“An xCu holder owns a portion of branded copper cathodes located in Hamburg, Germany,” he said. “This is real, physical, refined copper, not unmined copper or concentrate still in the ground.”
Holders can redeem their tokens for physical copper, provided they have a suitable storage account and pass identity and anti-money laundering (AML) checks.
Each sheet of refined copper weighs approximately 125 kilograms, making that the minimum amount investors can redeem physically, Elvidge said.
Archax, a regulated digital asset platform based in the U.K. with a presence in the U.S., EU and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), acts as trustee and checks that the copper held matches the circulating token supply.
The company already has five other tokenized metals products trading on its platform.
Uranium leads with a market capitalization of about $9.2 million, followed by gold at $4.1 million. Copper’s initial market value already exceeds the combined value of its nickel, cobalt, and rare-earth products.
Tokenized metals are not new. Tether’s XAUT and Paxos’ PAXG already offer tokens backed by physical gold, but copper remains a much smaller market for blockchain-based investment products.
The launch also differs from Bridgetower’s $11 billion Arizona copper-gold tokenization project, which involves mineral resources that have yet to be extracted.
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