Jade City, which is pioneering the tokenisation of Jade, has completed a pre-seed funding round of $300,000 and is now conducting a seed round with a target of $1.2m. Their real-world asset platform will launch later in 2024, offering the first global marketplace for jade-backed digital assets.
Jade has been a precious stone revered in Asia for thousands of years and for the last 200 years almost all Jade into China, the dominant consumer, has been sourced from Burma.
The demand for jade has been soaring with prices rising tenfold since the turn of the century. Currently, the estimated value of the jade jewellery market in China is c.$50bn, surpassing the size of the diamond market in China. However, for much of its history, Jadeite has been a gem accessible to few and plagued by black market activity, poor mining practices and political issues. This has resulted in almost depletion of Burmese jadeite and hence global supply. In this context, Jade City is being launched by a team of experts in mining and blockchain with the mission to democratise access to the jade value chain. This will be made possible through the successful processing and distribution partners that the team has already established in China.
Jade City was founded by James Bowater and is led by CEO William Ralston Saul and CTO David Atkinson. Will is a seasoned builder of mining companies and a cryptocurrency expert who founded InCrypto Hub and runs blockchain boot camps to teach others about the technology and its applications. David is a tech innovator and co-founder of Holochain, Holo, Rain, and Gild Lab.
The Jade City team has partnered with the owners of the world’s largest Jadeite mine in Kazakhstan via their sister company, Jade Vault, which has successfully raised $2M to help put the mine into production and secure a very substantial jadeite inventory. The mining operation draws on the expertise of Kevin Foo, who has had a 50-year career in the resources industry, working across five continents and successfully developing mines from exploration into production. Kevin was formerly MD of Celtic Resources, which was sold for $360 million in 2007.
Will Ralston Saul, CEO of Jade City, commented: “The current fundraising follows two years of meticulous planning and preparation and will allow us to build out the platform as we look forward to token generation and going live later this year. These are really exciting times for Jade City, and we’re seeing strong interest from within the crypto world and beyond as we unlock the power of these real-world assets.”