Minestarters

Junior exploration remains structurally underfunded. Despite elevated commodity prices, exploration budgets in key jurisdictions such as Africa are at decade lows, as operating-level price strength fails to translate into risk capital for early-stage companies. High failure rates and asymmetric risk-return profiles force investors to deploy significant capital to achieve diversification, shrinking the pool of suitable backers and leaving fragmented, slow funding routes that strand many high-quality exploration projects. The pathway from mineral discovery (exploration), through feasibility studies and permitting (development), to project finance, construction and production is long and capital-intensive. Until a project reaches production, the underlying in-ground mineral assets held by juniors are non-producing, non-cash-flowing and largely illiquid. This illiquidity imposes a valuation discount during the exploration and development phases, increasing the cost of capital and constraining access to funding. Early investors are locked in for years, with no ability to trade, rebalance, or exit exposure prior to the achievement of long-term project milestones.

enter Minestarters:

Curated Baskets Curators—researchers, mining creators, junior executives, or Minestarters itself—assemble baskets of mining projects, defining allocation splits and a minimum raise. Investors gain diversified exposure by backing expert-led strategies rather than individual high-risk projects.

NAV Tracking All material legal and financial documents are verified via oracles or cryptographic signatures from required counterparties. Net Asset Value (NAV) is tracked and reflected on-chain, providing real-time transparency and accountability for vault token holders.

tl;dr: off-chain collaborative curation, NAV-aware on-chain liquidity, and cross-chain capital rails for mining finance.

Curators stake to collectively assign weights to mining projects inside a basket using Yellow Network, enabling fast, gasless, multi-party curation with on-chain settlement only once the basket is finalised. Used a backend for peer discovery for Yellow.

Each basket issues vault tokens that trade in a Uniswap V4 pool, where custom hooks keep prices aligned with on-chain NAV based on project stage and progress, creating continuous price discovery for traditionally illiquid mining assets. Withdrawals from mining companies are also gated by progress.

The protocol is deployed on ARC Network, allowing cross-chain USDC funding and unified settlement without bridging friction.