For investors · Pre-seed deck v0.5
The financial standard coloured gemstones have lacked for five centuries.
A $25 billion private trade with no continuous price, no fractional access, no on-chain settlement. CaratShares introduces all three — and publishes them as an open standard the rest of the industry will adopt.
The problem
An asset class still trading like it's 1925.
For five hundred years, the world's rarest stones have changed hands in private rooms, priced by reputation rather than market. Every other major store of value has built the infrastructure to make this transparent and accessible.
- Bonds· electronic trading, T+0 settlement, continuous price.
- Diamonds · Rapaport price grid, structured trade exchanges.
- Real estate · REITs, MLS, fractional crowdfunds.
- Art · auction houses, indices, fractional platforms (Masterworks).
- Gold · LBMA fix, ETFs, on-chain wrappers.
- Coloured gemstones · nothing.
Why the gap persisted
A coloured gemstone is not a serial-numbered object. Until recently, three independent barriers blocked public-market infrastructure:
- Identification · no reproducible way to verify a stone's identity in a dispute.
- Custody · no industrialised insured storage for unique physical items.
- Settlement · no atomic "pay-and-own" outside high-trust private channels.
All three barriers fell over the past decade. Labs (GIA, SSEF, Gübelin, AGL, GRS) now produce reproducible identification reports. Geneva Free Port and similar bonded vaults industrialised unique-item custody. Programmable settlement on Ethereum-class chains made atomic delivery-vs-payment possible between strangers.
The solution
A standard — not a marketplace.
Bloomberg prints terminals, ICANN runs DNS, Visa fixes the transaction protocol. CaratShares does the same for fine gemstones: publishing the spec by which the industry will operate on-chain over the next decade.
Each stone is listed via First Light Offering (FLO) — primary issuance at a fixed price per Facet (1/N share of the stone, represented as an ERC-20 token). After FLO closes, Facets trade continuously on a built-in order book settled in stablecoin. Majority holders can squeeze out minorities at NAV + 15 % with a cooling-period challenge window. A 100 %-holder can request physical redemption: the contract burns supply, transfers the certificate NFT, and the vault ships the stone.
FLO
First Light Offering — primary issuance. Fixed price per Facet, time-bounded, NAV-anchored. Replaces IPO terminology with category-specific semantics.
Facets
Stones divide into Facets — fungible ERC-20 fractions, one contract per stone. Permissionless transfer, atomic on-chain settlement, supply fixed at listing.
Squeeze-out
Majority (≥75 %) buys out minority at NAV + 15 %. 7-day cooling window for sale-vote challenge. Mirrors Delaware §253 corporate squeeze.
Physical redemption
100 % holder calls home: contract burns supply, certificate NFT transfers, vault ships. 2 % redemption fee covers armoured logistics.
Economics
Five fee streams — plus the dealer's margin.
- Listing fee · 5 % of each FLO purchase — paid by primary buyers, physical USDC into platform pool.
- Trading fee · 1.5 % of every order-book fill — taker pays, physical USDC into platform pool.
- Performance fee · 15 % of NAV appreciation above HWM (hedge-fund 2-and-20 model) — accrued at re-appraisal events.
- Custody fee · 2 % / year of NAV, time-weighted — covers insured vault storage, accrued continuously.
- Redemption fee · 2 % of NAV at physical delivery — covers armoured shipping and arrival verification.
- Origination spread — principal listings. The platform also lists stones it owns: illiquid, high-value inventory acquired at wholesale discounts and listed at independently appraised NAV. This spread is Masterworks' primary revenue engine (~11 % embedded per deal); ours settles on-chain. Conflict guardrails: principal listings are disclosed, NAV is lab-set, performance fee accrues only above the high-water mark.
The market is 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. On $250M of inventory at maturity, blended fee yield models to 3-4 % platform take per year, and origination spread on principal listings scales on top — with sourcing, not churn.
Working demo
30 stones, on-chain, real fills.
A working catalogue is live on Base Sepolia testnet: 30 lab-verified stone listings spanning $2,500 to $3,000,000 in valuation, every governance flow exercisable (FLO, order book, squeeze-out, redemption), synthetic liquidity bots simulating realistic order flow.
Open the catalogue
Live trading interface · MetaMask required · Base Sepolia testnet · No real funds at risk
View catalogue →The founder
One of three to five people in the world 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 required to talk credibly to GIA, SSEF, and Gübelin — a rare overlap that defines who can build the standard versus 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. This is iteration two, not a first attempt.
The raise
Pre-seed: $3M to harden, audit, and acquire first inventory.
Why now
The opening is twelve to eighteen months.
- Lab digitisation · GIA's QR-coded reports now standard. Verification is a single fetch, not a phone call.
- RWA narrative · institutional appetite for tokenised real-world assets is at peak credibility, but the category is dominated by treasuries and credit — gemstones are still virgin territory.
- Generational handover · second-generation gem-trade families are actively looking for digitisation partners as the first generation hands over the books.
- Crypto compliance · MiCA in Europe, FIT21 in the US — frameworks for tokenised assets are crystallising. A protocol that ships with this in mind from day one will be the natural infrastructure when the rules land.
Get in touch
For introductions and term sheets.
Alex Chubuk, founder · Warm intros preferred · NDA available on request · Pre-seed allocation $50K to $500K per ticket
Slide deck → · One-pager → · White paper → Print-ready · open, then Cmd/Ctrl+P → Save as PDF