Introducing Elmnts: Our Vision & What’s Ahead

tl;dr

• Tokenized commodities is the future, but we aren’t there yet
• Elmnts is tackling the main problems of an outdated commodities investment ecosystem: accessibility, liquidity, transparency
• Elmnts is now officially out of stealth and onboarding select users to its Private Beta
• The Private Beta will allow Elmnts to get closer to users and understand their needs, iterate on a better product experience, and scale for the future
• An upcoming Public Beta will make the platform available to more users 
• New and updated features will be launched in the coming months along with more investment opportunities

The Future of Commodities is Tokenized

Real-world assets have seen a recent uptick in interest. As the web3 ecosystem matures, the need to improve the efficiency and transparency of assets that exist in the physical world, backed by blockchain technology, is a big problem to solve.

This is why we’re building Elmnts. Pronounced “elements'' as a reference to the fundamental building blocks of matter we’re bringing on-chain. Energy powers web3 and everything in our digital lives. Every screen, anything with a plug, electric vehicles, and more requires power and electricity. Electricity requires a fuel source, fuel is energy for the grid – that fuel comes from the natural resources that need to be responsibly managed.

We’re building Elmnts for two primary reasons:

• Make commodity investments more accessible and efficient, starting with mineral rights
• Bring attractive investment returns on-chain that aren’t correlated with other crypto assets

Large Potential Market, Challenges Ahead

The market for traditional commodities royalties is a $700 billion market. There are also around $80 billion in royalties paid out to investors each year. 

The traditional mineral rights asset class is highly fragmented and has been typically reserved for high-net worth individuals or institutional investors. Add to that, the manual paperwork, lack of digital infrastructure and limited secondary markets meant the investment was difficult to access and hold. 

In contrast, the total amount of tokenized real-world assets on-chain is hovering only around $12 billion. This number includes treasuries, real estate, equities and other categories of assets–the amount of commodities-related assets circulating on-chain is only a fraction of that at around $800 million.

Given the large market size, the way users invest in commodities is ripe for disruption. We’re aiming to break down these barriers with specific solutions and approachable functionality that brings the industry into the 21st century. 

The Elmnts Private Beta: Why Now?

Considering all these factors, there has never been a better time to launch. 

To get where we are today, we’ve spent countless hours understanding how we can approach specific problems in the space. We have decades of industry experience to see the cracks in the current oil & gas royalties system. 

We also believe in the virtues of blockchain and democratizing financial tools that would otherwise be out of reach for many across the globe. Even thoughTradFi, and even some aspects of DeFi, are still heavily dependent on the legacy banking system, we believe in an on-chain future. But it’s clear that as an industry, we don’t have our own tools yet – that’s what we’re focused on building first.

The Private Beta is the starting point for building more tools for investors to find commodities returns, backed by the liquidity, transparency and access that blockchain provides. Users are able to create a non-custodial wallet and fund their account via ACH, USDC or wire transfer. Once funded, users can invest in mineral rights tied to oil wells across select locations in the USA.

Seems like a simple concept, right? But to move much of the infrastructure of commodity investing, with a very specific use-case (like oil & gas royalties), we are making progress that we’ll look back on in the years to come and think that we contributed directly to the progress of bringing more real-world assets on-chain.

What’s Ahead: Work, Grow & Scale

As we start with the Private Beta for a limited number of users, and move to the Public Beta that is more broadly available, we’ll continue adding to the Elmnts ecosystem.

Making the Elmnts platform scalable, both by adding more investments available to users and product enhancements, we’re taking small steps forward that will help the industry to evolve. The opportunity to create a truly unique web3 user experience that is approachable by both the crypto-savvy and TradFi users will be a much needed breath of fresh air as many crypto tools today can be complicated and confusing.

In the future, the Elmnts ecosystem will include more commodities outside of just oil and gas royalties, as well as leveraging DeFi to amplify returns and create custom programmable returns for each user. We believe oil & gas mineral rights are the perfect asset class to integrate with DeFi, especially when used as collateral. It provides the opportunity for more attractive yields compared to other asset classes like real-estate, treasuries or other on-chain assets. 

Leveraging Solana’s innovative toolkit to create a new financial system from issuance and tokenization, to streamlining programmable returns with these oil & gas assets, will be a game changer.

We can’t wait to welcome you along for the journey in bringing the fundamental building blocks of matter on-chain.