Introducing Smarter Markets: Commodities Legends and Market Builders

Episode 1
Commodities Legends and Market Builders

Robert Friedland, a Renaissance man who founded several successful mining, technology and entertainment companies, speaks to host Erik Townsend openly about his views about the what, who and how of the global energy transition and meeting the energy demand of future generations.

About the episode

With world leaders rapidly reacting to climate change concerns, governments are developing policy to support the energy transition towards renewables and decarbonizing the world’s energy sources. How crucial are metals like aluminium, copper and nickel, to the global energy transition?

What to listen for

— Why copper will be the winning commodity in coming years

— Singapore wants to be the world leader in revolutionizing the market for trading clean energy

— Abaxx Technologies, a private startup to revolutionize electronic commodity markets

Hosted By

Erik Townsend
Episode 2
Commodities Legends and Market Builders

We sit down with energy industry maverick and market innovator, Maryam Ayati, who leads NEO Holdings. NEO brings established industry giants together with the climate and entrepreneurial ecosystem in mutually profitable models. Together, they identify and operationalize tomorrow’s most valuable new commodities and business models, reinventing energy and extractive supply chains such that they serve planet, people and profit.

Earlier in her career in private equity settings, she has led at-scale deployment of novel clean technology including some of the world’s first downstream liquified natural gas value chains to replace diesel and fuel oil: LNG-fueled drilling, mobility, marine and mining. In addition to overseeing world first monetization of landfill-gas to mobility, flare-gas-fueled microgrids and flare-gas to mobility in N. America.

Maryam also spent over a decade as an executive at Royal Dutch Shell. There, she created and led multiple global lines of business and organizations. These included Shell Trading’s Origination & Investments practice across global crude and oil products, pioneering the LNG to downstream and marine concepts for the energy company, creating Shell’s Global LNG Regas organization, leading the business model design for Shell’s New Energies business and various others. With Shell, she also co-founded the industry first enterprise grade blockchain platforms Vakt and Komgo, serving as the founding board chair of Vakt Holdings.

About the episode

Maryam Ayati doubles down on Robert Friedland’s vision of grading and trading commodities based on ESG aspects but describes it as a first step in a transformational but rapid redesign of commodity supply chains, financing and pricing. She describes how the entire commodity supply chain could be tokenized using stable tokens and distributed ledger technology, and how commodities could literally be traced to their source with the journey to end-user captured in almost perpetuity, using new data tech which applies molecular-level digital fingerprints to almost any commodity.

What to listen for

There is a land grab for the highest value assets of the economy’s next iteration on traded markets, commodities and resources.

This future is being designed, built, legislated and monetized with big tech, data and crypto leading – without the burden of a legacy of competitive advantage to protect or preserve. The traditional market and commodity players are not at that table.

— They should be.

The next iteration on resource and commodity markets will have origin, source tracking, environmental social attributes built into a single tokenized version of the truth. Priced in for the market to choose.

There is a time-bound opportunity for tip of the spear leaders in established industry to take a seat at the head table to collaborate with the new economy’s pace-setters. They earn that seat by leveraging a century of lessons learnt, a wealth of know-how, experience, relationships and distribution channels that can be deployed to create new competitive advantage.

Hosted By

Erik Townsend
Episode 3
Commodities Legends and Market Builders

A superb, hour-long discussion with Commodity Legend, Jeff Currie. This episode sheds light on the politics and market issues facing the investment community in committing fully to renewable energy technologies.

Jeff’s commentary helps listeners understand the difficulties in pricing carbon, and why a carbon price is crucial to advancing ESG standards. He delves into the role governments and policy plays in establishing rules for carbon emissions, and helping the market discover a price for emitting carbon into our environment. Jeff focuses our attention on the reality that, to properly incentivize investment in renewable energy technologies, the first step is a clear mechanism to price carbon.

Hosted By

Erik Townsend
Episode 4
Commodities Legends and Market Builders

Thomas McMahon has over 50 years of experience in international exchange-based Commodity and Derivative product creation, clearing, trading, and regulatory licensing. Over the past decade, Thom has worked broadly across Asia to bring to market major international exchange formation and licensing projects in Singapore, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, Dubai and India. Thom previously served as Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of the Singapore Mercantile Exchange from April 2009 until June 2011 after licencing and launching an exchange and clearing house now owned by Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. Thom was also a former President of the Hong Kong Mercantile Exchange, and a Vice President and Director of the NYMEX, now part of the CME Group Inc.

About the episode

Abaxx co-founder Thom McMahon weighs in on the company’s activities to actually design and build the fully tokenized commodity trading system envisioned by Robert Friedland, Maryam Ayati and Jeffrey Currie in our first three episodes. Thom also explains why a physical delivery LNG contract is essential to the green energy revolution, and how Abaxx Exchange is designing that contract right now to establish Singapore as the global benchmark market for LNG price discovery.

What to listen for

— History of Henry Hub

Abaxx Technologies , a private startup to revolutionize electronic commodity markets.

Hosted By

Erik Townsend
Episode 5
Commodities Legends and Market Builders

Charlie McGarraugh is Chief Strategy Officer for Blockchain.com, the largest self-custodied crypto wallet provider globally.  Previously he was a Goldman Sachs Partner and former head of metals trading, so his native language is finance. In this interview, Charlie explains Tokenization in terms that Finance professionals can relate to, then goes on to explain what this change will mean both to financial markets and to the people who work in them.

What to listen for

—  How DeFi is reducing intermediation, counterparty-risk and operational costs in traditional financial asset trading?
— Real-world examples of how tokenziation can reconstruct marketplaces for price discovery and settlement.
— Blockchain.com wallet to hold title to physical gold in a digital asset form.

Hosted By

Erik Townsend
Episode 6
Commodities Legends and Market Builders

Logica Funds’ Mike Green explains why he and most of the smartest people in finance are in the business of exploiting and profiting from deficiencies of current markets, rather than fixing them. Mike explains why incentives don’t favor fixing what’s broken, and what we need to do to change the system and enable migration to a new generation of SmarterMarkets™.

What to listen for:

— A smart contracts and ledger-based systems can improve transparency within the financial system, but the systems that are in place currently do not benefit from this transparency, creating a headwind for innovation in the technological infrastructure of financial markets.

— The lower cost of capital combined with a “social contract” or acceptance of risk taking is rewarded by the system and becomes the “bug” in adopting new technologies that keep market participants accountable.

— There is a cost associated with transparency, and until we accept this and are willing to pay for this collectively, we will find it difficult to build smarter financial markets to benefit society as a whole.

Hosted By

Erik Townsend
Episode 9
Commodities Legends and Market Builders

Commodity legend Mark Fisher shares some choice stories, including how the Hudson River can be used as a risk management tool to cure over-trading, then goes on to reflect on how the design of commodities futures markets could be improved.

Hosted By

Erik Townsend
Episode 10
Commodities Legends and Market Builders

Former senior Twitter executive and current head of Media, Sport & Entertainment for the World Economic Forum (WEF) Kirstine Stewart weighs in on the growing influence of social media on financial markets and society as a whole, including whether and how social media should be governed to control abuse of its power of influence.

Hosted By

Erik Townsend
Episode 11
Commodities Legends and Market Builders

Epsilon Theory founder Dr. Ben Hunt joins SmarterMarkets™ to weigh in on how social media is being used to engineer the narratives which shape both financial markets and society more broadly. We discuss the influence of social media then go on to discuss how financial markets no longer serve society in the way they were intended, and what needs to be done to fix them.

Hosted By

Erik Townsend

Ranting on the inadequacies of our systems and riffing on ideas for how to solve them …

SmarterMarkets™ brings together the icons and entrepreneurs of technology, commodities and finance to examine how market systems can be redesigned and improved to address the most important challenges of our time.

Ranting on the inadequacies of our systems and riffing on ideas for how to solve them …

SmarterMarkets™ brings together the icons and entrepreneurs of technology, commodities and finance to examine how market systems can be redesigned and improved to address the most important challenges of our time.