Gerard Kavanagh
The road to financial independence

We'll be running blog-like commentaries from time to time in part to discuss potential queries on our groundbreaking offering, related investment market updates, and of course crypto commentary. In short, as with pretty much all blogs, anything that we find interesting and worth sharing Let's start at the root of our offering - The Ruby Unsurprisingly a topic discussed in the WP on pages 10 and 11, let alone by the appraiser extensively in the appendix of the WP to the tune of 27 pages. Throughout history, gems have been the original and thus very definition of a collectible and a store of value. So let's look at this quickly from another perspective, the baser side if you will. What's it worth? To paraphrase Bored Ape Yacht Club when discussing their collectible NFTs - It is inherently subjective to determine a Ruby's overall value or rarity. It's a polite way of sidestepping a value proposition discussion - value is in the eye of the beholder etc - anything more than that banal commentary and the worry is the SEC or FSA might get miffed and suggest you are discussing a "security". Now there is a topic to be discussed in a future blog, but for now, let's keep to the Ruby and its worth. Rubies command higher prices per carat than any other gemstone apart from coloured diamonds. The most expensive ruby ever sold, back in 2015, was valued at USD$1.18 million per carat (Source: Christie’s Hong Kong). An appraisal of our Ruby is offered in our WP (it's US$290m and change - see page 38 of the WP), the appraiser is a well-known global expert and specializes in this field. But an appraisal is still just a view. Gems of this size and capacity ONLY trade rarely and in private sales/auctions so getting a "market" feel is not feasible or realistic. What we can, and do show is that the depository (that holds the Ruby in a Citibank vault) has insured the Ruby for that very amount (see the link on the first page of the website - GTD Insurance). Giving credence to the appraisal value. Insurance is not free, overstated values consequently can cause a company/individual to carry more insurance than necessary and pay excessive premiums. In short, you should always look to value the asset (in insurance terms) at its real replacement value. Risks, of which costs are a factor, also weigh negatively in valuation terms. So let's run through those and how we mitigate them. 1) High costs and fees are a real financial onus when retaining a ruby of this size, insurance being a major one and the other being the annual depository fees. Neither is applicable to buyers of our token OR in our forthcoming NFT issuance. Simply put, we FIX00, wear those expenses in perpetuity for you.
2) Counterfeits and frauds - The ruby ownership and existence can be verified at any time using the links on our website and will be independently valued and audited annually. 3) Security & breakage - By securing the asset in a depository with full insurance in perpetuity, at our and not your expense, and where all of this is verifiable clearly negatives this cost and risk. 4) Lack of liquidity, market & volatility. Selling collectibles can be challenging because it’s often difficult to find a buyer. As above we defeat that concern by ensuring the underlying asset can never be sold in real-world markets. In order to digitalise a real-world asset it has to be locked away securely forever - it can never be sold - as such it cannot damage, say through forced sale or break-up for jewelry purposes, the real-world equilibrium of demand and supply and thus price stability. By bringing the collectible into the digital world we IMPROVE the inadequate auction-based markets by fractionalising the asset in the form of NFTs and offering them at discounted, affordable prices. This allows more people to participate and diversify ownership of these assets as never before. That brings the opportunity for the first time ever in such assets to create a functioning, deep, market - one that can reflect the value, through the transparency of an open market system for both purchasers and asset sellers.
A quantum leap forward from current real-world practices of the opaque closed-end markets that cater only to the elite, but actually, work against them given the ever-escalating costs and the complete lack of transparency. Our crypto-based solution is an immeasurable improvement of existing practices, with open not closed markets, and access to all - take that imperfect real world! We have absolute faith in the crypto-verse being able to manage and value assets via its own means and markets. Our products, our markets, our way!