The post Lightspeed Newsletter: Solana-based mineral rights platform scores funding appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Today, enjoy the Lightspeed newsletter on Blockworks.co. Tomorrow, get the news delivered directly to your inbox. Subscribe to the Lightspeed newsletter. Howdy!  August 5, already! July was a blip. Time to get serious about finishing that summer bucket list. There are only so many more nights for grilling hot dogs on the roof. Anyways: Elmnts scores pre-seed funding for mineral rights platform Elmnts is a Solana-based platform for tokenizing mineral rights, which are the rights to extract underground resources like oil and natural gas. The startup has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding at a $20 million valuation, it told Lightspeed exclusively.  The round was led by Graph Ventures, Foundation Capital and B+J Studios. 45% of the funding will be used on “development” and 30% will go to “legal/regulatory,” according to an investor pitch deck that was shared with us.  Mineral rights can be pretty lucrative, particularly when it comes to the gas industry. Oil and gas producers have to pay property owners a 25% royalty in many parts of Texas. The US government hauled in $2.9 billion from royalties on oil and gas extracted from federal land in 2019.  The issue, Elmnts co-founder Odai Ammar explained in an interview, is that most mineral rights are being “gobbled up by private equity” since there are only a couple auction venues where mineral rights come up for sale, and the minimum buy-in for solo investors would be in the ballpark of “a few hundred thousand dollars.” Elmnts tokenizes a fund that holds a collection of mineral rights assets, and investors can buy shares in this fund. The operation is kept compliant via Solana token extensions, which are features of Solana’s SPL token standard that let issuers code things like confidential transfers and delegate authority into their tokens to meet requirements from regulators.…

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Filed under: News - @ August 5, 2024 9:08 pm