The financial standard coloured gemstones have lacked for five centuries.

The problem

An asset class still trading like it's 1925.

Every other major store of value built the infrastructure to price and trade transparently. Coloured gemstones never did — they still change hands in private rooms, priced by reputation rather than market.

Why the gap persisted

Three barriers blocked public-market infrastructure. All three just fell.

The window from all three falling to the category having a standard is measured in months, not years.

The solution

A standard — not a marketplace.

Bloomberg prints terminals. ICANN runs DNS. Visa fixes the transaction protocol. CaratShares publishes the spec by which fine gemstones operate on-chain over the next decade.

Each stone is listed via a First Light Offering at a fixed price per Facet — a 1/N ERC-20 fraction of the stone. After the FLO closes, Facets trade continuously on a built-in order book settled in stablecoin. Governance, buy-outs, and physical redemption are all enforced on-chain.

The mechanics

Four primitives, enforced by contract.

The market

A large private market with zero public rails.

Institutional appetite for tokenised real-world assets is at peak credibility — but the category is dominated by treasuries and credit. Gemstones remain virgin territory: no incumbent owns the standard.

Comparables

A funded category — with an open seat.

Fractional and tokenized ownership of physical assets is a proven, venture-funded category. No player owns coloured gemstones.

Courtyard proves the exact mechanics — tokenized physical items in insured vault custody, traded continuously on-chain. CaratShares applies them to a larger, untouched asset class — and positions as the standard, not another marketplace.

Economics

Five fee streams — plus the dealer's margin.

• Listing fee · 5% of each FLO purchase · Trading fee · 1.5% per order-book fill (taker).
• Performance fee · 15% of NAV appreciation above high-water mark, at re-appraisal events.
• Custody fee · 2% / year of NAV (insured vault) · Redemption fee · 2% at physical delivery.
• Origination spread — principal listings. The platform acquires illiquid stones at wholesale discounts and lists at independently appraised NAV. This is Masterworks' primary engine (~11% embedded per deal) — ours settles on-chain, with disclosed principal listings and lab-set NAV as the conflict guardrail.
• Two-sided by design. Dealers use the FLO to turn multi-year inventory into 30-day liquidity — supply queues up rather than being begged for.

At $250M of inventory, blended fee yield models to 3–4% per year — and origination spread on principal listings scales on top of it, with sourcing, not churn.

Traction

Shipped — not slideware.

A full trading interface is live on Base Sepolia today.

Live now · caratshares.com/catalogue Built end-to-end by the founder — contracts, frontend, and infrastructure.

Why now

The opening is twelve to eighteen months.

The founder

One of a handful of people who can build this.

Alex Chubuk — built CaratShares end-to-end, solo.

Solidity contracts, frontend, infrastructure, deployment. Background spans Ethereum-class smart-contract architecture and the gemmological vocabulary to talk credibly to GIA, SSEF, and Gübelin — the rare overlap that separates who can build the standard from who can only market a product on top of it.

The platform ships with production-grade operational infrastructure — atomic state management, rolling backups, and a full audit trail — built and battle-tested by the founder on prior production systems.

The raise

Pre-seed: $3M to harden, audit, and acquire first inventory.