Abaxx Technologies Stock

Good day, and welcome to the Abaxx Technologies Second Quarter 2026 Earnings and Business Update Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note that this event is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Tara Hayes, Director of Communications. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, afternoon or evening, depending on where you're dialing in from today. Thanks for joining us for our Q2 earnings and business update call. With us are Josh Crumb, Founder and Chief Executive Officer; Steve Fray, Chief Financial Officer; David Greely, Chief Strategy Officer; Joe Raia, Chief Commercial Officer of Abaxx Exchange; and Leah Wald, Digital Title Lead at Abaxx Technologies.

The primary disclosure for today's call are our quarterly financial statements, MD&A and earnings announcement, which were released prior to this call and are available on our Investor Relations website at investors.abaxx.tech. This call is being webcast, and an archived version, along with the presentation, will be available there shortly after the conclusion of today's event.

Our discussion today includes forward-looking statements, which are subject to various assumptions, risks and uncertainties and other factors that are difficult to predict and which could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Please find our full disclaimer and cautions regarding forward-looking statements on the slide on screen. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, and therefore, undue reliance should be not placed upon them.

We refer you to our earnings press release and SEDAR filings for a more detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could impact the future operating results and financial condition of the company. We do not intend to update any forward-looking statements made on this conference call to reflect events or circumstances after today or to reflect new information or the occurrence of unanticipated events, except as required by law.

And with that, I'm going to turn the call over to David Greely.

Thanks, Tara, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Abaxx Exchange celebrated its 2-year trading anniversary this quarter. And not coincidentally, it was the strongest quarter that Abaxx Technologies has reported to date. At its core, Abaxx is building one of the rarest assets in global finance, a fully licensed regulated exchange and clearinghouse designed to bridge physical commodity trading between East and West.

Our operational execution remains at a high pace and multiple transformational milestones were completed during the second quarter that solidified the global foundations of our business, setting up years of scalable growth ahead. In Q2, we chose to accelerate our plans for scaling that growth towards our goal of 1 million average daily volume in the next 3 to 5 years. We raised capital and put it to work, expanding our sales team and building the initial liquidity in our markets that will attract commercial participants, and as liquidity begets liquidity, will allow us over time to win these markets as the venue providing commercial participants with best execution on a number of global commodity benchmarks.

We can see the results of these efforts in our trading activity and financial results, which I will walk you through first and again, in the network building and commercial milestones, which I will review in our 2Q highlights. First, the results. Total volume reached 888,902 contracts and year-to-date trading volume surpassed 1.1 million contracts in the second quarter, a sevenfold increase over the full year of 2025. Average daily volume reached 14,572 in Q2 and continued to grow into July, where it reached 34,136 contracts per day with single day volume on Abaxx Exchange surpassing 100,000 contracts for the first time on July 1.

Average daily open interest reached 641 in Q2 and continued to grow into July, reaching 1,119. And as we continue to advise investors to evaluate our trajectory on 6-month horizons, we're pleased to report our first half-over-half comparison since daily trading commenced in mid-2025, with a 613% increase in H1 2026 volume over H2 2025. We expect this positive, though nonlinear growth to continue in H2 2026. Looking ahead to 2027 and beyond, based on the continued expansion of our client network, new products, new markets, more trading hours and more trading regions, we remain confident in our trajectory to reaching our goal of 1 million average daily volume over 3 to 5 years, which would imply maintaining 50% to 100% half-over-half growth.

Returning to our Q2 results, the increased trading activity generated $4.5 million in transaction and clearing fees for Abaxx Exchange. These transaction and clearing fees covered the liquidity-related credits to liquidity providers, resulting in a small positive revenue. However, this quarter's transaction revenue was not the goal. The goal remains to build the liquidity required for widespread commercial participation in our markets. As our transaction and clearing fees and liquidity-related credits have grown into significant line items in our financial results, our CFO, Steve Fray, will be discussing how we are presenting these in our financial statements.

Importantly, our deployment of these liquidity building programs, which are used at all exchanges have worked as designed, deepening order books, establishing institutional scale liquidity for the first time in our markets and driving broader onboarding across clearing members, ISVs and brokers that will grow transaction and clearing fees from commercial participants. In order to capitalize on this commercial interest and engagement and accelerate growth of commercial participation in our markets, we recruited to build out our sales team and scale our market development efforts.

This increased our net cash spend to $16.3 million in 2Q compared to $12.3 million in 1Q 2026 and $13.2 million in 4Q 2025 and remain consistent with our steady long-term trend of disciplined budget and headcount expansion even as the company's trading and commercial activity scales more rapidly than our largely fixed cost base. Just as we continue -- just as we chose to increase spending this quarter, we retained the levers and flexibility to reduce cash spending in the future, if required, including adjusting our spending plans for commercializing our MarketOS and ID++ technology and our exchange commercialization runways.

Including a noncash component of expenses of $12.4 million, the company reported a net loss of $28.8 million for Q2 2026 compared to a net loss of $21.6 million in Q1 2026. We'd note that this noncash component includes an unrealized loss on derivatives of $6.1 million caused by the effect of the decline in our share price on our outstanding convertible debentures. We raised capital, put it to work and are seeing results. Abaxx raised $69 million during 2Q at a price of $54.25 per share. And as of June 30, 2026, Abaxx had $95.1 million in cash and cash equivalents on its balance sheet, remaining in a secure financial position to continue scaling our markets and completing a number of major milestones planned over the next 4 to 6 quarters of funded runway.

On our agenda, in the call today, we'll dig into our operational accomplishments and plans going forward. I'll review the key operational highlights from the quarter. Josh Crumb and Steve Fray will then discuss our approach to capital allocation and how we're prioritizing investment to support commercial growth. Joe Raia and I will follow up with an update on Abaxx Exchange, including the progress we're making in market development and participation. Finally, Leah Wald will discuss the commercialization of ID++ through MarketOS and milestones ahead.

Before discussing our second quarter highlights, I'll provide a brief update on the unfounded and meritless allegations advanced by Viceroy Research in a series of so-called short reports issued between June 11 and 30, 2026. Viceroy published these communications while disclosing a short position in Abaxx such that it stands to benefit from the decline in Abaxx's share price. The company has taken regulatory and legal action. We asked the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization, or CIRO, to investigate potentially manipulative or deceptive trading activity in Abaxx shares. And we retained Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison to investigate potential wrongdoing related to Viceroy's campaign and trading in the company's shares and to assess all available legal remedies.

The Board directed the Audit Committee, which is comprised of independent directors, to conduct an independent investigation into the allegations. The Audit Committee retained independent legal counsel and a major international public accounting firm to assist in the course of the investigation. As outlined in detail in our MD&A, that review has found no evidence supporting the allegations. The process requires a substantial amount of time and is ongoing, and we will provide an update when it is complete.

Finally, the Board believes the current market price does not reflect the underlying value of the company and on July 22, authorized a normal course issuer bid and automatic securities purchase plan, both of which became effective July 24 and remain in place. Purchases under the plan are intended to protect shareholders and the company's cost of capital from the effects of potentially manipulative trading activity associated with the campaign.

With that update, I'll turn to our second quarter operational highlights. I'll move quickly to leave space for the rest of the team to discuss these in more detail and provide the context for what each means for our business. At Abaxx Exchange, broader connectivity and growing liquidity are increasing the relevance of our markets to commercial participants. MarketOS advanced toward commercial implementation at Abaxx Clearing and toward third-party commercialization outside the exchange. Our shares began trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange on May 21 after Abaxx had grown to become the largest company by market capitalization on Cboe Canada. We welcomed Yongan International Singapore as our first Mainland China-backed clearing and trading member, providing institutional clients across Hong Kong and Asia with direct clearing access to Abaxx Exchange.

Abaxx Exchange market data is now available through LSEG and Bloomberg, expanding our reach across the institutional commodity markets and creating another potential source of recurring revenue as our market scale. We also launched Silver Singapore Futures and Enwex Germany Solar Futures, bringing the Exchange's product suite to 18 contracts. Joe will provide more detail on these developments during the market update. We entered into a commercial agreement with Alta, our first Singapore integration partner, to advance the use of money market fund shares as yield-bearing T+0 margin collateral at Abaxx Clearing, subject to all regulatory processes. As software increasingly acts on behalf of firms, we also formed Abaxx Labs and released Agents++, extending 7 years of work on globally resolvable identity infrastructure from humans to AI agents so they can operate as verifiable extensions of the people and institutions that authorize them.

Our exchange and clearinghouse gives MarketOS a direct path into regulated markets. In turn, the technology is designed to make participation in those markets more capital efficient, support broader participation and help accelerate our path to 1 million ADV. MarketOS also creates opportunities beyond Abaxx Exchange. During the quarter, we signed an agreement to support development of the Cambodian National Futures Exchange, creating a path to deploy the technology with third parties and extend its revenue potential beyond our markets. Leah will provide more detail on these developments, including a look under the hood during the digital infrastructure update.

Now I'll turn it over to Josh and Steve.

Thanks, David, and thanks, everybody, for joining us today. We have never been more confident in this business. Q2 gave us the clearest evidence yet that the infrastructure that we had spent 7 years building is converting into commercial market activity. Our prices are now available on more than 400,000 institutional screens through Bloomberg and LSEG. Order book depth and trading activity increased, and that activity is accelerating institutional onboarding and strategic discussions around new commodity benchmarks from both commercial participants and interested governments across multiple jurisdictions.

Our commercial and executive teams have always maintained unparalleled access to global commodity clients throughout our careers, but there is simply no substitute for a prospective new trader or clearing member than being able to pull a live time series of trading data off of a Bloomberg terminal, LSEG, TradingView or one of our many live ISVs to discover market arbitrage opportunities and execute in our order books. Abaxx's strategic position as an independent commodity exchange and clearinghouse sitting between East and West is also becoming more relevant.

Our conversations across Washington, China and the Middle East reinforce the demand for a sovereign grade global trading venue engineered with modern technology and contract designs to eliminate a number of systemic basis risks plaguing today's physical commodity supply chains. Seven years into our 10-year plan, the commercial case for Abaxx is stronger than it has ever been. The activity we saw in Q2 gives us greater conviction in the value of the exchange network, the benchmark opportunity in our markets and the revenue potential that comes with scale.

As we update our market on our growth and development path going forward, I want to start with what we have already built. The infrastructure in place today, looking at our business from a sum of the parts, or from the top down, has substantial strategic and replacement value even today before assigning any value from the commercial upside of our individual markets from the bottom up. We have already worked through 7 of the 9 hard cold start problems, which can be seen in the accompanying slides. That work has created an increasingly difficult to replicate exchange and clearing network, even though much of that value is not reflected directly in our balance sheet numbers today. It also explains why we continue to invest in liquidity building programs, which Dave will expand on our market update.

Liquidity turns connectivity into functioning markets, supports best execution and benchmark status and strengthens the broader exchange and clearing network as those markets develop. We like to say that liquidity is an asset and best execution is the product we sell from that asset base. Looking ahead, we are excited -- we're executing against a defined set of milestones through year-end and early 2027 that would further strengthen the value and earnings capacity of the exchange and clearing network. We'll walk through a few of these as bullets.

Extended trading hours, expanding operational trading hours to match ICE and CME global session schedules. Product suite expansion, following the trading hours extension, we plan to begin launching products largely already developed in our existing pipeline with the potential to more than double our current suite over the next 4 to 6 quarters, subject to regulatory requirements. New asset classes, the expansion would also take Abaxx Exchange into new markets, including potentially oil, base metals and agriculture, materially broadening the range of commodity risk managed on the exchange.

Tier 1 bank onboarding, Onboarding the first major global bank clearing member transforms the clearinghouse credit profile and supports larger institutional positions going forward. Critical mass of Chinese onboarding, completing onboarding for a critical mass of Mainland China-related FCMs and commercial trading desks, expanding participation and clearing access across the region. Physical deliveries, executing first physical deliveries across LNG, lithium and silver to join what we've already seen in gold and carbon, validating contract utility for commercial participants and supporting durable open interest. Active trading in wind and solar, bringing additional utilities and trading desk participants into our wind and solar markets this fall, supporting daily trading, initial market making and liquidity development.

Noncash collateral acceptance, beginning live acceptance of yield-bearing money market fund shares and vaulted gold as T+0 margin collateral at Abaxx Clearing using MarketOS and ID++. We believe we are still a few quarters away from being able to project guidance and breakeven for each product individually and for the exchange collectively, but we believe these final key infrastructure completions will put us in that position well before we would seek new growth capital from strategic partners or the equity markets. Looking at our individual markets from the bottom up, we continue to prioritize liquidity and commercial participation over near-term net fee capture. Dave will walk through the economics of that investment in the market update.

We expect growth to continue in the second half of 2026. As we've stated in the past, our business is best examined through a lens of half-over-half infrastructure development and onboarding, and our outlook remains intact for 50% to 100% half-over-half growth in trading volumes over an extended horizon, consistent with our 3- to 5-year goal of 1 million ADV. We are already seeing the return on that investment beginning to show up in our precious metals markets. Based on current trading activity and client engagement, we now see a path for that complex to reach stand-alone breakeven and potentially begin carrying the exchange's baseline operational costs from 2028.

Client conversations across the U.S., London and Asia were also reinforcing Singapore's role as a neutral precious metals hub. We continue to see major benchmark opportunities in LNG, lithium and VC carbon as we've developed over the years, but precious metals can now become a core asset for Abaxx rather than a niche market share. Our precious metals opportunity also gives you a good example of the operating leverage in the exchange model as much of this opportunity is a welcome upside surprise against our initial expectations for this segment. Our baseline operating costs across personnel, clearing, operations, regulatory compliance and cloud infrastructure are relatively fixed.

As trading volumes scale through the second half of 2026 and first half of 2027, incremental exchange fee revenue will be reinvested in liquidity provider programs and deeper order books. Investors should, therefore, not expect rising trading volume to flow directly to our net margin or bottom line over the next 3 to 4 quarters. We intend to deploy growth in transaction and clearing fees back into liquidity across our developing markets, and we'll continue to update investors each quarter on the economics we're seeing. As that investment drives liquidity, network growth and connectivity towards critical mass, we expect net fee capture per contract to inflect sharply positive, which we now believe should begin by the end of our funded runway.

Even after completing a transformational financing in Q2, we continue to manage our runway against market conditions in the next stage of growth. Management continues to have a significant ownership stake in this business. And with an owner-operator culture, we have a long track record of disciplined budgeting, tight dilution and maintaining multiple paths to additional capitalization alongside a deep strategic investor base supporting this growth and vision.

Frankly speaking, we believe we should be investing much more in developing new products, growing contract liquidity and growing our valuable financial network into very large addressable markets across Asia and beyond on top of the infrastructure that we've already proven out and that is now scaling. Ultimately, our investment pace remains tied to our cost of capital, and we will maintain the strict dilution constraints we have always imposed on ourselves. For now, that means trading some speed for patience, including moderating the expansion we had planned for MarketOS go-to-market this fall.

We will continue to assess the trade-off between growth and dilution with our technology expansion budget remaining a lever to extend runway as our exchange breakeven horizon begins to emerge. And finally, I have one additional comment to share with you today. I'm pleased to update that Joe Raia has been appointed President of Abaxx Exchange. Joe is supported by Chief Business Development Officer, Russell Robertson, and 5 new specialized commercial sales lead hires covering energy, metals and environmental markets across Houston, London, Singapore and Asia.

With that, I'll hand over to Steve Fray to walk through a few notable detailed financial disclosures this quarter.

Thank you, Josh. This quarter, we completed our accounting assessment of payments issued under the market maker and liquidity provider programs at Abaxx Exchange, which are relatively new. That assessment resulted in 2 determinations affecting the presentation of our financial statement. First, we determined that the liquidity-related credits to market makers and liquidity providers constitute consideration payable to customers under IFRS 15, and we recognize and should be recognized as a reduction of related fee income.

As a result, we are presenting the payments we received as transaction and clearance fees, and we are presenting the liquidity-related credits paid to market makers and liquidity providers as a separate line item that is deducted from these fees before stating our revenue. These liquidity-related credits were previously presented within our operating expenses under travel, marketing and promotion.

Secondly, we determined that delays in when market makers and liquidity providers were invoiced in the company for payments earned under those programs could result in the related payments being recognized in a subsequent period to the underlying program activities. As a result, these program payments are now being recognized in the quarter in which they were earned rather than when we received and paid the invoice. In our financial statements and MD&A, we provided a table that clarify the impact of these determinations in the previously reported issued unaudited income statement for the 3 months ended March 31, 2026.

As shown in that table, $543,000 of program payments previously presented within the travel, marketing and promotion expense would instead be presented as a reduction in transaction and clearing revenue. In addition, $1.3 million of program payments relating to March 2026 would have been recognized in Q1 2026 rather than when invoices were subsequently received and paid. These changes had no impact on cash and cash equivalents or total assets. As of March 31, 2026, total liabilities increased and shareholders' equity decreased by $1.3 million. For the 3 months ended March 31, 2026, revenue decreased by $1.4 million, operating expenses decreased by $112,000 and net loss increased by $1.3 million.

Because these programs are relatively new, and there would be no significant change to prior quarters. Regrettably, there were errors made when incorporating these changes into our unaudited financial statements and MD&A. This resulted in Q2 2026 operating expenses being overstated by $1.3 million. As corrected, Q2 2026 operating expenses were $19.2 million when compared with restated operating expenses of $15 million in Q1 2026. This makes the actual growth in operating expenses $4.2 million or up 28% from Q1 2026. The balance sheet was accurate as presented for Q1 2026 and Q2 2026.

The income statement was accurate as presented for H1 2026, but not for the individual quarters. We have reviewed our processes and controls and have made changes to prevent a reoccurrence. These errors were corrected over the weekend before the markets opened, reviewed by external auditors and were refiled and we refiled our financial statements and MD&A for Q2 2026. These are available on SEDAR and on our website at investors.abaxx.tech.

Thank you, Steve. Before we move on, I want to acknowledge that as CEO, those errors are ultimately on me. Our shareholders are entitled to accurate disclosures and the controls change Steve outlined is designed to prevent a reoccurrence. We also want to thank the team and the Board. The last 2 months have been demanding, and this team continued to build relentlessly. We have enormous talent and experience across the company and a team that understands both the opportunity in front of us and the work required to capture it.

I'll hand it over to Dave to begin walking through what that work looks like.

Thank you, Josh. In our 4Q 2025 earnings call on April 19 of this year, I discussed how we look to capture generational opportunity to build the new commodity benchmarks for the next decade and beyond. Two years after the launch of Abaxx Exchange, we're a good way down the road. We built the exchange in clearinghouse, launched 18 products, and we have connected a robust network of clearing firms, ISVs, data distributors, brokers and traders. And while we continue to connect and onboard new partners, we are focused on driving volumes and liquidity in our individual product markets up the S-curve from being new to mature markets.

The nature of a market is that it is a network, and so it becomes more useful to each trader as more traders participate. The first participants in a market are taking real risk, but they will not be able to enter and exit trading positions. The solution to this problem adopted by exchanges has long been to compensate the early participants who take this risk, the liquidity providers who provide the initial liquidity that enables commercial participants to trade. And so what we typically see as trading activity and participation moves up the S-curve is that the revenue per contract, the transaction and clearing fees less the compensation to these liquidity providers often begins low or negative, then climbs up over time on an S-curve of its own.

It's important to note that the liquidity of an exchanges markets is an important competitive advantage. A bad liquid contract will often beat the good illiquid one. And so it's important to not view liquidity programs as a necessary evil, but as a tool for developing and retaining a competitive advantage. We see this today at other exchanges. On May 29, ICE, the Intercontinental Exchange, launched a new liquidity provider program to make their CORSIA Phase 1 market more competitive. And the Hong Kong Exchange introduced a new liquidity provider program as it seeks to revive its gold futures market in Hong Kong.

Consequently, while we expect fee revenue from commercial participants to lift our revenue per contract up its S-curve over time, we expect these programs to continue because we see these programs as an investment, an investment in the liquidity and competitiveness of our markets, not an expense to try to drive to 0. That said, let's discuss the nature of the investment we are making in building liquidity in our markets and how by overcoming the cold start problem, we expect to create a return on that investment. As you'll see in the slide, it all begins with building network connectivity for traders through their clearing firms, brokers and ISVs and then using market-making and liquidity provider programs to build that initial liquidity in markets, then the wheels begin turning.

Liquidity begets liquidity as more trading participants are attracted to the market by those already trading. The trading activity creates business opportunities for more clearing firms, brokers and ISVs, leading them to connect to our exchange. Their increased connectivity provides access to more traders who can enter the market, creating more liquidity and trading activity and those 2 mutually reinforcing cycles drive the market up the S-curve to maturity. While the liquidity programs require funding, this investment ultimately generates returns through 3 channels. The trading activity generates transaction and clearing fees for the exchange, the increased connectivity raises the network value of the exchange and clearinghouse and the trading activity creates valuable market data, including pricing benchmarks from which the exchange can earn market data fees.

One item I haven't discussed is the role of margin financing, which can be a very important means of helping commercial hedgers to use the exchange. While I won't go into detail here, I will note that our work on the technology side to advance the use of digital collateral performs effectively the same role, lowering the cost of collateral and helping to drive commercial participation.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Joe to update you on how these dynamics are playing out in our markets. Over to you, Joe.

Thanks, Dave. This next slide shows how much our connectivity network has expanded over the past year. As we talked about earlier and a year ago, much of our work was focused on establishing those core connections. In fact, the Bloomberg and LSEG/Refinitiv connectivity took almost 2 years of hard work from the Abaxx data and ops team. Today, Abaxx Exchange is connected to 7 clearing firms, over 20 interdealer brokers, 5 licensed data distributors, including the leading global providers, 5 exchange ISVs, 2 settlement banks and more than 100 trading firms.

We made several important additions to that network during the quarter. With LSEG/Refinitiv and Bloomberg now distributing our market data, Abaxx prices are available across all major global commodity futures ISVs and data distributors. And in early July, we went live with our carbon and LNG markets on Emstream, a boutique OTC broker electronic platform that has an incredibly dedicated following of commercial firms. Several firms have already asked to onboard as a result of the Abaxx liquidity shown on that screen. Again, as we keep saying, market maker liquidity attracts commercial requests for access with those commercial firms paying full rack rate of exchange fees.

As Dave and Josh both mentioned, we also added Yongan Singapore as our first but not last Mainland China-backed clearing and trading member, expanding direct clearing access to Abaxx Exchange for clients across Hong Kong and Asia. That access is particularly relevant in LNG and lithium and gold and silver, where Yongan is seeing client interest as China's commodity markets become more accessible to both Mainland China and its international participants. I would strongly encourage shareholders to listen to David Greely's August 8 SmarterMarkets interview with Yongan's Singapore CEO, Josh Qiao, for a direct perspective on why they chose Abaxx Exchange. An additional note on Yongan, they executed and cleared for their first trade, our GKS gold market trade at the end of last week.

With the commercial team expanding during the quarter, we are increasing our coverage across key regions to continue adding clearing and brokerage access globally so that our growing network of global customers can better manage their market risk with our rapidly expanding product suite. India continues to be a fantastic source of new liquidity for us, and we have been paying particular attention to developing those key relationships in that important region as their percentage of volume continues to grow.

This next slide does give a great visual on the growth of the Abaxx overall market liquidity. In Q2, as we talked about earlier, total volume reached 888,902 contracts, up 276% from Q1. To put that in perspective, volume in Q2 alone exceeded our total volume for all of 2025 by more than 450%. Average daily volume reached 14,500 contracts per day, nearly 4x the Q1 level and then ADV increased to 34,136 contracts per day in July. Average daily open interest increased from 280 contracts in Q1, up to 641 in Q2 and then again to 1,199 (sic) [ 1,119 ] contracts in July. Certainly, open interest does capture positions that remain outstanding rather than simple contracts trading during the session, and commercial firms consistently tell us that sustained open interest is one of the metrics they watch when deciding when to participate more actively in the market.

These commercial firms also equate -- equally focused -- are equally focused on market liquidity, which they say the Abaxx markets clearly are showing growing. July total exchange volume just for the month of July reached 785,129 contracts, more than double the June volume. But markets are cyclical, so we don't expect activity to increase in a straight line every month. July was incredibly strong, but our focus remains on building sustained liquidity and commercial participation over time. Our new physically deliverable silver contract, the first of its kind in the region, only launched on May 22, but traded a total of 107,477 contracts before the end of Q2.

We designed the contract around four-nines silver, the high-purity silver required for industrial manufacturing based on feedback from commercial customers in the region and initial performance certainly reinforces our conviction in that design as silver volume alone increased another 80% in July over Q1 volumes. Participation in our gold futures markets also continued to build. Q2 volume reached 630,000 contracts, up 287% from Q1 and July volume increased another 188% from June. As our gold Singapore market has gained traction, we've seen the broader regional market moving in the same direction with established Asian exchanges renewing their focus on regional gold benchmarks. That renewed focus is opening new opportunities to trade basis and arbitrage across regional gold markets while further validating the market need we identified when we launched GKS.

In our global LNG benchmarks, combined Gulf of Mexico and NPA volume reached 121,000 contracts in Q2, up 102% from Q1. In April, trading represented the equivalent of more than 110 full physical LNG cargoes and NPA, our Asia contract at one point represented more than 40% of the JKM volume. In September, Abaxx will be the sole exchange sponsor at the annual Gastech Global Gas Conference in Bangkok, also hosting an LNG Japan Energy Leadership Roundtable with some elite senior LNG market trading firms and NGO and government entities. There are over 50,000 people that annually attend Gastech, and Abaxx will be well represented and play a prominent role again at that conference.

Trayport recently highlighted Gulf of Mexico as a new FOB benchmark for the U.S. Gulf Coast, independently reinforcing the market need for a transparent LNG price anchored directly to the point of the U.S. export. And speaking of Trayport, as of early July, there were over 20 specific commercial firms and over 75 individual traders that had requested access specifically to Abaxx markets on the Trayport's Joule platform. These firms include large bank trading desks, European utilities and merchant energy firms. And also just today, we had another request for go live access for one of those large European merchant trading firms.

It proves the point again, fully that liquidity begets liquidity and that market making programs attract commercial firms, which generally pay full rack rate and exchange fees. Our pipeline of new products includes innovative contracts across energy, environmental markets, agriculture, base metals and precious metals developed around specific risk management needs we hear directly from commercial participants. The investment in our team, our data distribution, execution, clearing, brokerage, trading relationships and initial liquidity Josh and Dave outlined compound with each new contract launch. Each addition to our product suite supports the contracts already trading, while each new product makes the network more useful to participants.

Our oldest contracts are only 2 years old within the 3 to 5 development period we've outlined. Those investments are delivering the market development we expected and derisking the path to our target of 1 million ADV. We have launched 18 net new contracts in 2 years, and the network we've built gives the next products more clearing access, distribution and trading relationships as they come to market. Our commitment to solving hard problems in commodity markets continues to attract new talent to our product development team and achieved in Q2, including professionals from CME and commercial energy firms, expanding both our market expertise and our capacity to translate those needs and turn them into new contracts and markets.

Now I'll hand it over to Leah for an update on digital infrastructure. Over to you, Leah.

Thanks, Joe. Everything in a clearinghouse is an identity question. Who authorized this trade? Who holds this collateral? Who's entitled to act right now? Each one is slow and expensive to answer today, and that cost often shows up as collateral sitting idle. Abaxx started there 7 years ago, building ID++ to give people and institutions control over their identity, permissions and data. MarketOS is the application suite on top of it, and every application on that page inherits the same identity layer, which is why each one is stronger and cheaper to build than the last.

We also have something most technology -- financial technology companies don't, our own regulated exchange and clearinghouse. So we build the specification rather than guessing at what a central counterparty clearing needs. We've been working hard building and shipping. This quarter, Verifier shipped new releases in both app stores, and we completed important work on AbaxxOne, which is designed to connect a firm's existing enterprise identity environment to ID++.

We work from a simple commercial premise, which is that firms shouldn't have to replace the systems their people already use to adopt ours. Identity should travel to where the work already happens, not the other way around. For the time we have left today, I'm going to focus on our tech work in real-time collateral because it shows most directly how MarketOS improves the economics of trading in Abaxx's markets.

Now let's walk through this backdrop. Cash margin is a solved problem. A call goes out, the clearing firm collects it and the clearinghouse can recognize it immediately. Before a clearinghouse can recognize noncash collateral margin, it needs current evidence of ownership, eligibility and control. Today, that information sits across fund administrators, custodians, transfer agents and other third parties, each one operating on a different system and a different time line.

Members compensate by holding more cash. That cash earns a negotiated rate at the FCM, and that's fine as far as it goes, but it isn't the return on the asset the member would rather be holding. The member gives up that difference every day across very large collateral balances because the collateral cannot be recognized fast enough, and that's the cost we're going after. ID++ proves the cryptographic controls behind MarketOS, which connects to the existing systems of records and captures the state changes the clearinghouse needs to see in real time. So rather than each party learning about a change at a different moment, they all see the same event at once, signed, attributable and independently verifiable.

The adage I grew up with in this space was don't trust, verify. Trust isn't something you ask for at the start. It's what you're left with once everyone can verify for themselves. We've been deliberate about what we didn't want to build. Clearing firms are comfortable with their customers' credit. Otherwise, they wouldn't be customers, but we didn't build a credit tool. We built an evidence tool and real-time evidence is what can allow clearinghouse to recognize collateral without waiting to be told what's true.

The popular version of trying to solve this problem has been to tokenize the asset itself, turn it into a bearer instrument and move it on to a blockchain. That creates 2 problems for a risk manager. First, a bearer instrument means whoever holds the keys holds the asset. And most of the largest losses in digital assets this year have been key custody failing, not cryptography failing. When a key goes, so does the asset. Second, the legal question. And this isn't just us saying it. The SEC and the IMF have both flagged the same gap this year that in many jurisdictions, a token is a claim on the issuer rather than on the asset, which can leave you as an unsecured creditor in a bankruptcy, both point to the same fix, legal certainty harmonized across jurisdictions.

There's been real work done here, and I don't want to dismiss it. It may well get there. We just don't think a clearinghouse should have to wait, and we don't require any of it. We've built MarketOS to work with the existing system of record, so the same infrastructure can support a money market fund share, vaulted gold or a commodity in transit. Each has different custody, title and settlement mechanics. Each requires current verifiable evidence of ownership control and status. Each additional asset class draws on the same infrastructure, which is powerful because it then becomes a distribution question. And Dave mentioned Agents++, which extends that same identity and permission framework to software agents. Via AbaxxOne, it has a path into the fuller MarketOS suite, so a firm coming to us for collateral efficiency can make progress on agentic automation, too.

We're continuing to develop our MarketOS work into the 3 commercial applications we isolated as having the most potential and supporting our clearing business, money market fund collateral at Abaxx Clearing, stored commodities and commodities in transit. First, we're working to establish money market fund shares as T+0 collateral at Abaxx Clearing. Alta is the appointed fund manager of the Singapore VCC with a money market fund sub-fund and Abaxx Clearing aims to accept those shares in that fund as eligible margin, subject to completing the applicable regulatory processes made possible by digital title.

Second, stored commodities. We have demonstrated in our previous pilot that vaulted gold can serve as collateral while remaining in existing custody. That can reduce the cost and operational complexity of transferring physical inventory and put more of the asset to work. We are now validating that structure with bullion banks and commodity lenders with the same approach applicable to other stored commodities. Third, commodities in transit. When lenders can't independently verify what they're financing, credit tightens and financing costs rise. Digital title is designed to give traders and lenders a current verifiable record of the cargo, including changes in ownership and control. That gives lenders better visibility into the asset they are financing and gives traders stronger evidence to support access to credit.

MineHub is our partner in taking that application to market, and we're working towards validation with commodity market participants and ultimately live institutional use. Collateral friction is a key reason firms stay with incumbent venues and every piece of it we take out improves the economics of moving to Abaxx and supports the SmarterMarkets vision Josh described. Across our industry, exchange groups are spending billions of dollars buying their way into technology and infrastructure. And capital can buy a platform, but it can't compress the 7 years we've spent solving the identity verification problem to bring MarketOS to market. MarketOS gives us a capital efficiency advantage in our own markets and a commercial opportunity beyond them.

And with that, I'm going to hand it over to the operator so we can start the question and answer.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Etienne Ricard with BMO.

On the liquidity provider programs, I understand the rationale for the payments and the need to build liquidity. Josh, I heard you say you'll continue to support these programs for at least the next 3 to 4 quarters. Now we've seen similar programs typically last 2 to 3 years at other exchanges. So assuming volume activity continues to build, is this also a reasonable time line for Abaxx Exchange as well? I mean, in other words, how fast and how meaningfully should we see the net revenue capture rate improve from here?

Yes. So thanks, Etienne. Nice to hear from you. So I'll take it first and then hand it over to Dave. I think one thing that's important when we're comparing us to other venues, while the contract at the -- like I said, so from the bottom-up perspective, looking at each contract, we're not going to be any different than other exchanges. I think the one difference you have to remember in our market is that we're building a new clearinghouse at the same time as building individual contracts, right?

So -- and that's -- it's a good thing because even if we don't -- even if that revenue doesn't hit our net capture, our ecosystem is profiting, right? Our clearing members are still collecting their portion of the trade. Our ISVs are still collecting their portion of the trade, interdealer brokers and so forth.

So the economic activity is increasing in our network. And as you can see, we're not spending anything additional in our OpEx, in our fixed OpEx, but really just that recirculating that revenue. So yes, this is a point that I think sometimes gets lost is that we're building our clearing house at the same time as the individual products, but it is growing and it is working.

Dave, do you want to talk a little bit about the time horizons?

Sure. Happy to do that. And then I might flip it to Joe because at the beginning of your question, you remarked about the length of programs at other exchanges, and I think Joe could have some valuable insights into that piece as well. But really, it really goes back to that 3-step chart that we've shown on a couple of quarterly earnings call now of going from new market to critical mass to a mature market.

And really, in the beginning, as we've said, in a new market period, it's primarily the early movers, the market makers, liquidity providers and what we've seen some of the early commercial adopters, the merchant trading shops. And what you expect to see over time is that as the commercials come in, and as Joe said, as they're paying the full rate on the contracts without any liquidity provision payment, that will start to pull up the average revenue per contract across all of the trading. So it's really a question of having those commercial participants come in. As they're generating liquidity through their own trading, it can allow you to pull back a little bit on some of the liquidity provider programs, but they still remain important.

So I would say it's difficult to say -- it's difficult to say when does the RPC go to a certain point as it is to say when does commercial participation hit a certain point. So I think we'll keep doing what we always do, which is look to the step ahead. Right now, we're seeing, as Joe said, much more commercial engagement in a reaction to that initial liquidity we've built. And as those come in, they -- that trading would naturally pull up the RPC numbers, and that's how we will progress.

And Joe, do you want to comment on how those programs are used at other exchanges in terms of the length or duration of those programs?

Yes. Sure, Dave. I mean, having been involved directly with them at the NYMEX back in the day, if you look on their -- simply and even on their fee schedule, you'll see programs that have been existing since I was there in 2003. I launched the Brent Market Making program in 2003, and it's still in existence. And so they don't -- it depends on how -- and it becomes retooled or adjusted depending on where the needs are. They're absolutely necessary for all markets, even as Dave said, where you have exchanges that have long-standing clearinghouse development and relationships, we're starting from a cold start, and we obviously needed to build liquidity.

So I wouldn't say 2 to 3 years is the normal lifespan. As I said, there are many that have been existing since -- for many, many years. And again, you just need to adjust them as the marketplace develops and as you start bringing in commercial firms. I would make an important note that when you look at the other existing exchanges, their mix of market makers versus commercials is always -- you can look at their RPC and how their RPC goes up and down over the years. But generally, it doesn't go below 45%, 50% of market makers. So that just points out how important they are.

Okay. So if I understand correctly, the net revenue per contract should remain near current levels probably for next year and then hopefully, it improves from there. Is that fair?

Well, I think we would expect that to be improving over the course of the year.

Yes, we might be blending a couple of concepts here. So like on our precious metals in general, again, as the commercial activities come in, like on an individual basis, we don't necessarily need to then start increasing spending to drive to 0, right? So we can -- on an individual contract basis, that revenue capture can grow. I'm just saying from a business perspective, we should expect to continue investing, but this is very much cost of capital dependent, right?

If the market wants us focused on breakeven and cut more investments or reinvestments, absolutely. And that was sort of what my comment was on we're seeing signs that we think that the precious metals business alone, the products we've launched and ones in our pipeline can be in a position to carry the freight of our fixed operating costs in 2028. And that will be more clear over coming quarters. That's an early assessment of the data we're seeing in our market and conversations we're having. But again, we don't have to reinvest everything to net to 0, is my point.

So Josh, on capital allocation, you have about $100 million in cash after the capital raise. Now expense growth has increased a little bit this past quarter. In what areas of the business are you seeing the strongest return potential to grow the exchange business? And as a follow-up, how do you think about your ability to reach breakeven levels without the need to raise more capital?

Yes, sure. So first on the cost side. On the cost side, it has jumped in Q2 over Q1. But if you -- that's why we're showing the Q4 as well. There's a little bit of volatility in the timing of some of these costs. As we mentioned, we did do a big ramp-up of some key executives in the commercial team. But we actually think where Q3 and Q4 are tracking, you're not going to keep seeing those sequential jumps. So I think we are closer to a run rate this year after our capital raise, after some new expansions. And so we should have a pretty consistent operating cost base through the remainder of the year, again, unless something changes significantly in our cost of capital.

And then, yes, so as far as the runway, I guess that's back to my comments. Look, we're taking this on a sort of a quarter-by-quarter basis. We're very disciplined with our dilution. And so we will go slower if the cost of capital sort of dictates that. And so there are some levers we can pull here. But we do not see a significant cost increase while we will continue to see, again, that what we believe is that sort of 50% half-over-half growth in activity in our markets.

And the next question comes from Aravinda Galappatthige with Canaccord.

Just following up from there. I mean, that was very useful. With respect to -- so it's really about sort of the timing of the commercial participants becoming more evident. Maybe just help us sort of with what we should look for as we track that? I mean, is there a recognition? I mean, the open interest has already increased a little bit. I mean, there's obviously room to grow more. In terms of your conversations with them, what else are they looking for? Is it more clearing members to sign on? Maybe just help us with those sort of guideposts.

It's David. Do you want to take that one, Joe?

Yes. Sorry, I was on mute. Sorry. The -- as a regulated exchange, we don't obviously put out the specific names of firms that trade our markets. Open interest is certainly a good indicator. And as you mentioned, Aravinda, we have seen a nice growth in our open interest. I think the liquidity is helpful, too. So as I mentioned in my remarks, open interest is a great balancing point, but the actual activity in markets and deep liquidity in markets is equally important. We -- market traders say they like open interest, but they also want to be able to get in and out of contract. So that's an important guidepost for us and also for the marketplace.

I would say that we're lucky now that most trading firms have more than one clearing relationship and some of the nonbank clearing firms that are already connected to Abaxx are seeing a lot of move over from some very significant firms to them for existing -- for new trading -- excuse me, new clearing relationships. So that's helped us quite a bit in the expansion of our markets, particularly in India, where a lot of the trading firms that are coming on board there use some of the existing clearing firms of Abaxx. So that's been a big help for us. But I think in general, just the growth in volume is a good guidepost as far as not only how market makers and liquidity providers are joining us, but also as commercial firms are also.

I should also probably note, beyond looking for increased commercial open interest deliveries, these types of indicators, having a Tier 1 bank in our clearinghouse as well because remember, we don't have retail trading here. So the cold start is really large lot commercials. And so even the increasing credit profile of the clearinghouse with more clearing members and stronger clearing members, including Tier 1 banks, does help the confidence in positions as well as the physical delivery underwriting. So yes, that's the other key one to unlock more open interest and liquidity throughout the year.

And then just moving on to MarketOS. Again, some helpful comments. I just wanted to make sure I understood a comment you had made earlier, Josh, about sort of the time to deployment. Are you sort of -- is that sort of something that will perhaps take a little bit more time than originally expected? Or did I sort of not hear that correctly?

So within our own clearing system and our own network, we're still on track. We're still pushing everything. It's more of the expansion of the sales and the tech team for more third-party. That's where we're kind of remaining a little bit more on hold. We made some internal changes to move some folks over to Abaxx Labs and focus on the agentic opportunity. And then we've very much focused the team on the internal collateral use case to support the exchange.

Other things we kind of had in the works around Messenger and others, I would say, a little bit more on hold. And in fact, we've even had some cost savings. We've always maintained a couple of outsourced development -- software development shops because that allows us the flexibility with budgets that we've kind of monitor on a quarter-over-quarter basis. But of course, AI is now doing a lot of the work that people -- firms used to use with third-party development hours. So I think the efficiency of AI, combined with a little bit more focus on the 2 sectors, we can actually reduce some of our cost spending. But again, we're also just staying very focused on those 2 areas rather than a broader technology expansion.

And the next question comes from Martin Toner with ATB Cormark.

Congrats on results. It sounds like you're pretty encouraged by some of the trading in metals contracts. Can you talk about if some of those contracts are now kind of reaching the point of "liquidity"?

Yes, sure, I can take that. The -- they are. That's a simple answer to that, Martin. Thanks for the question. I think, though, when you compare it against other markets, certainly, we have our aspirations to grow even further, particularly in the expansion in the region and the need for these contracts as a Singapore listed contract. Certainly, with the addition of Yongan as a clearing member and the great start on our silver contract, we're looking to other contracts that firms have been asking us for in the region that can help bring additional liquidity to those markets and also new volume and revenue for us. So yes, we're excited about the growth of gold and silver, but we know that the use of the clearinghouse is important for other markets, too, that we'll look forward to be launching.

Yes. And just to add on to Joe's piece -- sorry, I just wanted to add on quickly. I think in terms of like what we're seeing is what commercial participants want to be seeing, right? So in terms of is it liquid, it's really liquid enough for what? Is it liquid enough for commercial participation? A lot of the feedback we get is they want to see the volume. They want to see the open interest. They want to see narrower bid-ask spreads. They want to see depth in the order book. And when you look across those markets now, they're able to see those things. And so that's why we're getting the higher level of requests to start going live than we have previously.

That's great. How focused do you think investors should be on the change in open interest across your contracts?

I think it's one of the important milepost or guidelines for futures exchanges, but it's not the only one. I use the example a lot in discussions with customers where one exchange had several thousand lots of open interest in one of their battery metals contracts, but yet they hadn't traded that contract in months or weeks. And so the argument is how would a trader get out of that position even if he had open interest if there was no liquidity. So I think, as Dave said, with a deep bid-ask spread and daily liquidity, it's obviously equally important to open interest. And so you have to really balance that and bring in firms that will not only hold open interest, but also, again, the liquidity providers that will allow a trading firm to get in and out of their position.

Yes. One other kind of related -- one other related point that I think is actually very critical to understand about our markets versus others. So of course, there's -- well, essentially almost a duopoly in these energy and metal markets out there. And so often firms will block trade open interest against a market even if there's no real volume. And a lot of that is because these are very specifically PRA survey sort of assessment type markets. So this isn't necessarily a central limit order book activity. This is a block trade just because they're utilizing one of the handful of clearing houses.

With our products, so the question could ultimately be what's the endpoint? Can't they just spend more on liquidity and be more liquid? The endpoint is you've got to have the contract that is best execution. So if you look at, again, our battery metals contracts in comparison, we believe that, that's better execution than a PRA sort of cash-settled index. So our liquidity can naturally drive more trading than somebody that's trading against the PRA. And so yes, so while they may have high open interest, low liquidity and right now, we've got low liquidity -- sorry, high liquidity open interest, we do believe that open interest is an endpoint for us, if that makes sense.

Yes, that's great. Can you talk a little bit about the pipeline for new products and contracts going forward?

I think for competitive reasons, Martin, we don't -- and also from a regulatory perspective, we don't put out the specific pipeline. But as the slide pointed out during the presentation, we have quite a few new contracts in various asset classes that we are looking at that we'll be rolling out here over the next few months. So stay tuned to that. We have a lot of requests from clearing firms and trading firms for new markets. I think after the summer here, we'll have a few that will be coming out in various markets. But that slide did give you probably a good idea of what asset classes we'll be looking at.

That's great. Last one for me. Was the accounting change your call? Was there -- or was there something else? And like what triggered the change?

Steve, are you still on for this one?

Yes, I'm here. I was just coming off mute. Thanks for your question. We work closely with our auditors as part of the quarterly review, and there wasn't a specific trigger. As we go through our review, we will always assess and the application of IFRS, which is actually quite complicated. And as understanding evolves and matures, the newness of the program was always going to be assessed, and that was just one of the things that happened during Q2 and reported within Q2.

Yes. Remember, this is sort of, again, an oddity of our market. Remember, almost all of our comps are either U.S. reporting under U.S. GAAP or Chinese. So there's actually not a lot of commodity IFRS out there. So -- and as Steve mentioned, there are some real nuances, particularly given that we invoice through our clearing members, not directly through the customers. So anyways, it's more complicated than it should be.

And the next question comes from Puneet Singh with Cantor Fitzgerald.

Just going back to the top of the call on the incentives. Josh, you mentioned how the precious metals contracts could carry you through and you spoke about maybe pulling back in other areas. I just wanted to understand if I got that, like what that means. So would you pull back on liquidity programs in relation to newer contracts? Or -- just trying to understand that point.

Again, like this is the classic battle for a company that understands sort of the endpoint and the scale of the market that we're building. But investing in network growth versus investing towards breakeven, that's always going to be a push/pull. It's no different than probably any tech VC company or anyone else that's got a network business. And so we're just taking it day by day, right, or sort of quarter-by-quarter, what we're seeing. Should we hyper focus on 1 or 2 products to breakeven? Or should we be investing at the scale? Of course, my bias is I think shows out clearly that with a better cost of capital, we should be investing at the scale of our opportunity.

And frankly, I think one of my favorite comments from the critics is how can this be real with the budget they spend. But look, we are absolutely competing against companies 100x our size with a much, much smaller budget. So yes, I mean, it's really the market's acceptance of those milestones. And again, we've got a TAM of commodity market development and basis risk, gas to power, power to intelligence that spans the largest market in the world across Southeast Asia and China. We have a massive TAM beyond just the products we've already gone after. So I think investing more should be the case, but we're only going to invest, of course, what the market can bear. And so given the sharp share price decline, we just want to be clear with our investors that we watch this stuff closely, and we want to control dilution.

Okay. Joe, you were mentioning Yongan conducted their first trade last week. I did listen to that podcast that the CEO did with Dave there. That was good. Just want to understand, though, given that they have a big client base, when do you actually expect more material volumes to come from them? Like how does that trajectory look over the coming quarters?

Yes, that's a great question, Puneet. And we're really excited about the Yongan relationship, and it creates a lot of FOMO within the country. And again, the CEO, Qiao, was very specific about the products that their customers were asking him for and the type of customers that they have. And so for us, we feel that like any large clearing firm, once they open the access to our markets for their clients, you can never -- we don't have an expectation on specific volumes. But we know from large clearing firms, and these are -- Yongan is probably equal to the size of one of the large U.S. banks or international banks that there's a very good opportunity for them to trade with us to manage their risk and to grow our volumes.

So there's a big partnership with them. We'll be doing events with them, co-marketing events with them. We'll be at Gastech with them. We're really looking forward to the expansion of the relationship, and we do think it will create FOMO within the region, and we'll see further onboarding requests for other FCMs within China.

Okay. So maybe I'll flip it a little bit, Joe. Just based on the other clients, right, like does it take you something like 6 months before you really see more volumes to come from them if they have interest and it looks like they do or?

I would say it's probably less than that. We don't like to give horizons on volumes and growth. But once the clearing firm does connect and opens up the opportunity for all of their clients, then that -- theoretically, that could start quite quickly. So we're hoping that, that will -- this summertime, we do think that, that will start once they've gotten -- they did get their first trade in. It was in the gold markets, and we're excited about that. And I think that, that most big clearing firms like to put a trade on to make sure that the pipes work and everything works well. And then hopefully, we'll see a quick ramp-up.

Okay. And then just last one, just gold versus silver. So your gold contract took about, if I'm correct, about 9 months. before it started seeing larger volumes. And silver has been different. It took about a month. Is that because silver contract is being used by the same clients as your gold contract, i.e., already onboarded?

Part of it is that -- and I would say -- sorry, you broke up there. But part of it is that there is familiarity with the clients that are trading our gold contract. So -- but also the region had a real pent-up demand. We had met specifically with one of our clearing firms last fall. And when we're talking about new products, they said, your gold contract is doing great, but you need to look at silver next. And a lot of people were kind of -- some folks from London were like, well, maybe you don't -- maybe that won't succeed out there. But we know our clearing firms hear their requests from their customers, and so we kind of listened to them pretty intently as far as where new markets and new opportunities lie.

And this was a good one. And we, again, felt that not only the trading firms, but the clearing firms that we have connected with us were then allowing access to their client base. Again, some of those, to your point, that were already connected with us, which caused that ramp-up to happen a lot faster. So having launched so many contracts over my years at the exchanges to look at a contract that starts on May 22 and is trading as actively as our silver contract is now is quite -- even for me, is highly impressed. I'm very impressed by it.

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

Thank you, Dave, and thank you, everyone, who's been on the call asking questions and staying with us. I know it's -- we're well past the allotted hour, not unusual for one of our earnings calls every quarter. We try to make it shorter, but I think the value of the transparency and the interaction with clients is something that we value and are proud of.

So I do want to take some of the questions. Thank you to those who have submitted. You can continue to submit them. Many of them, as I scan through, have already been answered. So I'm going to try to take some that are a little different from the questions that have been asked so far.

And the first one, I'll start, I think it's important, and then maybe I'll flip it to Josh. We had a question on with Joe's promotion, what is the status of Nancy? Just want to say, Joe is not going anywhere. So we're very proud of Joe and the work he's doing and terrific to have him as President of the Exchange. He's going to keep on doing what he's doing and really help our biz dev team that's growing and scaling hit the ground running. Just as Joe isn't going anywhere, Nancy isn't going anywhere. Nancy remains CEO of Abaxx Exchange. So no change in Nancy's role, and we're very appreciative of that.

I don't know if you want to add anything on to that, Josh?

No. Other than that, we just really have such an amazing team across the board. Of course, the President of Product and the CEO of our clearinghouse, Dan McElduff as well. We've got a number of people that ultimately have tremendous experience. And yes, look, I think it's just sometimes we get accused of doing too much, too many things. But I think it's that the focus and the specialization of each one of these leaders.

And again, Joe's leadership over the commercial business and representing the exchange around the world as the President is very important. And of course, a job he's earned as kind of one of the co-founders since the beginning. So yes, I mean, look, we just -- and look, that's going to be emerging in our tech business as well. I think that's the key thing is everyone in our company is very focused, even though we're doing so many things as each quarter shows.

Thanks, Josh. I'm going to come back to you with another question because one of the items in our financials this quarter was the ipushpull investment. And the question is, can this be viewed akin to the relationship history with MineHub vis-a-vis the strategic context?

Yes, absolutely. Look, again, we had the CEO on one of the podcasts. I'd encourage everyone to listen to that. This is a very, very smart team that really knows the trading desk, really knows the -- both the IT and the plumbing systems and frankly, the history of the trading desk. And so it's really a natural place just like MineHub as really being infrastructure for physical commodity transit data. This is a team that really knows what's happening from data, ISVs, messaging systems, and we think is a huge value add, particularly down the road with our data business and with our messaging and AI businesses.

Thanks, Josh. Joe, we've had a number of questions coming in, basically asking if you could shed some light on the status of our Northwest Europe LNG market.

Yes, it's a great question, Dave. So we delisted the contract last fall. The reason for that was the a change in what they call REMIT, which is a European-specific reporting requirement for -- specifically for physical power and gas markets. And we had to make some changes internally to allow for that reporting. We have -- we're at the very end stage of getting that ready to be added to our product and reporting across all of our products, if necessary. So no specific date on the contract yet. But just I would just say stay tuned to everybody, and that should be coming out shortly.

Thanks, Joe. There also had a question. I think this could be a good one for Leah. We've had a question saying, is our full digital title, private digital title software custodian agnostic in contrast to, for example, the Canton network only having one approved custodian? So I think there's also a question related to the ability to work across platforms.

Sorry, I'm not sure if you're on mute, Leah. Well, maybe we'll circle back. I'm not sure if we have a connection issue.

I have another question in the meantime for you, Joe. And that is glad you're here. What is the feedback from majors and trading houses around transitioning OTC bilateral cargo hedging onto cleared block trades or screen trade liquidity via the Abaxx LNG contracts?

Yes, it's a great question. And we constantly are interacting with the commercial market on the value of the contract's liquidity into -- and translating that into actual trades, whether it's on block trades or even on central limit order book trades. I think that we had great interaction and participation on the 2 LNG workshops that we had before the summer. And it had 70-something firms in London, 50 firms or 40 firms in Houston, the Gastech conference coming up is another great opportunity for that education.

And it really is an education point of explaining firms how our delivery works, how to make sure they're comfortable being able to get in and out of contracts. We're onboarding firms that want to trade. I think the Trayport request by some of the trading firms on there is specific to LNG. And so I think we'll just watch the space. We'll see some -- hopefully, some good things coming in the fall here on firms that will want to -- that will be going live and that potentially will want to go to delivery. But it is an education thing for sure.

Thank you, Joe. And with that, I know we're well past the time. So I think it would be good at this point to conclude our question-and-answer session. I really want to thank everybody for joining the call today and for your interest in building SmarterMarkets with us. A recording of this webcast will be available this afternoon on our Investor Relations website at investors.abaxx.tech. If you have a question that was not answered, please feel free to send it through to our Investor Relations team, and I'll pass it back over to our call operator to end today's event. Thank you.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.

Good day, and welcome to the Abaxx Technologies Fourth Quarter and Year-End 2025 Earnings and Business Update Call. [Operator Instructions]

Please note that 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 the event by typing in the submit a question box on your screen. Questions will be addressed after the formal presentation has ended. 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.

Thanks, Nick. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening to those joining us from Singapore. Thank you for joining us today for the Abaxx Q4 '25 Earnings and Business Update Call. My name is Tara Hayes, Director of Communications at Abaxx, and I'll be directing today's presentation.

With us on the line are Founder and CEO, Josh Crumb; Abaxx Chief Strategy Officer, David Greely; Abaxx Exchange Chief Commercial Officer, Joe Raia; and Abaxx Digital Title Lead, Leah Wald; Abaxx CFO, Steve Fray; 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.

Everyone should have access to our 2025 year-end reports and annual information form, 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 SEDAR+. We have published a short slide presentation to accompany today's webcast, which is being recorded and will be posted to our Investor Relations website, investors.abaxx.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 Josh to update investors on the company's milestone-driven year across the Abaxx network, 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 Abaxx Singapore entities' 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, 2 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 in 2025, our battery materials products in lithium carbonate and nickel sulfate and first-of-their-kind weather derivatives contracts with Enwex onshore wind futures now listed across 6 major power markets, including the United States, catalyzing a significant amount of new onboarding from global institutions since launch.

Any other potential products discussed today, including new markets planned for additional precious metals and oil contract we're now working on, base metals, additional weather derivatives, smart commodities or even some of our innovative technology-enabled products in the pipeline will be subject to meeting all regulatory requirements and disclosures before listing.

As we speak about gold products today, we want to point out that Abaxx Spot was newly incorporated in Singapore last year, but operating under a different branch of the Abaxx corporate family tree and not part of the entities regulated by MAS under Abaxx Singapore as the monetary authority of Singapore does not regulate spot commodity markets.

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 Box on your screen at any time. With that, I'd like to hand the call over to Josh for some opening remarks and a walk-through of how Abaxx is solving core structural inefficiencies for global commodities markets through its fully integrated market ecosystem.

Thanks, Tara, and thanks to everyone for joining us today. We'll spend some of our time today discussing real-time markets and the speed of technology. In that context, it may seem paradoxical to be presenting historical Q4 results when our business transforms every 90 days. While our 2025 figures represent a successful 0-to-1 transition of a company that builds hard things to one that sells things globally, the developments over the past month have already made them history.

In Q4 2025, we operated at a start-up baseline of around 1,500 contracts of average daily volume, which generated our first approximately CAD 1 million in top line exchange trading revenue for the year. However, in the final 2 weeks of March, we executed a decisive step function breakout to 11,500 ADP. This logarithmic growth was driven primarily by our flagship LNG and Singapore gold contracts with volume now picking up in our lithium carbonate and carbon curves, and we expect our unique weather product suite to join them as well given the high commercial demand for joining and trading.

To put the scale of that shift in perspective, the volume we transacted just this past month of March effectively eclipsed our entire trading volume for 2025. This velocity demonstrates the scale of the proprietary infrastructure we have spent 6 years building. As we expand from our early Singapore-based traders into India, the Middle East and beyond, with the largest markets of the U.S., China and the U.K. still in progress for ramp-up later in 2026, we are following a clear network effect path to joining the elite group of roughly 10 global futures exchanges of our kind, transacting 1 million contracts a day or more.

But stepping back, it is important to contextualize the strategy behind those numbers. As many of you know, when talking about markets, I always like to say that one should never lead an argument with price, but instead focus on the fundamental structure behind the price. And similarly, when looking at the real-time growth of our business, one should never lead an argument with volume. It is important to remember that the volume growth we are seeing today is a direct result of the foundational onboarding work, connectivity and incentive strategy we completed in 2024.

Consequently, I look forward to discussing the revenue impacts of our 2025 developments in 4 to 6 quarters from now as we begin to see the full effect of recent milestones such as our U.S. CFTC FBOT approval and our TMX Trayport connectivity and more. Even this week, post the Trayport rollout, major global banks and energy trading desks are actively pulling our LNG and gold market data through these new channels and reaching out for connectivity to our markets.

I'll also note at the top of the call here that we are continuing to evolve the format of these quarterly calls. We will speak again in just 45 days to discuss a much richer Q1 2026 data set. And because onboarding and connectivity KPIs are best viewed on a 6-month over 6-month horizon, today's presentation will focus on the plumbing updates behind the numbers. David Greely, Joe Raia and Leah Wald will provide updates on our growth stages, product updates and the MarketOS and ID++ Digital Title technology stack. I will then cover our corporate finance updates before we open the floor to our sell-side analysts for Q&A.

But before handing over the call, I think it's important -- it's an important time in the world to reiterate the deep engineering and problem-solving culture that we built at Abaxx and our approach to solving global macro challenges while creating long-term shareholder value with a high-grade business model.

Our core focus remains the development of the Abaxx network. This network is the absolute nexus where our exchange and market businesses converge with our software strategy. In a world now moving at the speed of agentic computing, we are developing an operational machine unlike any global competitor, one designed for the rapid rollout of new physical markets to meet challenging supply chains -- changing supply chains and evolving collateral networks.

This is the infrastructure and client network where we will deliver our vision for seamlessly global 24/7 markets powered by ID++ and MarketOS. As we present our onboarding and development KPIs, remember the Abaxx network is far more than a list of partners and counterparties. It is a preloaded distribution network. Every new member is a future trader of our nth commodity contract, many of which no competitor has yet imagined and no analyst has yet modeled.

Furthermore, every member is a future user of our MarketOS full stack technology, allowing us to eventually capture revenue through software, data and services far beyond simple trading fees generated in 2025. Over the year ahead, as we grow our benchmark contracts and release our software products, the broader markets will begin to see what we're building, in our view, an unreplicable strategic moat.

This moat is comprised of hard market plumbing. Every new clearing member, trading firm and data distributor adds a new node. Every new regulatory license and risk management practice becomes embedded. This makes the Abaxx network and MarketOS a technology platform that will be increasingly difficult for any pure software company to replicate or any pure market infrastructure incumbent to mimic.

We are an engineering sovereign-grade infrastructure, a high integrity asset capable of supporting the global economy's most essential functions during times of stress. Even today, our team is working with urgency to meet the moment as geopolitical conflict effectively halts 20% of global energy transit in the Middle East. In this world of force majeure and failing paper safe-havens, the market is in need of sellers of last resort.

We provide physical benchmarks anchored in molecules rather than surveyed proxies, actual local metals, not just price assessments from far away and uncorrelated markets. We are still in the earliest stage of this build and growth. And to reiterate, our medium-term goal of 1 million contracts per day is not a ceiling. It is a floor of our ambition. We have built the infrastructure, the market is validating utility and now we scale.

And with that, I'd like to hand the call over to David Greely.

Thank you, Josh. As Josh noted, we remain in pursuit of generational opportunities in both markets and digital infrastructure. Starting on the market side of the business, the globalization of the natural gas market through LNG, the energy transition to a more electrified system powered by low-carbon renewables and existing commodity markets like gold that are operating on outdated infrastructure open the door to new benchmark futures contracts, and we seek to create these new WTIs and Henry Hubs of the next decade and beyond.

Building these markets will take time. History suggests it takes 3 to 5 years to build a new commodity market to maturity, but it's worth it as these are incredibly profitable markets to own. And even with conservative estimates of total addressable market size across our product verticals of energy, environmental products, battery materials and precious metals, our goal remains to hit 1 million average daily volume in futures and options by 2030.

Turning to digital infrastructure. Electronic trading brought trade execution into the digital age in the early 2000s, but not clearing and settlement. With MarketOS, we are building smarter markets by modernizing clearing and settlement while respecting existing trust mechanisms.

The FIA has identified post-trade collateral movement as one of tokenization's most compelling use cases. Derivatives markets move billions in daily collateral transfers, yet much of it still settles on banking hour time lines. Compressing settlement towards real time could fundamentally reshape how collateral supports trading, clear the path to 24/7 markets and lower structural margin requirements, where initial margin alone across cleared markets totaled approximately $915 billion at the end of 2024.

As BlackRock's CEO, Larry Fink noted in his 2025 annual letter, however, realizing that potential depends on solving one critical problem, identity verification. We believe that we solved that problem with MarketOS, our technology for solving identity verification and accelerating the velocity of collateral. And we believe that our Digital Title technology could unlock the benefits of tokenization for over $40 trillion of assets.

And it's important to note that the markets and digital infrastructure sides of our business work together to seize these opportunities. Our regulated exchange and clearinghouse can bring our digital infrastructure into the heart of the financial system. And our digital infrastructure can increase the benefits of trading on our exchange, building liquidity and widening its competitive moat.

So how do we capture this opportunity? We're already a good way down the road. We built the exchange and clearinghouse. We've launched 16 products, and we've connected a robust network of clearing firms, ISVs, data distributors, brokers and traders. And while we continue to connect and onboard new partners, we are focused on driving volumes and liquidity in our individual products up the S-curve from being new markets to mature markets.

We think about this process of growing from a new market to a mature benchmark that reaches the TAMs we discussed as proceeding in 3 main stages: new market, critical mass and mature. You may recognize this is the typical process of the diffusion of new product innovations.

In a new market, participation is mainly from the innovators and early adopters. These are typically incentivized market makers and liquidity providers along with commodity trading merchants. In this stage, you should expect to see wide bid-ask spreads, low average daily volumes and open interest, low net revenue per contract as liquidity providers need to be incentivized to provide the initial liquidity to the market and product trading limited to futures in the front of the curve.

At this stage, our focus is on demonstrating the practical use of the contracts through first trades and deliveries and building the initial liquidity, which will attract more participants to the marketplace, beginning the journey of the S-curve. For some greenfield markets like LNG, this will require substantial education and more time.

For existing brownfield markets like gold, this can be done by pulling liquidity from existing markets through spread trading. The objective is to drive liquidity and participation into the market until it reaches the next stage, critical mass, the inflection point where liquidity begets liquidity and the growth of the market becomes self-sustaining.

This typically occurs as the early and late majority join the market, the commodity traders, commercial hedgers and financial players. As we progress through this stage, you should expect to see spreads narrowing, ADV and OI growing and RPC rising as market makers and liquidity providers become a lower proportion of the participants.

As average daily volumes climb, markets become liquid enough to support options trading and more trading moves further out the curve. At this stage, our focus is on driving market adoption through the inflection point where liquidity begets liquidity and market adoption is significantly derisked. Then the market continues to grow to its full potential total addressable market size, becoming a mature market.

At this stage, the laggards are pulled into the market, portfolio allocators, macro funds, high-frequency traders, CTAs and algorithmic traders. At this stage, you should expect to see tight spreads, high ADV with churn rates around 40x the physical market and high open interest, higher RPCs and a full range of products and data with trading across the forward curve.

At this stage, our focus will be on protecting the market by keeping it aligned with the evolving commercial needs of the marketplace. I want to turn this over to Joe in a moment to walk you through our progress moving up this S-curve so far. However, I'd first like to quickly note a few important external macro events that can provide headwinds or tailwinds to progressing towards this goal.

The longer-term trend that I started with, globalizing natural gas market through LNG and the energy transition remain intact. And if anything, they've accelerated, proving out our thesis time and again. The most recent macro event, however, is, of course, the conflict in Iran and the resulting disruption to energy markets. The extreme risk and volatility initially led LNG traders to step back from markets, creating a headwind to volume growth, but this has already been reversing, and we expect that this experience has highlighted the need for more precise trading and hedging instruments that our LNG contracts provide.

It remains to be seen if the resulting pivot to more energy security from the energy transition is a headwind to carbon emissions markets as regulators loosen emissions caps though it is worth noting that the move to renewables is a move to energy security in many countries and the move to more installed renewables is raising the commercial hedging demand for our weather derivatives.

The pivot to energy security in Western countries will likely be a tailwind to accelerating investment in the battery materials production and a tailwind to our contracts, while the continued move away from the dollars that began with sanctions on Russia will likely be a continuing tailwind to our Singapore gold futures and spot gold pool.

With that, I'll turn it over to Joe to walk you through our market performance and volume growth.

Thanks, Dave. This next slide gives a good visual on the growth of our overall exchange volume reflected at the end of Q4 2025. This growth shows the power of the exchange's ability to launch new products utilizing the Abaxx Clearinghouse and also our global commercial customer reach.

It's important to note and take a second to speak to the recent press release of March 23, which for the week ending March 20 saw a 343% week-over-week increase in volume, resulting in a total of 54,700 contracts traded. We also saw new daily records in our physically deliverable gold and LNG contracts. In the week ending March 27, we saw new records in our physically deliverable lithium carbonate Singapore contract at 761 contracts, the only physical lithium carbonate futures contract traded in U.S. dollars available outside of China.

Back to 2025. Our LNG futures contracts also saw a 238% increase in contracts traded within Q4 '25 as compared to Q3. And now in Q1 of '26, our overall LNG volumes have increased 84% over Q4 '25 total volumes for a total of 59,100 contracts traded in both our Gulf of Mexico and North Asia Pacific contract. Of note, at the end of March '26, our NPA North Asia Pacific contract is now representing in less than 12 months, more than 40% of the JKM financially settled PRA instrument, further demonstrating the specific markets need and support for a truly physical LNG risk management tool that directly correlates to waterborne LNG cargoes.

Gold futures contracts continue to lead volume growth. Launched at the end of Q2 '25, volume in Q3 '25 reached 51,545 contracts, increasing 24% quarter-over-quarter and with 64,000 contracts traded in Q4 2025. Moving into Q1 of this year, volume grew to 162,700 contracts traded, a 154% increase over Q4 volume. On March 24 of this year, Gold Singapore futures reached a new daily record of 20,130 contracts traded, surpassing the previous daily record of 15,700 contracts.

As has been our messaging since the exchange launch, our growth in liquidity continues to attract new market participants across the breadth of our product groups, creating surface area with trading firms and brokers and clearing firms alike. Of specific note, an example of this new surface area, the increase in carbon futures liquidity going from only 250 contracts traded in Q4 of '25 to 12,000 contracts traded in Q1 of '26, brought in multiple new commercial firms that wanted access to that market.

Also, with the go-live of the Trayport platform last week, we have already seen a marked increase in requests from trading firms and broker firms to again gain access to our markets. Our efforts to add new institutional trading firms in India is also bearing fruit as we have added several new trading firms from that region, and we will be heading back to the India region twice in April to meet with trading firms in Mumbai, Calcutta and GIFT City.

Now turning to our pipeline of new and innovative products. As is evidenced in our volume numbers, our flagship LNG futures continues to show a steady increase in liquidity and volume, validating the work and efforts in coordination with the commercial marketplace into developing and launching a new much-needed global benchmark in physical LNG.

We recently held an LNG workshop in Houston that attracted 33 LNG evolved companies with discussions around how to trade our products and into detailed talks on delivery and new products. We continue to receive new interest in developing other new energy futures markets and we will keep the industry involved in all of our new contract development workshops.

We have the best team to develop new solely needed risk tools in commodity futures markets, and we'll continue to innovate and launch industry-leading products that real market participants request, further establishing Abaxx Exchange as the global leader in new commodity futures products. Our environmental market suite of products also continues to show steady growth with our voluntary carbon CORSIA futures contract developing new liquidity at the end of Q4 and also showing new volume growth and records into Q1 of '26, with trading now out 5 months of our listed months.

Our newly launched suite of wind futures markets are also attracting new commercial and institutional onboardings for trading both in Europe and North America. We have further contracts that have been submitted to our regulator for additional environmental markets in 2026. In our precious metals markets, we launched our deliverable gold futures contract in the middle of Q3 and going into Q4, have seen steady new volume growth and records capped off by the first ever delivery of kilobar futures contracts in Singapore.

Of note, the delivery of the 25 kilos of gold, which occurred in December of '25 was between a U.S.-based bullion bank and a Thai-based gold refiner, further demonstrating the global reach and nature of Abaxx Exchange. We have had many of our global customers ask for additional new precious and base metals markets, and we'll look to partner with our customer base to develop and launch these new markets. We expect to bring further updates on Q1 volume growth and records as we finish the first quarter of '26 and appreciate the support of our clearing members, our trading firms and brokers to help bring these new markets and risk management tools to the global commodity trading community. Back to you, Josh.

Thanks, Joe. As David and Joe have just outlined, the physical location for commodity markets is driving a fundamental shift of how risk is managed. However, the software infrastructure underpinning global trade simply hasn't kept pace with the demand for 24/7 global liquidity and real-time risk management. Over the past month, we've seen the rapid rise of unregulated CFD commodity futures, high-risk bucket shop perpetuals that nonetheless preview the demand for 24/7 price discovery and risk management in commodities, but none of which possess the curve mechanics or infrastructure fit for physical risk management.

This trend in commodity markets is moving away, in our view, further in the direction of highly liquid but purely speculative financial abstractions, which brings us back to what we've been building on the tech side of Abaxx Tech. For years, we have discussed our full stack technology vision, the ID++ protocol and our suite of market workflow and communication tools built on top of a brand-new Internet data and identity primitive. Ahead of FIA Boca last month, we formally introduced the brand for this integrated architecture, MarketOS.

MarketOS is our institutional operating system designed to accelerate trade and collateral mobility in cleared markets. It is a unified transaction productivity suite, integrating Verifier+ Credential Management, Abaxx Sign, Messenger and Drive, all built on our proprietary ID++ protocol to embed verifiable authority, privacy and legal enforceability directly into commercial workflows.

By establishing cryptographic identity and enforceable ownership at the moment of that execution, we eliminate the post-trade verification hurdles that currently slow collateral movement in institutional markets. This proprietary technology stack is first designed to address a massive industry bottleneck. As Dave just pointed out, initial margin held at the leading clearinghouses totaled approximately $1 trillion with noncleared collateral and central bank collateral and reserves even greater -- an even greater number. Despite these enormous sums, much of this collateral still sits on restricted banking hour time lines, which is exactly what MarketOS is designed to address. As global macro plumbing expert, Zoltan Pozsar recently observed, gold cloaked with Abaxx and gold naked ain't the same.

By privately cloaking securities and physical commodity inventory in our ID++ protocol and managed through MarketOS infrastructure, we are creating high-quality liquid assets, HQLA, unlocking the capital of commodities for our clients and allowing them to move with T+0 finality under existing legal frameworks with or without blockchains.

Early last month, we introduced MarketOS at the FIA Global Cleared Markets Conference in Boca Raton to tackle this head on. We held pre-rollout conversations with a number of FCMs, ISVs and the major cloud infrastructure partners. The feedback was consistent. The industry is being forced to look at stablecoins and 24/7 markets. They are still largely uncertain of the path forward, but they recognize that solving verifiable identity and cryptographic transaction finality is key for the transition from banking hour settlement to real-time velocity of the Internet.

As we've crossed these commercial discussions, our monetization framework is focused on 3 primary streams. First, platform access fees. These are straightforward subscription or licensing revenue for seat access through Abaxx console suite. Transaction fees, revenue generated based on the volume of transaction flow through MarketOS architecture. And finally, basis point fees on collateral, a value-based fee tied to assets posted and managed on the network or assets on network.

Before I hand the call over to Leah, who is launching the first product within the MarketOS infrastructure for Digital Title verified collateral, I do want to touch on one more thing. And not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but this is Abaxx after all, and it's our job as engineers and macro culture to get too far ahead of ourselves.

So for the past year, we have been heads down in development of our own agentic workflows. We've also been building with the OpenClaw and CLI agents that have taken the world by storm over the last few months, and we believe the core privacy and identity engineering we've developed for real-time markets is exactly what's missing in the field of AI agent identity.

Yesterday, Abaxx submitted formal technical comments to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST. We proposed the ID++ protocol from our MarketOS architecture as a candidate model for NCCoE's reference implementation for AI agent identity and authorization, particularly needed for regulated markets. As AI agents move into financial markets, the missing infrastructure is trust. Who authorized this agent? What is it permitted to do? Can you prove it after the fact?

ID++ built on open WC3 (sic) [ W3C ] and IETF standards is designed to answer those questions with cryptographic proof, not just logs, but tamper evidence of authorized bound -- with authorization bound to every agent action. We submitted technical comments to NIST on this exact problem. Combined with MarketOS, we believe Abaxx is positioned to provide the trust layer for autonomous participants in regulated institutional markets, audible, secure and built on open standards the industry is converging around.

Now with that vision of the inevitable agentic future on the table, I want Leah to walk you through the very real and now validated results of our recent Digital Title pilots, the first practical realization of the stack.

Thank you, Josh. What you just saw from Josh is years of deliberate infrastructure work, identity, signing, documentation, communication, built, certified and ready. Digital Title is the first commercial application that pulls every piece of that stack together. Markets are moving towards 24/7 trading and T+0 settlement and the infrastructure underpinning them hasn't kept pace. Blockchain promised to solve that, but it has struggled to integrate cleanly with existing custodians and clearinghouses requiring institutions to build entirely new infrastructure layers on top of the frameworks that they already operate in.

And even where integration is now being attempted, the question of ownership enforceability and insolvency remains unsolved in most jurisdictions. That is not a footnote. It is a structural gap that has slowed institutional adoption at every turn. Digital Title takes a fundamentally different approach, and it's powered by our proprietary transaction productivity suite you just saw, MarketOS. Working entirely within existing legal and financial infrastructure, Digital Title produces documented, timestamped, cryptographically verifiable evidence that an ownership process was properly followed in real time.

Underneath it sits a purpose-built collateral state machine operating as middleware between MarketOS and capital market participants. That runs continuous automated verification across every position, ownership check, encumbrance changes as it happens, aiming to give institutions and regulators a live picture of collateral that regulators themselves identified as a gap in centrally cleared markets as recently as January 2025 when CPMI-IOSCO published policy proposals specifically calling for greater transparency and responsiveness in initial margin at CCPs.

Think of it as a difference between a timestamp trade confirmation that captures every step of execution as it happens versus a settlement dispute resolved through weeks of back-office reconciliation. We believe that evidentiary certainty, identity anchored at every step via ID++ and backed by real-time collateral state monitoring is what allows institutions to act on ownership at clearing speed without replacing a single piece of the infrastructure they already rely on. And in December 2025, we proved it twice at T+0. Every ownership event was captured in real time, identity anchored and cryptographically verifiable at the moment it occurred. In the first pilot, vaulted physical gold was mobilized as transaction-ready collateral, enabling immediate financing against vaulted inventory through existing legal mechanisms.

In the second, money market fund shares were transferred instantaneously on margin call and served as bilateral transaction collateral, while the original holder continued earning yield on that same principle throughout, capital simultaneously serving as margin and generating yield with no settlement gap.

A third pilot is in process, extending the same framework to build a lading for in-transit commodities, bringing digital verifiable title to cargo that currently cannot serve as transferable collateral at all. These 3 distinct asset classes, one Digital Title framework anchored in identity and verified at every step and a combined addressable opportunity exceeding USD 3.9 trillion across markets where we have now proven that the framework works and is production ready.

The pilot validated the framework and now we're building the business for it. What we have created is a new category of financial infrastructure, one that sits at the intersection of legal certainty, institutional identity and real-time evidentiary documentation. That combination has not existed in capital markets before and the institutions we're speaking to understand its significance.

Our first commercial license agreement is in advanced negotiations with the traditional financial institution. The way we think about this is delivery. And honestly, it reflects how we've always built at Abaxx. You establish the commercial relationships and validate the framework first, then deploy into regulated infrastructure as the regulatory pathway completes. We have entrepreneurial spirits over here. So we know how to sequence the build, experiment, iterate, find traction and commercialize.

And that's exactly what we're doing. And having a traditional financial institution at the table at this stage, one that's doing due diligence, recognizing that Digital Title addresses a problem that cannot solve with existing tools is a meaningful signal of where this is going.

On clearing, we are pursuing integration into our Singapore regulated futures and clearing ecosystem, subject to all applicable regulatory requirements. And this is where it gets really exciting for the core business. If approved, when Digital Title is live in our clearing infrastructure, members can post yield-bearing securities and keep earning on that capital while it serves as margin with every position state monitored consistently, continuously and verified cryptographically. That changes the economics of trading on our platform in a way that is genuinely differentiated from anything else in the market.

It makes Abaxx more attractive to a broader set of participants, and we hope it will deepen the capital efficiency of existing members and grow the eligible collateral pool on our exchange. Abaxx Clearing is where we prove that at scale, and then we aim to license the same framework to any CCP, prime broker or collateral manager operating within existing regulatory structures across both traditional and tokenized fund structures.

The framework is asset agnostic by design. Whether the underlying is a traditional money market funds or tokenized equivalent, the evidentiary and identity layer works the same way. Every institution that adopts it reinforces the network and every market it enters expands the opportunity. That flywheel effect is real. The foundation is built, the first commercial relationships are forming and the platform scales from here.

I'll now turn it back to Josh to discuss Abaxx's outlook.

Thanks, Leah. To summarize the trajectory we've discussed today, we have successfully transitioned from the construction of a multiyear build into a high velocity revenue-generating growth phase with more products, technologies and revenue streams to open up in quarters ahead. The recent shift from 1,500 ADV initial baseline to 11,500 ADV breakout is the direct result of our continuous development of the Abaxx network.

As we look to drivers of long-term growth on this slide, I want to wrap up by briefly addressing our approach to budget and capitalization moving forward. Our owner-operator mentality and knowing what we built and what we own remains the foundation of how we build shareholder value. We continue to prioritize the cost of capital over simple access to capital, and our executive team remains deeply aligned with shareholders and dilution minimization.

In 2025, we managed the initial global liquidity build on our infrastructure with a total operating cash deficit of approximately USD 30 million. While we saw a slight 5% to 10% increase in cash spend during Q4 as we prepared for our recent volume breakout, we view this as an incredibly efficient allocation of capital for a company building a regulated global clearinghouse, new benchmarks from scratch as well as our full stack technology strategy.

And I should also note that we saw an increase in equity comp in late 2024 and 2025 as we paid out exchange launch bonuses in equity and awarded a team that wasn't being rewarded in Canadian capital markets at the time in our view. But our executive team remains deeply aligned with shareholders.

To maintain focus on our growth milestones, the Board and I reduced 2025 year-end bonus equity compensation by 20% and I have personally forgone mine for 2025 to prioritize our expanding team, reiterating our commitment to financial discipline through a long-term build. For our 2026 budget, we expect this trajectory of disciplined modest increase in cash outlay to continue through the first half of 2026 as we scale our operations. However, we remain in a position of strength.

We ended 2025 with a bit over CAD 50 million in available cash equivalents and equivalents and over $35 million in marketable assets, providing us with the working capital runway to sustain our current growth through at least the end of the calendar year.

As I've noted on previous calls, although we feel we are underinvesting in the team, infrastructure and TAMs we're pursuing, we continue to be patient and manage dilution, and we'll only look to aggressively accelerate our sales and operating budgets if we see a significant shift in our cost of capital, specifically as the market begins to fully price in our execution towards 1 million ADV and begins to value our technology suite or should -- that we identified a strategic partner to further expand the network as we did in Q4 of last year.

We have built the infrastructure, we are validating the utility of our markets and technology, and we are now providing the scale. In just about 45 days, we will speak again to discuss a much richer Q1 2026 data set and new products. As I've said before, no matter how ambitious you think Abaxx is, it's bigger than that.

And with that, operator, let's open the floor to questions from our analysts.

[Operator Instructions] The first question will come from Puneet Singh with Cantor Fitzgerald.

Had a couple of questions. First question is, how are you working through the backlog of onboarding going on with new clients? And when do you think we see that flow through into the exchange traded volumes? My understanding is you're still working through it, but you've had some great uptick here recently. So just how are you thinking about it right now?

Thanks, Puneet. Joe, do you want to grab this?

Sure. So our onboarding process is not unlike any of the other exchanges. But as a new exchange, we obviously have quite a few firms that are in the process. We don't give out the numbers that are in that process. I would say that we're working through it in a normal manner with really nothing really holding up any of the firms to get onboarded quickly.

We have them coming in across various regions of the globe and on various platforms for different products. So we have a great team, the teams in Singapore. We also cross over to North America and Europe to handle any of the questions that we have after Singapore hours. So yes, I think we'll see those firms continue to onboard. We have quite a few that are in process. And as we launch new products, we get new customers that also look to come and onboard with us.

Okay. I understand. My second question was, is there any geographical data on the clientele related to the strong performance in the gold contracts? You mentioned India and the work you're doing there. But as I gather, I guess that's for later. Maybe just on the recent trading volumes, where are you seeing that from, if you can share?

Sure. The addition of India actually has already started to bear fruit even after just a few months of visits there with customers. But as I mentioned in my remarks, gold is obviously a global product. Our gold futures contract is attracting interest from not only Asia traders, but also Europe and certainly in the U.S.

As I mentioned, our delivery included a U.S. bullion bank that was involved in the delivery of the first kilobar contracts in Singapore as a futures contract. So I think as you look at merchant firms, they have presence globally in all markets. And so we're starting to see the addition of their trading units in different geographic locations to trade our products, especially as we have products in Europe like our European wind futures, our ERCOT futures power contract in the U.S.

So that again starts to bring in customers that are maybe trading in Asia, but also have trading units in other areas. But just to go back to India, it's been a great new addition for us. We started the outreach and connectivity with customers only in the middle of Q4 of last year. And as I mentioned, we'll be back there twice in April, and we're going back there for a reason. There's a lot of firms that want to trade our markets from there and not only in gold in other markets, but we also have had firms that have onboarded with us quickly to access our markets from that region.

Got it. And then last one, I just want to shift to the tech side. Maybe just with the pilots now done, I know there's another one to go. But maybe just what are the milestones, Josh, that we could look forward to over the balance of the year? Just thinking about how that picture gets more framed for investors.

Yes. Thanks, Puneet. I think there's probably 2 aspects of the technology we've got to think about. Like everything, we put our focus in our sort of first client first, which is our own exchange and clearinghouse. And I think it's really important to understand the intermediated markets, the whole risk management system of a clearinghouse by nature, is going to move slower because you're bringing everybody along together.

You're bringing your clearing members, the trading firms, regulators. And so you can't just rapidly launch things. So those a bit like some of the other answers, we would love to give a precise time line, but we're working it through the process. But again, much like our clearinghouse, the value add becomes significant once you make those moves.

So on the products that we want to actually bring through the clearinghouse, we'll be able to give you probably a better update in 45 days here. As I mentioned, we just started engaging our FCMs down in Boca last month. And so we'll be able to probably have a clear picture on the next call.

As far as products that may sit outside of regulated markets, that's something that we can probably move a little faster. And this is things more like the messenger and the overall suite. And that's something that we'll be able to go to market over the next -- definitely within the next 2 quarters.

The next question will come from Aravinda Galappatthige with Canaccord Genuity.

Josh and team, congrats on all the traction over the last quarter, over the last year and so forth. I'll just start with a quick follow-up on the pilot programs. I mean you gave a pretty good description of what's been going on. With respect to the pilot programs themselves, can you just talk about the nature of the participants that were involved there?

And any sense of as you kind of push forward towards commercial deployment, who you expect would be the sort of the early adopters? I mean, what category of players are sort of more open to this and more likely to sort of make a move and then as opposed to others? Any color on that?

Sure. Thanks, Aravinda. Maybe I'll tackle the first part of the question and then hand over to Leah on the specifics. So the way we went into it in Q4, we put an incredible amount of pressure on the team to get these pilots done end of the year. And so there was really 2 major things that we were focused on.

Number one, obviously, that the technology worked and that we get through the sort of the technology audits of the actual process. And then number two, the legal aspects and preparing sort of a legal memo that also verified the claims. So it's both the technology and the legal side that was really the most important. And that came from direct conversations with our regulator that mentioned finding a legal framework was more important than necessarily proving any kind of pilot.

But that said, because we were in a rush to get it by the end of the year, we worked with firms that are quite close to us. We had been in through the course of Q3 and Q4, conversations with a number of major institutions, both that are shareholders as well as members of our clearinghouse. But just to move quickly to an actual live transaction, we worked with the Ivanhoe Capital, Robert Friedland's family office as well as one of our bullion bank partners and advisers. And then the money market fund was more of an internal test. But maybe let me hand it over to Leah to walk through some of the specifics.

Absolutely. And thanks so much for the question. And Josh, thanks for the handoff. I think, again, as you asked, what types of market participants are we looking to? What are we targeting as commercial targets, that's where it gets really exciting for the long-term picture. And that's where when early in the presentation, we spoke about asset agnostic being by design and not an accident is very important to key in on.

I mean it's a deliberate architectural decision that we believe makes Digital Title genuinely platform scalable. And that's especially in this world of tokenized funds as well as traditional finance, understanding and desiring that 24/7 movement and what we're building here.

So that same, again, evidentiary and identity infrastructure that works for traditional money market fund works equally for tokenized equivalents, for physical gold, for in-transit commodity cargo. We've proved a lot of that with those pilots. So we're not building point solutions for individual asset classes. So I'm not going to speak to just exactly who we're targeting because we are speaking to a bevy of CCPs, any prime broker, any collateral manager, any bullion bank that could plug into with their existing regulatory framework and immediately unlock capital efficiency that they don't have today are folks we're speaking to who could be potential clients and obviously prioritizing where our tech is as of right now.

And I think just one last thing to note is because the marginal cost of adding the next participant or the next asset class is quite low relative to the value it creates and the foundations we've already built, the network effect really does compound in a really powerful way.

So as mentioned before, every institution that comes on board makes the platform more valuable for everybody already on it. So we are starting with clearing, which we believe is the highest leverage entry point, again, subject to regulatory approval. But the participant universe that this infrastructure can ultimately serve is obviously much broader than that, and we've started having those conversations. So it's getting exciting.

And then just switching over to the exchange -- the core exchange operations. As an analyst that obviously has the burden of trying to make these quarterly projections, I wanted to understand the March volumes a little bit better. I think LNG, we can -- I can sort of have some understanding of that. But the upswing in gold, is there any additional color that loves -- that can give us a little bit more clarity what drove that? Is -- what were the kind of the drivers there? And then secondly, the Trayport connection, I mean, how material was that to sort of the upswing in overall volumes?

Thanks. Maybe I'll take a very quick first shot at the gold side. Look, we've -- the acceleration of what's happening in the Singapore Bullion Market Association and the global bullion banks moving towards Singapore. Look, we always had a view on that as sort of an ideal hub for physical gold trading given so much of the physical gold moves through Southeast Asia and into Hong Kong and China.

And so we always had a pretty good thesis that, that was a great place to both have flow and inventory of gold. But really, the acceleration is even more than we expected. As Joe mentioned, the onboarding of traders from India and the Middle East certainly accelerated what was already happening with our local Singapore client base.

And again, we look forward to that opening up broader. We probably thought the market share of Singapore was probably a little bit lower given all the existing liquidity of existing markets like COMEX and ShFE. But we think that this actually can be a larger market share than we initially expected, given just how ideal the positioning is in Singapore.

Do you want me to answer the Trayport part of the question, Josh?

Yes, absolutely. Thanks, Joe.

Yes. So Trayport really is -- for us, it's kind of a long-term project. We probably started that, I guess, in the middle of last year. Connectivity to ICs, clearing firms, tracking (sic) [ trading ] firms, all of this does take quite a bit of time for us to get into their flow and into their development process and to allocate resources.

We knew going into it that it would be an important connectivity point, especially in Europe. However, we're starting to see even in the U.S., several LNG firms, exporters and liquefaction terminal operators that are using Trayport for hedging and for trading LNG markets, natural gas markets and also outside of Europe into Asia, as the marketplace expands into Asia and in Europe, we see firms there asking for connectivity.

So I think predominantly, it will be European. As we mentioned, we only went live last week, and we've already had quite a few inbounds from firms asking to access our markets on Trayport. So we're really excited about that development and how the marketplace will be able to look at our products against other markets that are available on the platform already.

The next question will come from Katy Chen with BMO.

So my first one is how has the grant of registration with the U.S. Foreign Board of Trade impacts trading interest for the Abaxx futures? And also from what participants have you seen the strongest interest from in terms of being added onto the platform?

Thank you. Maybe I'll again start and then hand it back over to Joe. I think it's important that none of the material volume we've seen to date has come from the major commodity trading markets of the U.S., China or even the U.K.-based commodity traders and banks. And we do see that onboarding happening now. So again, none of the U.S. volumes are there, and we're -- but we're very excited. And again, like I think we've talked about China and some of the past conversations, we're definitely very active for the second half of the year to bring some of that volume in as well. But Joe, do you want to answer some of the specifics on the FBOT?

Yes, FBOT is important. It was a major achievement. Firms, exchanges hadn't achieved that designation by the CFTC in many, many years. And just as a refresher, it does allow all U.S. domiciled trading firms, clearing firms, dealer brokers, ISVs, the ability to access all of our futures markets directly.

And so the growth of our Gulf of Mexico LNG futures and expansion into U.S. power markets via the ERCOT wind futures contract has brought significant new interest from our new group of trading firms to onboard with us. We knew that they were there. We knew that there was an encumbrance by not having that direct access. And now we're starting to work on getting that not only from trading firms, but even clearing firms.

So that's an important step in the right direction. I would say we have some time to start seeing some real definitive volumes from the U.S., but that will happen quickly. And I think that not only the Trayport platform, but also use of TT, CPG, ipushpull on our data distribution, all these things will help U.S. clearing firms come into our markets and trade our products.

Maybe my next one [indiscernible] trading activity. So what's like -- what are your next key initiatives for the upcoming year as it relates to like expanding the market assets and potentially entering into new asset classes?

Yes. So first off, I should apologize because we have a new format. We probably ran a little bit long in managing the script. So I'm happy to extend it for a few more minutes if people are okay with that.

Yes. Look, again, I think it's a lot more of the same. Some of the firms that we've been working with to onboard for 4 years now as far as the relationship management, getting these firms having -- believing the vision, helping us with the products, but of course, not being able to check large institutional boxes until we get to certain volumes and sort of steady-state operations.

That's certainly happening now. We've heard some FCMs mentioned numbers like 25,000 ADV as a market they need to join. And so again, we've got a very deep sort of under the surface of the iceberg. Group of clients have been helping with products all along. And I think it's just more of the same, growing the volume, managing different incentive programs, bringing on new regions. And then eventually, as Dave laid out, that brings in a lot of the clients that we've already been talking to that just need that institutional scale liquidity to onboard.

So yes, I think a lot of -- more of the same. And again, there's been some acceleration with some of the new products, particularly over the last quarter with the weather derivatives.

The next question will come from Martin Toner with ATB Cormark Capital Markets.

Can you talk a little bit about how volatility in commodities markets of late, especially energy markets has like created an opportunity for sort of an advertisement for some of your contracts and what the experience has been like in reception, et cetera?

Thanks. Joe, Dave, you obviously were very involved during CERAWeek. Do you want to answer that one?

Dave, do you want to go first?

Yes, yes, I'm happy to. As Joe was saying, we had a terrific event down in Houston during CERAWeek focused on LNG. Joe and I have been doing those for a number of years. And the thing I always listen for are the types of questions we're getting. And to me, the types of questions we were getting this year were very much the questions you ask when you're thinking about doing the thing for real.

You had people asking about, hey, I really need to understand the physical delivery mechanism. I really need to understand what would be my responsibility in this situation. I really want to understand if I'm a gulf coast and I'm getting my gas at Henry Hub price, how can I use the Gulf of Mexico contract to hedge.

So I think there's been a lot of interest and strong reception. I think there is a short-term, medium-term thing happening in terms of the volatility of the market. As we said, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, what's happened with Qatar LNG, those are massive events in energy markets.

And the first thing most traders will do is they'll take their hands off the keys. And so I think in the beginning, what we saw was people trading less, not just us, but kind of across the board. And then as people kind of looked at it, the need for those physically deliverable contracts, that very precise hedging instrument where you're hedging against the actual thing you're exposed to, not some price index on a pipeline that may or may not reflect your reality, I think people have really been focused in on that by the recent events.

And it's not just what's happened recently. This has been a recurring thing. We've seen it with COVID. We've seen it with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So I think over and over, our thesis is being proven out and people are getting focused. But what's your take, Joe?

No, I agree, Dave. The sitting on your hands basically happens when volatility gets hyper. And as you said, it's not just our contracts, it's across the marketplace. Managing risk is so important, not only from our side and making sure that our customers are protected, but also our clearing firms. And so -- and that's consistent across all exchanges.

We're no different than anybody else in that manner. And so we do see, as Dave said, now once things start to settle down a little bit or at least people can see medium term, short term, what the horizon is, they then begin to come and start looking at managing some of that risk, look at some opportunities maybe to trade markets that they weren't in, but also look at other products that sometimes may have been like we're seeing in some of our new products, too, like in lithium and in our carbon markets.

So the fact that the volatility is there is something we watch very closely. We know that our systems in our risk management process has worked well during the volatility that we've seen, and that's a testament to what we've built as an exchange in the clearinghouse also.

That's great color. Has the second half of March contract volumes changed your expectations for the rest of 2026?

Joe, do you want to grab that?

Yes, sure. We never could tell how customers are going to trade as kind of going back to the answer on the previous question. But given the geopolitical issues in the marketplace, as long as our design is sound and our mechanisms on delivery are sound, we're hoping that the market continues to grow. Liquidity begets liquidity is something we say all the time and that we're proving that out that as we build liquidity and as Josh mentioned in his opening remarks, as we start to see more commercial firms come on board with us and start to trade, that will just continue to attract new firms to trade our markets.

We're seeing it. We're seeing it with Trayport. We're seeing it on global markets. and certainly in our LNG markets. And so there's a lot of opportunities for us to stay connected -- well connected with the trading market and also to bring new clearing firms and we're seeing that also. So that's an important step in our development of our markets. And I think that we're excited about the growth for this year.

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

Thank you, Nick. I realize we're past the hour, so I'm going to try to keep this part relatively tight. Obviously, there's a lot happening at Abaxx, and so we hope you'll forgive the length of this call.

I would say going through many of the questions that we received ahead of time and those that have come in, I think we have broadly answered many of them either in the prepared remarks or in the insightful analyst questions. So I'm going to start picking out 2 and maybe a couple more if we have time that seem representative.

If you do have questions that you don't feel were answered though, you can always reach out to us after the call. I really like this first question that came in. I might take a stab at answering it myself and then let Josh jump in as well.

And that question is, what do you view as the biggest misconception about Abaxx that the market or analysts get wrong? And I'd say we're fortunate that we've had a lot of people who followed us for a long time. I think -- and so they get it. I think sometimes people who are new to Abaxx because we are working on so many areas, they think that it's a bunch of different things.

And to me, the biggest misconception about Abaxx is that there's lots of things when really -- when you take a step back, it's all one thing. It's building smarter markets. It's building the -- both the regulated market infrastructure and the digital infrastructure to improve markets and meet commercial needs.

And it's really about us trying to remove every obstacle we encounter to doing that. And if we need to create a new spot market in gold, we'll do that. If we need to create a new custodian and adaptive infrastructure, we'll do that.

I think the other thing that's come up as a misconception recently has been, while it's great to see those volumes that we're getting now and the initial volumes, there's a tendency to want to extrapolate and say, well, if this quarter was this, next quarter will be this. I would just emphasize, it's a highly nonlinear process with fits and starts. Probably in 5 years when we can all take a step back, it will look a lot smoother than the experience of it right now.

But the way we think about it is it's really anchoring -- we're always thinking 3 to 5 years out. What's the North Star, what's the goal that we're trying to get to? And then how can we remove as many obstacles as we can and work backwards from the goal. So I would emphasize focusing on that 3- to 5-year outlook, if it's on the exchange side, what are the TAMs that we're going after, what are the probabilities you as an investor assess us being able to reach that and realize that it's going to be very nonlinear along the way.

So don't get too overly focused on the day-to-day moves. But that's my two cents. Maybe I'll turn it to you, Josh, if you have something you'd like to add.

No, I would absolutely echo that. And I think it's just the nature of market development and market structure. I think there's a lot of times, I feel like people confuse, say, what's happening in crypto markets and the volume seen in a crypto market versus the volume you see in a cleared regulated futures market kind of thinking they're the same thing that a price is a price, but it's absolutely not the case.

I think just the scale of what we're building for risk management, yes, I mean, look, we get frustrated when we see what happened in the Middle East or like you mentioned, what happened in -- after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we literally built every part of our market to solve people's problems for those types of events.

And again, often, I get a little bit frustrated that we didn't have more capital so that we'd be more ready by this point. We've had to be far more patient than we've liked. Certainly as an engineer would love to launch things faster. But these are -- this is major infrastructure, the equivalent of building a mine over the course of 10 to 20 years.

And I think that the market doesn't fully appreciate the scale of the plumbing, again, to create a regulated clearinghouse that manage that level of significant global risk versus a start-up bucket shop. And so I think that's probably the thing that's most misunderstood. And again, we're one of one. No one has gone and built a greenfield exchange products, clearinghouses, technology stack, all from scratch, probably ever, but at least in the last 10, 15 years.

And we received another question, Josh, that I think would be good to turn to you. And that question was what positive business development and what negative business development most surprised you and management over the last 12 months?

This is like one of those [ employee ] interview questions. Yes. Look, I mean, I think some of the -- like I said, the development of Singapore as a precious metal hub and the world sort of very rapidly converging on our view around about the way we tokenize gold as being critically important.

I think I probably always had that in my mind as somewhat of a gold bug. But certainly, that's becoming more mainstream. And again, I really think we built the right market in the right place. So I think the positive surprises out of Singapore and what that means for our long-term market share in the precious metals business is very positively surprising.

On the negative side, it's kind of more of the same. Sometimes the delays that we -- sometimes you wish how can people not have seen this before? And then they kind of accelerate after the fact, stock market included. I think it took us 5 years as a public company to be sort of appreciated for what we're actually building. And so that's probably both a positive and negative surprise.

And Joe, we had a couple of questions on the state of onboarding and connectivity. And as Josh said, we're going to be covering that more on kind of a 6-month basis. But I think there might be a misconception out there that particularly clearing firm onboarding has stopped. And I was wondering if you could just kind of give a brief update on how you see clearing firm onboarding continuing over the next year?

That's a great question. And it's really, I think, one of our major challenges, but also accomplishments. I think the FBOT designation that we -- an achievement helped one U.S. domiciled large bank FCM that clears a majority of energy firms or commodity firms is now committed to onboarding with us. We have 2 others outside of the U.S. that are in the process of onboarding through a carry broker, and that's as a result of products.

So it really -- it kind of is -- to your point, it's not linear. It's difficult having worked at the largest FCM on the globe at Goldman. I know the process. I know how hard it is. It takes a lot of resources and commitment from the clearing firm to dedicate the resources to connect to any new exchange, let alone one that's a brand-new one.

That's the hardest part. It's really that we are new. And I think the fact that we've generated the volume that we have and the new products and the new customers will only lead to new clearing firms coming on board. So that's an important part that we constantly engage with them. Our customers are constantly asking their clearing firms to onboard with us.

So that pressure is continual, and that will only help bring these firms on board. A good example, the Trayport, as I mentioned earlier, the Trayport activation, we -- as I said, in a week's time, we've had 3 banks that never really were looking -- they were looking at us, but they hadn't committed to start trading with us. Three large banks came to us and wanted access to our markets through Trayport.

That, in fact, will lead to those banks now having to connect with us in order to clear those contracts. So that's really the best testament to what we're doing is that when you have a bank asked to trade our products, that has to bring their clearing firm on board and then that opens up the door to all of their customers. So that's an important step in the process. It's just a matter of just expanding liquidity. And as I said earlier, liquidity begets liquidity, and that's really the best thing that we can continue to develop.

Thanks, Joe. And maybe I'll turn one more question to Josh because I know we're well over the scheduled time. There have been a number of questions, Josh, on the broader gold and precious metal strategy and how Abaxx Spot fits into that along with the work on the MarketOS side. I was wondering if you might be able to give people just kind of a broad outline of how you're thinking about gold and precious metals right now.

Yes. No, we certainly want to expand. Again, we've got another call in 45 days and hope to update with a new product, at least one new product, if not new market infrastructure to present. And like I said, it's been such a positive surprise. And it really is -- I do think the gold market is going to be -- and the precious market in general is going to be a perfect place for our 2 parts of our business to converge, being able to use gold as real-time collateral, not just a very specific exchanges warrant system, not just a very specific LVMA account sort of balance sheet gold held in London, but actual physical gold being able to move in real-time velocity, I think, is huge.

And that's particularly important now that there's been some more cryptographic risk and the quantum risk in the ecosystem of crypto currencies. So we think gold is as [indiscernible] and others have written about, we think this is a great unifying market infrastructure for all of the things that we've built. So we look forward to presenting more of that in the quarters ahead.

Thanks, Josh. So we're well past the hour. I thank everyone for staying engaged. Obviously, we could probably continue to talk for another hour, 1.5 hours. But at this point, we should wrap it up. So I'd like to turn it back. Thank everyone for their questions and turn it back to Nick.

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