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The London Metal Exchange (LME), one of the oldest and largest trading platforms in the world, is currently considering tokenizing some of its inventory. This refers to metal lying in warehouses, but not tied to a specific warehouse order and without a guarantee certificate that would confirm its belonging to a certain stock lot. Physically, it exists and is accounted for, but the LME has not yet had a standard mechanism to use it as collateral for financing. It is planned that the exchange will start issuing digital tokens for such stocks. If necessary, the instruments can be held in an escrow account with a third party and used as collateral for loans and other obligations. At the same time, no one is launching the finished product right now: the LME itself emphasizes that the study has just begun and plans will be developed together with interested parties.

The idea is to use assets that previously fell out of standard financial schemes. Metal without a warehouse order is not so easy to use for lending: it is important for the lender to understand exactly what the obligation is secured with, how the metal will be checked and what legal mechanisms will work during recovery. Tokenization is seen here as a way to formalize the security and make it clearer to the market. But for a full-fledged launch, issues of inventory verification, recognition of tokens as collateral, and coordination of procedures with creditors and warehouses will have to be resolved. So the current stage is rather preparatory: the LME checks what conditions are needed for the scheme to work not only on paper, but also in real transactions.

For Hong Kong, the initiative is important separately. The city wants to strengthen its status as a digital raw materials hub, and this task is fixed in the 15th five-year plan of the People's Republic of China, adopted in March. The document aims to use the unique advantages of Hong Kong as an approved supply point in the global LME warehouse network for commodity trading, risk management and financial transactions. In January, the LME approved Hong Kong as a warehouse location, although renting there is more expensive than in other parts of Asia. If tokenization of stocks goes ahead, Hong Kong may become one of the sites where physical metal and digital instruments will come closer together. For the LME itself, this is a chance to expand its geography and offer the market new ways to work with collateral.

There are already examples of tokenization of precious metals, but the scale and model of participation there are different. In 2023, HSBC launched a platform that allows tokenization of every bar of gold in its warehouses, and customers can track and trade their metal through digital assets. Mark Williamson, HSBC's global head of partnerships and offerings in the field of currencies and commodities, noted: the system is designed for institutional clients. Later, other projects appeared — XAUT from Tether and PAXG from Paxos. But none of them involved the direct vertical participation of a precious metals exchange comparable to the LME. At the same time, the LME turnover last year amounted to $ 21 trillion, which is about 4 billion tons of metals. So even a careful study of tokenization by such a platform attracts the attention of the market.

Attention to the digitalization of financial markets is generally increasing. David Solomon, the head of Goldman Sachs, listed digitalization as one of the key trends on October 17. According to him, it is able to generate new products and open up traditional markets to customers who did not exist there before. This is a hint for the raw materials industry: digital solutions are gradually emerging from the sandbox and becoming working tools. Although tokenization does not eliminate fundamental concerns. The lender still needs a guarantee that the metal is physically there, that the rights to it are confirmed, and that the token is recognized as collateral in practice. The LME has not yet made public the final outlines of the scheme, so it is premature to draw conclusions about its scope.