Tokenisation of Physical Uranium: A Case Study of Alternative and Complementary Investment Vehicles

Investor interest in uranium has grown as nuclear power regains attention in national energy strategies, but gaining direct exposure to the physical metal has been difficult and often limited to institutional investors. This case study examines three vehicles addressing this gap: a Swiss actively managed certificate, a blockchain-based token, and a pending U.S. exchange-traded fund (ETF) built principally around that token, each providing exposure to stored physical uranium through a different legal and operational structure. Drawing on interviews and public documents, including the ETF’s pre-effective U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) registration statement, the analysis compares structure, participants, processes, and regulatory treatment across the three vehicles. The three vehicles vary substantially in accessibility, custody, verification, and regulatory considerations, though the ETF’s contribution rests on its proposed rather than realised structure. Know-your-customer requirements and centralised-exchange listings were associated with observed changes in the token’s trading volume. The study’s original contribution is a structured comparison of the accessibility, operational, and regulatory trade-offs between tokenised, non-tokenised, and fund-wrapped exposure to the same real-world asset. More broadly, the proposed fund-wrapper structure indicates that tokenisation may introduce an additional layer of intermediation when a tokenised commodity asset is packaged within a traditional fund.