[REPLAY] Josh Crumb: Global Commodity Outlook & Building ABAXX

Josh Crumb traces his career from mining engineering at Colorado School of Mines, through project management at mine sites, corporate M&A work with the Lundin family, and eventually to Goldman Sachs in London where he served as head metals strategist under Jeff Curry. This background gave him deep exposure to commodity market infrastructure — COMEX, LBMA, London Metals Exchange, Shanghai Futures Exchange — and ultimately led him to found Abaxx Technologies, which he describes as the first truly greenfield full-stack commodity exchange and clearinghouse built from scratch in decades.

Crumb discusses the Lundin family and Robert Friedland at length, crediting their success to long-term thinking, backing the best teams and projects, and having the risk appetite to stick with investments through cycles. He notes that Friedland is one of Abaxx's largest investors and describes him as a rare visionary whose mental models are unlike anyone else he has met. He also discusses Friedland's iPulse technology, which uses pulse power rather than mechanical processes for drilling, mining, and beneficiation — potentially revolutionizing energy consumption in mining and enabling cheaper geothermal energy access.

On commodity markets broadly, Crumb argues that demographics and energy are the true drivers of economics, and that Asia's continued urbanization and middle-class expansion make long-term commodity demand fundamentally strong. He expresses concern about the disappearance of large macro commodity funds and specialist capital allocators, which he says has reduced price discovery quality in markets like oil — where he notes bearish positioning exists despite tight inventories and backwardation. He sees the downside for oil as limited to a price-war scenario around $45-50/barrel variable cost, but views the risk as skewed to the upside.

For natural gas and LNG, Crumb is bullish on the infrastructure buildout — liquefaction, regasification, and pipeline networks — particularly as coal-to-gas switching expands across Asia. He frames this less as a price bull call and more as a structural expansion of global energy resilience, analogous to what the US experienced with the shale revolution.

The core of the conversation centers on why Abaxx was built and what differentiates it. Crumb argues that the major existing exchanges — CME/NYMEX, ICE, LME, SGX — have lost touch with physical markets, particularly in growth commodities like LNG and battery metals, by defaulting to cash-settled survey-based contracts rather than building genuine physical delivery futures. Abaxx's contracts are designed to go to physical delivery at expiry, providing real hedging utility. He uses the 2022 European gas crisis as an example, where an $8/MBTU basis blowout between LNG and TTF exposed the inadequacy of proxy hedging.

Abaxx launched June 28th with five contracts: three LNG contracts (Gulf of Mexico FOB, Northwest Europe, Northeast Asia) and two carbon contracts, with battery metals and gold contracts planned for fall. Crumb explains the extreme difficulty of bootstrapping a greenfield exchange — gaining credibility with regulators, technology vendors, FCMs, and SWIFT — noting that commercial end-users expressing demand to their prime brokers was the essential first step. Near-term growth will come from converting existing OTC block trades onto the exchange before building open-interest liquidity.

On gold, Crumb describes a structural shift away from LBMA 400-ounce bar markets toward Asian kilo-bar markets, with physical flows increasingly centered in Dubai, Singapore, and Tokyo. Abaxx is launching a kilogram gold pool this fall to serve this emerging market structure. On silver, he notes that investment demand is the critical swing factor and that moving through the cost curve — from byproduct supply to incentivized primary mine supply — requires sustained investment demand that has been surprisingly absent despite gold's strength.

Crumb's most contrarian view is the underpricing of supply chain balkanization — the idea that Western and Eastern commodity prices will increasingly diverge due to carbon border adjustment taxes, ESG-linked green premiums, and geopolitical sourcing preferences. He cites Indonesian/Chinese nickel vs. Western sulfide nickel as a prime example and argues this differential is not yet priced into futures curves or equities.