Commodities, electronics market and Security Tokens

Battery demand is growing- electronic devices, electric vehicles and energy storage.

Copper is one of the primary metals that should see a jump in demand related to the increase in demand for batteries. Others include lithium, nickel and cobalt, as well as graphite, manganese and vanadium to a smaller extent.

Major copper producing companies: Codelco, BHP Billiton, Anglo American, Rio Tinto, Glencore, Freeport-McMoRan, Southern Copper, Vale, Antofagasta, KGHM Polska Miedz

Lithium mining companies: Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile, Albemarle, FMC and Livent Corp. (spin-off of FMC in October 2018).

Nickel mining companies: Glencore, BHP Billiton, Vale, MMC Norilsk Nickel PJSC, Eramet, Ardea Resources, RNC Minerals, Sama Resources. Nickel is heavily impacted by steel industry, where as lithium and cobalt are not.

Key companies developing energy storage solutions: Tesla, Lockheed Martin, FirstEnergy, E.ON, SunPower, SolarEdge Technologies, Sunrun, Panasonic, Redt Energy, Good Energy and Bushveld Minerals.

Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology have made it more convenient and secure to securitize what are normally considered non-liquid assets, including: commodities, real estate, currencies, art, and more.

The tokenization of these assets will provide greater liquidity, ²⁴⁄₇ markets, lower transaction costs, fractional ownership, automated and quicker settlement, improved compliance checks, and a broader slate of possibilities with smart security contracts.

JP Morgan developed a platform, Quorum, which is an enterprise-focused version of Ethereum. Quorum allows for high speed and high throughput processing of private transactions within a permissioned group of known participants and is currently used to digitize gold bars as partial investments on blockchain. The plan is to move forward with the tokenization of other real assets in 2019.

The race to tokenize these assets is on.

Swiss asset manager and commodity, Tiberius Group AG, launched a token (Tiberius Coin) in October consisting of a basket of the following: Copper, Tin, Aluminium, Nickel, Cobalt, Gold and Platinum

The current cost of purchasing Tiberius Coins comes with a 9% fee.