futures, how do you think about the opportunity set here relative to gold? And if you could explain how the product is different from other silver futures available, that would be great.

Yeah, it is. That's a great question. It is different, again, as we do with all products. You know, this is a customer-driven request for quite a long time, especially given the success of our gold contract. The contract, as we described earlier, is a 1,000-ounce contract. It will be the first four nines contract in silver that is listed as a deliverable futures contract, unlike the COMEX contract, which is 5,000 ounces and three nines. We will be deliverable in vault in Singapore. And when you look at the markets that 4.9 purity is required for, it really meets the needs of hedging in solar, electronics, and advanced manufacturing. And we expect industrial support and trade flows from the Asian marketplace to take delivery of that silver in our vaults in Singapore, along with eventually our spot market also. So we're very excited about that.

Thanks, Joe. And if you don't mind, maybe I'll add just one more thing. I think what's very interesting about this silver contract, even as opposed to gold, is it really solves a major logistics bottleneck. You know, silver, as you know, has the dual use of both, you know, an investment product, but also, you know, heavily consumed in its annual output by industries, particularly growing industries in renewables and advanced electronics. And that needs that purity of the four nines. But because of its use in those sort of growth areas of the economy, it's also been really part of geopolitical issues. And so even some of the silver spikes that we saw last year were very specifically refining bottlenecks of getting a three nine bar out of New York and flowing into the arbitrage of, you know, sort of higher price markets in Asia that were demanding the physical material. So it was really that bottleneck between the different market structures of New York and Asia that were creating that problem. But then, of course, when the arbitrage flips the other way, you know, if, you know, call it Western markets, you know, have a higher premium, metal then flows all the way back to New York. And so being sort of uh in in region in Singapore uh with western markets um you know we we should see uh a lot of uh you know sort of de-risking use cases particularly as silver gets added to uh you know um you know tariffs and uh geopolitical sort of policy moves and so forth so uh we we think this actually uh is going to serve uh you know a use case for the market um probably even even beyond, you know, just sort of the differences between kilobar and Western markets and gold.

Very helpful. Thank you. And lastly, so a broader question on the exchange here. To the extent that we continue to see more trading activity and more volumes, how much more incremental capital do you have to post with regulators in Singapore to ensure the capital resiliency of the business.

Do you want to start? Sure.

So, our capital is always risk-based. We have a minimum requirement by our regulator, the MAS. I think, and I'll let Josh get into the details on the capital side of things, but it's safe to say that we are well capitalized and have sufficient capital to cover significant increases in volume and open interest on the exchange.

Yeah. And I would also add, again, that capital requirement is not really volume-driven. It's based on open interest and the kind of value at risk, although it's not specifically that model. But effectively, that's the way we, ourselves and our regulators and our clearing members, look at the capitalization of the guarantee funds. And so we're still in a pretty good area um you know uh with with existing balance sheet for uh you know for what we're seeing in open interest um and which you know could you know lead to another question you know look in the early days particularly given that all of our products uh or the majority of our products are physical delivery products um you know we do see a uh you know a significant sort of you know lower uh open interest and and even volumes as as we're around uh contract expiry you know, sort of windows, both in our markets and other markets that are, you know, it's kind of arbing and hedging against. And that's just really a function of the physical liquidity sort of market makers and physical users as they get onboarded. So, you know, we do, of course, expect that open interest to grow as a percentage of overall volume over time. And then that will require, you know, more capital in the guarantee funds. But again, right now, our balance sheet is sufficient for the types of runway, you know, we see over the next, you know, over the next two to six quarters.

Yeah, and Josh, if you don't mind, I'll just add that our regulatory capital scales with our cost base, not our volumes, like in general. So MAS requires us to hold about six months of operating expenses and liquid assets, plus a risk-based capital charge tied to our investments and our counterparties. Then, you know, from a volume perspective, it's really kind of member margin and default fund contributions those grow with activity but you know those are really member resources not necessarily ours directly so as volumes ramp we get the revenue without a proportional capital call and that's one of the most attractive features of our operating model the next question comes from puneet singh with canter fitzgerald please go ahead yeah thanks uh hi josh and team um i want to start on the tech side uh the sdk and abex labs uh agents plus plus seems like an exciting opportunity i just want to understand how you envision getting

developers to use it i know with your futures contracts you've always gotten industry feedback so wondering if you've had chats with industry on the need for something like agents plus plus beforehand and wondering if you can elaborate on that a bit uh and then also just on the comments you submitted to NIST. Seems like the interests align there, but would love to hear your take on that. Thanks.

Yeah, thank you. I always appreciate leading with a tech question. So we'll have Ian and Leah back on the call in August and give us a little bit more time. Of course, that was only like two weeks ago that we released Agents++, but I think there's a couple things related to your question that are probably pretty important to understand. First off, This is the first part of our business that is just purely, you know, technology. So the way that we've built Abbex Labs under Ian's leadership, I think it's important for two things. One is this is our first part of our business that's not always starting just in the core of our exchange and clearinghouse. You know, this is going to be just as applicable in health care and really anybody, you know, starting up building with CLI agents in sort of an enterprise space. I'm probably misquoting the Deloitte stat, but I think it was something like, you know, 80% of firms have tried these types of, you know, clawed bot type agents, but like only five are being used, 5% are being used in production. And that's because, you know, these agents really run wild and can create real havoc if you don't have very, you know, very detailed, you know, access controls, identity tethered to human, you know, human credentials and so forth. So, you know, we definitely see the use case all over the place. And so we're letting Ian and Michelle and team, you know, focus on a broader space than just financial services. So that's sort of the first part. The second part is, you know, you mentioned industry insiders. And I think that's probably one of the really important parts of some of our team members, you know, like Michelle, like Carrie, Jack. with. I mean, they've spent their career, particularly Michelle, she's been a chief privacy officer and in that sort of intersection of privacy and data governance for her entire career. You've probably seen from some of our podcasts, she has some of those respective cryptographers in the world. So just like we have the real inside baseball relationships and commodities, we also have those through Michelle and some of our team in technology. So we are working on a very similar go-to-market strategy, you know, really developing these protocols and libraries with, you know, kind of the who's who of the space. And then we will obviously, you know, try to scale them, you know, separately. So, yeah, and then again, as I mentioned the script a little bit, the point here is to help consolidate around standards. You know, even as, you know, I think it was yesterday or over the weekend, you know, former Goldman CEO Lloyd Like Blank Fine was talking about, you know, needing identity and controls on these agents. So, yeah, I mean, this is a major market need. And I think this is like, you know, we don't have to, this doesn't have to be necessarily winner take all. You know, we're not talking about a commodity benchmark here. We think this segment, you know, agentic identity and compliance and agents is going to be a segment that's going to be probably growing like cloud computing, 20 to 50% CAGRs or whatever for the next decade. So, you know, we just need to be in the game. uh we we we are now um and we really you know we like our our positioning particularly given the trust infrastructure that we have with id plus plus uh our regulated markets and and kind of the rest of the business that it's launching from okay got it thank you uh so it seems like a pretty big opportunity here just uh we'll look forward to that august uh august call to hear more about it uh and then i just want to finish up on the exchange side maybe more for joe um I appreciate you can't talk about your clients.

Maybe I'll ask more on the geography then. You know, you talked about Traport being signed up last quarter, and then you've introduced some German-based contracts in your suite. Just think there's a lot of momentum happening out of Europe, and I think that'll feed through to LNG volumes. So I just wanted to ask, you know, on timing, or how should we expect maybe more European clientele to feed through into the exchange volumes?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I think, you know, we look at our volumes and we are a global exchange and, you know, we look at the connectivity of customers through the various regions where they're situated. The trading firms that are based in Singapore are also based in Geneva and London and recently in Dubai and also in the U.S. So as we onboard clients, you know, you onboard various desks that want to trade products, and you see them push their books or push the interest to onboard with us across the globe for various products. You know, as we talked about earlier, our precious metals contracts are certainly focused on Asia, the Asia region, but they obviously have quite a bit of interest in trading from the other regions through similar firms or identical firms in products like LNG. Certainly, again, an Asia product, but as you mentioned, the European side of the business, depending on the demand side, is important. And so you do see the same firms that are trading and onboarding with us in Asia are the ones that are in Europe and certainly in the U.S. And so we're really increasingly and we're constantly in front of customers and educating customers on our products. We held a workshop in Houston during Sierra Week. We had 35 firms there that were extremely interested in participants in the LNG markets and had incredible feedback and interaction with them. We're doing another workshop in London in two weeks for the same reason. And so these people are coming to this because they want to learn about our products. They've heard about it. They've seen the liquidity on the screen. And, you know, we're just constantly educating. We're at a huge event in Aniston and this week alone with our chief development officer, Russell, and team talking about LNG there. So it really is, you know, a constant, just constant drumbeat of education. And you back that up by volume. And so the volume and the liquidity, you know, whether it's through Trayport or through brokers or just on the screen with, you know, with our prop firms, it's just super important. And it just validates, A, the product specs that we've developed, and B, the commitment from our clearing firms to make sure that they understand how to manage the risk in our products. And lastly, the customers are, you know, are very, very important to understand how to trade us.

Joe, and I think I'd probably add one more thing that I think that's very important is just the sort of globally native, you know, structure of our team. You know, we obviously, if you're talking about LNG, we obviously have very deep relationships in the, you know, New York, Chicago, Houston, sort of U.S. energy markets, you know, given the careers of Joe and Dan and, you know, everyone else on this team. But we're also natively situated in Singapore in the demand center and, you know, in the markets that Nancy and Sean May and Russell and the team have been building over their careers. So we're natively on both sides of the import and export trade here. And I think one thing that's going to be very interesting as well, we have been working on some products for Canadian energy markets, and we are very excited to be kind of that bridge between Canadian energy markets and Asia as well. Again, being natively Singaporean, natively Canadian. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that piece is probably under-recognized. I think a lot of major exchange groups are still growing out of their hub. I mean, sure, they'll obviously have relationships, sales offices all over the globe, but we've been built to be that bridge from day one. And so I think over the next couple of quarters, we hope to show how those relationships are developing for some physical LNG types of markets and products that we'll be releasing. And, of course, you know, like I said, we're excited about the Canadian side as well.

The next question comes from Martin Toner with ATB. Please go ahead. Martin, your line is open. You may ask your question.

Hey, can you guys hear me? Yes. Hey. I think investors like these opportunity slides. Will you do one on silver? and apologies if I missed the answer to one of your questions, but do you have an ADV in mind for those silver contracts?

Yeah, I can jump on that. Oh, yeah, sure. Go ahead, Dave.

Yeah, I think there's a couple ways to think about it, Martin. If you look at the CME, their silver contract averaged about just under 50,000 contracts a day last year. Now, theirs is a 5,000-ounce contract, where ours is a 1,000-ounce. So that would be about $250,000 in our contract size, which kind of puts it in the ballpark of many of the other contract hams we're looking at. Now, if we do a quick bottoms-up analysis, kind of building up on the physical market, and we think that's the most important way to come to these. you know, physical silver demand was about 1.15 million ounces in 2025, according to the Silver Institute. That works out to the equivalent of about 4.6,000 contracts a day. So, as we've, you know, discussed in the past and discussed on the conference call last time, you know, we think the benchmark typically trades around 40x the physical. That would get you to 185,000 ADV. Layering on spread trading and options on top of that would get you to somewhere around 240,000 ADV. So I think that's the ballpark we're looking in, both from the bottoms-up analysis and looking at where CME is currently trading. Now, this isn't a brownfield market like we see an LNG. So it will be a competition. And we think with the four nines, with being geared towards that real industrial use that Joe talked about in Asia, we think we have a very competitive product and there's a lot of excitement around it.

That's great. Thanks, David. Can you talk a little bit about the timeline for getting participants active on those contracts?

Yeah, I can start. I think it'll be similar to what you saw in gold, you know, with the greenfield brownfield distinction we talked about. You know, like every market, it starts with building that initial liquidity with market makers coming in. I think as you saw in gold, you know, it's much easier to start a market when people are able to spread it against existing marketplaces. It's less risky than taking absolute positions. So, you know, I think gold and the ramp up there provides a good template for what we'd be hoping to see in silver. Now, we're very enthusiastic, but I think also, you know, like everything, we're looking at these things on that kind of three- to five-year horizon. But I think gold is the closest template to it. And the real industrial need, as Josh discussed for the product and Joe, I think that's where it could get really interesting.

Another one for you is, or anyone on the team, can you talk about what the addition of Dr. Jeff Curry means for marketing exchange with key players, producers, consumers, traders, et cetera?

Yeah, happy to start with that one. You know, first we should probably sort of clarify Jeff's role. It's not an operating role, but it is, you know, it is increased since he stepped down from his full-time role at Carlisle. And really what it is, is kind of more of the same of what Jeff has been doing most of his career, which is really focusing on sort of, you know, leading-edge research ideas in the macro community. You know, as seen in his, you know, first ex-post, where I think from a standing start, he got 2.2 million views in his sort of 10-point framework. So these types of analysis are now going to be published under ABEX Research or ABEX Insights. And so, you know, obviously that's going to help build our brand name, our, you know, our client list, the people that are reaching out to us for ideas and conversations. And, again, very similar to the role he played as a research analyst, you know, that was supporting the J. Aaron business at Goldman Sachs. So, you know, obviously, David Greeley, myself, one of our new executives, James Gutman, you know, we all worked in that seat as well for a long time. So we know the models very well. We know the sort of attraction of, you know, cutting-edge research and ideas. You know, that's essentially, you know, what traders demand. So, yeah, we think it's going to be a very important role, but it's not an operating role. I just want to be clear. It's kind of more of the same of Jeff producing research and working with us, with commercial clients, with traders, with, you know, FCMs and so forth.

And I would just add on to that, you know, if you go back to what our former colleague, Colleen Foster at J-Aaron, when Jeff retired from Goldman, she was quoted, and I'll paraphrase this. But she was quoted as saying there was never a room or a meeting with the CEO that she couldn't get when she brought Jeff with her. So I think, you know, Jeff has a fantastic, really unique reputation in the commodities world and, you know, really will be beneficial in helping bring attention to what we've been doing here, which he really believes in. And, you know, getting us in those rooms and those meetings going forward.

I was going to mention that quote, David, and I worked closely with Colleen, even though we weren't on the J. Aaron side, but we took you, as you know, when you were at Goldman and also Jeff quite a lot, the customer meetings. And to really put a finite nail on that point, it was so important to have him yourself, actually, and also Jeff with us to go meet with trading firms. And he just brings such a gravitas to the room and has such an incredible, use the old word, Rolodex of contacts that will benefit us greatly.

The next question.

As I mentioned, one of our big goals is, you know, next year when you see prices up there on a chart in Bloomberg or whatever, when Jeff or any of us are on a mainstream finance, you know, they're showing our prices on the screen. And we believe that's achievable over the next six quarters.

The next question comes from Charles Zhang with Canaccord. Please go ahead.

Congrats on the quarter and congrats on the Alta partnerships. Just wondering if there's any future milestones in terms of Bitcoin, the market OS, and the technology front. Have you guys finalized the pricing on the software licensing components? and any internal kind of revenue expectations, Josh, it would be helpful.

Yeah, no, thanks for the question. And, you know, this is obviously where I'm, you know, sort of talking out of both sides of my mouth, of course, you know, talking about how we're not being valued and at the same time, you know, not releasing pricing. You know, look, again, we're going to be spending a lot more time on this call, very much like the exchange. You know, we're very confident in the, you know, sort of a medium-term outcome of what we can do. We're very confident of being first movers, you know, like I said, in a, you know, being able to do this T plus zero at scale without new laws. And that's going to give us a major head start, I think, on anyone else as, you know, that's trying to use stable coins as we roll this out. So, but because we do feel like we have that head start, we're just being extra careful, of course. around the regulatory side of things, around, you know, who we're working with in, you know, highly regulated markets. And so, yeah, I mean, you know, we want to roll this out at scale once we have that actual, you know, money market T plus zero instrument up and running. And then, you know, when we believe that we're the only way to do that in these types of markets globally, then of course, you know, it'll be a lot easier to, you know, discuss and discover, you know, pricing. You know, we do believe that, you know, the capital efficiency unlock of having the only instrument that can do this, that's not part of a, you know, blockchain or stable coin, which again has a lot of problematic legal issues. You know, we think that that capital efficiency can be shared, you know, by the service that offers it, right? So we do think this can be a high margin business. But again, we want to kind of discover that as we are the first things out there.

Thanks. That's a great caller. And maybe jump back to the exchange side. On LNG, I mean, how has your original expectation around LNG, like total adjustment market changed over time as you see volume ramp up, like since the trade ports connections, since the Zhonggong Petroleum and the Qingdao International Energy Partnerships, which was announced last year? Like, what's your view on the LNG total TEM and how much market can you capture?

Well, maybe to start and then maybe I'll turn it over to Dave or Joe. You know, one of the things that I think is, you know, that we're really seeing, of course, is, you know, LNG has been kind of forecast to be oversupplied for, like, the last two years or so. And there's always something that kind of changes that dynamic. But, of course, you know, one of the major, you know, major, you know, sort of firm suppliers that were focused on the long-term fixed offtake market is, of course, Qatar Energy. And, you know, the incredibly unfortunate events of one of their trains being, you know, being bombed, you know, I think really does continue to change the structure of the market. and, of course, just, you know, all of the growth that was happening behind the straits that I think people are going to look at a little bit differently, you know, going forward as far as long-term, you know, off-takes. And so, yeah, I mean, look, again, very unfortunate events that have kind of brought us to here. But, you know, our belief is that over time, commodities commoditize. You know, spot markets, future markets are needed, and I think we're continuing to accelerate that trend in, you know, in LNG. And then, you know, and to some of your points of Asia, again, absolutely, you know, people want more security of supply. They want a seller of last resort. And, again, all of this sort of recent events have only increased our thesis. But, Dave or Joe, you want to get more specific or TAMs here?

Yeah, I would just add, yeah, I mean, just in terms of the numbers themselves, you know, When we put together our thinking on the TAMs, we tried to be very conservative because the opportunity in LNG is so large. To be taken seriously, we had to cut them quite a bit. And one of the ways we cut them quite a bit was really just basing it on the short-term part of the market, not the long-term contract part of the market. And so that cuts the size of the TAM. by about 40%, a little more, you know, almost in half. So I would think, you know, from the comments Josh made, I think he can kind of draw that we're moving into a world where there could be much more short-term trading, that the market structure is changing. We built the futures contracts to catch that moment of when the market structure would change, and you'd move from long-term contract markets to more of a futures market, physically deliverable benchmark. So, I think when you see the upside to the TAM, it's really, you know, just saying let's base it on the entire LNG physical market would increase it substantially.

I would just add, if you want, if you can just add on the pricing side, you know, we've said now since inception of the LNG development of the contract and launch that the market needs that pricing instrument, as Josh said, as a buyer and seller of last resort. But also the instruments that they've been using were non-correlated, and they were non-correlated because there was nothing else available in the marketplace. And now you're seeing the volumes grow in our physical benchmarks because now there is something in the marketplace. You've heard it from the Woodside Executive Director at Sear Week say that 100 Hub is not a pricing instrument for LNG, and they're not going to use it anymore. You've heard it from firms saying, we don't like Brent, we're not using Brent anymore. So the market has to take a real structural change and shift from what they've been pricing their molecules on to a physical futures contract. And that takes time, but we're seeing that. And we're seeing that by basically the volumes growing, the liquidity growing, and comments like the Woodside Executive Director making, comments like what Trey Port said, that our Gulf of Mexico contract is a benchmark now. So, that's something that, you know, kind of validates all the work that we've been doing over seven, eight years now to develop this product from a greenfield into something that is a global benchmark.

Appreciate the color. I'll pass the line.

We will now begin the online question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference over to ABEC's Chief Strategy Officer, David Greeley, to moderate this session.

Thank you very much. I think we'll keep this part pretty tight, given that we're already past the hour, and we wanted to keep the call on time for everyone today. More importantly, though, as I look through the questions, many of the questions that are being asked really, I believe, were either answered previously in the prepared remarks. They were asked by the analysts on the call, or we've said that we'll be answering them at a later point in time, in particular on that August call, as there's many questions on the tech side of the business, which is fantastic. One question that I'd like to turn to Josh is, with the world seemingly moving away from neutral globalization toward fragmented geopolitical and commodity blocks in energy payments, collateral, logistics, how do you see ABEX benefiting strategically from this transition? And in particular, do you believe ABEX's infrastructure, especially around commodities, digital title, collateral, and regional benchmark pricing, is positioned for a world where markets become more regional, politically aligned, and less globally fungible?

Sure. Thanks. Big question. So I'll just say short answer, yes. It's obviously an unfortunate trend, but it's the thing that we've been, you know, really saying since 2018, right? I mean, even when we talked about LNG as being a key bridge fuel on water, you know, I don't think most people, you know, fully agreed with that thesis, you know, at that time.

And that's now obviously, you know, obvious.

And I think, you know, like I said earlier in the call, being positioned at that, you know, at that real neutral gateway and frankly, you know, the Malacca Straits and the literal pipeline, you know, between the west and east of energy and commodity markets, you know, and being, you know, natively Singaporean and Chinese speaking and natively North American. And, you know, I think we're in the right place with the right products, the right technology. And ultimately, you know, we want to be a bridge. You know, we believe that, you know, that countries trading together, you know, people prosper on all sides. And so, you know, that is our role is to be that neutral, you know, neutral player, you know, of a five-sided network in markets and that neutral player, you know, geopolitically as well. You know, we are building relationships to, you know, to help people build, you know, understand trusted markets in agriculture and energy in Asia, when maybe some of the, you know, trust is falling, you know, in the West, you know, with tariffs and geopolitical, you know, type movements. And we're helping build energy markets, sorry, metal markets, you know, call it in the West, you know, when that's being used, you know, geopolitically by the East. So our goal is to help people trade and provide the new technologies and new markets to make sure people continue trading.

Thanks, Josh. Here's a less serious question, but I'm going to ask it anyway, because it says, given the global nature of the team, what are some of the team's go-to methods for dealing with jet lag? And I'm bringing this up because Joe Rea is the only person I've met in my life who does not suffer from jet lag. I don't know if you have a quick piece of advice, Joe, before we move on.

I think that's a great question. I think, I don't know, I just don't know why. Maybe it was because of my seagulling career when I was up for two days straight discharging cargoes on ships. I had to be ready at all times. But I think that, in seriousness, you just have to be, and my wife asks me all the time, too, how do you not jet lag? And I don't. and I find it exhilarating what we're doing and that kind of keeps you going. You drink a lot of caffeine, I think, to some extent, but also you just get on the time zone that you're on without thinking about, geez, what time is it where I came from? So that's generally the way I do it, but it's a great question.

You can sleep everywhere. I think last week Jeff Curry had his first middle economy seat probably in 20 years. So that's the IBEX team.

Yeah, I think Josh's technique is never be in any time zone long enough to think it's your time zone.

Exactly. One last question.

Yeah, one last question for you, Josh, and then I think we can close it out. And that question was, you've previously shared a case study on X slash Twitter about a main lobster contract and how it created efficiencies within that niche market. I understand that ABEX is currently focused on establishing more liquid, widely adopted contracts first, but I'm curious, does management still see a strong long-term business case for developing smaller niche market contracts? And if so, should investors think about that as something that could begin to materialize in the near term or is it more of a longer term opportunity? And I know you've been given some thought to that on the metal side, Josh.

Oh, 100%. No, no, I absolutely love the opportunity that technology is going to give for creating markets for everything. You know, funny enough, we actually just had a great call with a journalist yesterday, Ian and I, talking about essentially Jevin's paradox. You know, we were talking about all of the back office efficiencies, you know, that, you know, AI and Agents Plus Plus and our private digital title can solve for. And, of course, you know, the first, you know, first reaction was a sort of a dread of like, hey, will all those banks, you know, back office towers, you know, looking across, you know, the West Side Highway into New Jersey, will those all go away? And I, and I'm, you know, the optimist, no, absolutely, we're going to expand back office jobs. Because we're going to be expanding markets. And that's really what Jevons Paradox does is, as the, you know, as the cost and the complexity falls, you know, we can open up markets for everything. You know, whether it's, you know, AI researchers, you know, helping do the, you know, the early work of developing a new, you know, main lobsters contract, right, or, you know, getting the information out and building global liquidity across markets, you know, in a way that we don't have to co-locate, you know, locally and try to build a market with, you know, just a handful of people, but we build it globally. And I think that's what's being seen, you know, even in markets, which, by the way, I really don't like, you know, sort of perpetual commodity, you know, CFD, you know, bucket shop markets that are being traded in things like Hyperliquid. You know, you see that like what a market can do when you have traders from like, you know, logging in with their mobile phone in Nigeria or whatever, you know, accessing central liquidity. So I think the scale of central liquidity plus the Jevons paradox of technology and AI, I think we're going to get cleaner, better risk-managed markets for everything. And, again, AVEX wants to be on the forefront of that. We don't see any market as too small. Now, we have priorities with our current cost of capital, 100%. But, again, this is why we're building to the 2030s, and we can't be more excited about building markets for everything. Thanks, Josh. Josh.

And with that, it's 15 minutes over the call time. We should let you all get back to your day. We really appreciate you dialing in for this call and staying to this point in it. Thank you for your questions and your interest and support. And I think May is only halfway over, so we need to get back to work. So with that, I'll turn it back to our operator, Betsy, to finish the call. Thank you.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.