Elmnts Announces Pre-Seed Funding to Bring Real-World Assets to Solana

CHICAGO - August 5, 2024 - Elmnts, the first tokenized commodities ecosystem providing investors access to mineral rights and royalties, announced today it has raised over $2 million in pre-seed funding.

The raise was led by Graph Ventures, Foundation Capital, and B+J Studios. Additional participants include Asymmetric and Anagram, Solana Co-Founders Raj Gokal & Anatoly Yakavenko, and angels including Brian Long from Triton, Austin Federa from Solana Foundation, Mert Mumtaz from Helius, Nom from Bonk, and Stepan Simkin from Squads. Elmnts, which is based in Chicago, will use the funds to continue to build its platform and disrupt the traditional commodities investment space. The growing interest in real-world assets and the expanding $700 billion commodity royalties market create an ideal environment for Elmnts, with more than $80 billion in royalties paid out by oil operators to investors each year. 

Mineral interests by their very nature are illiquid and hard to access. Elmnts was launched with the goal of bringing access to oil & gas investments and providing a platform to buy, sell and borrow without intermediaries facilitated by tokenization. Elmnts launched its private beta on July 4th and has onboarded early users while continuing to add investments to the platform.

“Beyond the excitement around tokenization and real-world assets, the consistency of the returns in the oil & gas space is something we find extremely compelling,” said Odai Ammar, Elmnts’ co-founder and CEO. “Mineral royalties are a great asset class for DeFi, especially when used as collateral, providing the opportunity for more attractive yields compared to other asset classes like real-estate, treasuries or other real-world assets available on-chain.”

Investors often see USDC and other stablecoin yields attractive when on-chain activity is high, but plummet during bear markets. A common outcome at the end of each cycle is that capital leaves, people take their gains, and tend to off-ramp into fiat. Elmnts aims to build a platform that provides one of the best opportunities to keep that capital on-chain within a compliant structure with returns that aren’t correlated to other crypto markets.

“Elmnts is a prime example of how embracing new technologies can create transformative disruption within an established industry,” adds Austin Federa, Head of Strategy at Solana Foundation. “By using the Solana blockchain and its battle-tested frameworks like Token Extensions, Elmnts aims to bring liquidity to traditionally illiquid markets, while making them accessible to an investor profile traditionally excluded from natural resource markets.”

Omar Siddiqui, Partner at Graph Ventures, further states "Elmnts brings exciting innovation to an asset class that is uniquely large but effectively unavailable to the general public, being mostly transacted offline and off-market. Elmnts is building a platform that leapfrogs the offline to the on-chain, digital world.”

Elmnts is building in a market that is ripe for technical and digital innovation. The platform combines royalty streams from world-class drilling areas in the Permian Basin operated by prominent energy companies, with the convenience of onboarding users with an email address and an ACH, USDC or wire transaction.

The need to tokenize and add liquidity to this fragmented market is high. Oil and gas royalties lack a unified exchange, leading to high transaction costs and forcing owners to often fire-sale their assets. Utilizing Solana’s scale, security and speed, plus token extensions, Elmnts will allow users to invest in these assets seamlessly and efficiently.

About Elmnts

Elmnts (pronounced “elements”) is a tokenized commodity ecosystem focusing on oil & gas royalties built on blockchain technology. The platform enables users to invest in real-world asset opportunities and effectively buy and borrow with fewer intermediaries, lower fees and higher liquidity transforming the $700 billion commodity royalties sector. In July 2024, Elmnts launched the first-of-its-kind platform as an invite-only private beta for investors built on Solana. Elmnts is backed by Graph Ventures, Foundation Capital, B+J Studios, Asymmetric and Amagram, plus Solana Co-Founders Raj Gokal & Anatoly Yakavenko and angels including Brian Long from Triton, Austin Federa from Solana Foundation, Mert Mumtaz from Helius, Nom from Bonk and Stepan Simkin from Squads. For more information visit elmnts.io.

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