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The German billionaire Christian Angermayer covers his Manhattan penthouse with symbols of his favorite investments. On one wall is a graffiti print of the Bitcoin crest overlaying U.S. dollars; next to it is a painting of magic mushrooms; and beneath that, an ancient trilobite from the Cambrian period.
Perhaps best known for cofounding a steroid-enhanced version of the Olympics backed by Peter Thiel, Angermayer has made his fortune betting on sectors well outside the mainstream economy, such as crypto, psychedelics, and fossils. Last week, in an interview with Fortune from his apartment in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge, he shared details of his latest passion project: tokenized uranium.
Investors are no strangers to commodities as an asset class: gold, of course, is a long-time safe haven, and oil has a slew of exchange-traded products available to traders. But uranium, in no small part due to its key role in nuclear weapon-making, remains an underdeveloped and essentially out-of-reach market, even as demand skyrockets. Just last week, the stocks for advanced reactor companies and uranium miners jumped on a report that President Trump would sign orders to speed the construction of nuclear facilities.
For his part, Angermayer is betting on Uranium Digital, a startup founded by the former hedge fund manager Alex Dolesky, which is building a blockchain-based trading platform for uranium available to both retail and institutional customers. Angermayer is investing an undisclosed amount in the company as well as joining as a strategic advisor.
Angermayer says that he was searching for an investment in natural resources based on his conviction that AI development would demand new energy sources, like nuclear power. “Nuclear, and hence uranium, is a very infrastructure way to bet on the AI boom,” he tells Fortune.
It just so happened that he found Uranium Digital, a startup building in his other preferred sector of crypto. “That’s how I function,” he continues. “I always have my big ideas…But I very much believe that’s the spiritual, psychedelic side, that you then meet the right people at the right time.”
From Tether to uranium
Angermayer started his career as a biotech entrepreneur, cofounding the firm Ribopharma, which merged with a pharmaceutical company in 2003 and made Angermayer millions. He later founded an investment firm, Apeiron, which now has more than $2.5 billion of assets under management, much of it Angermayer’s.
Apeiron has a diverse portfolio of investments, from Hollywood blockbusters to pioneering manufacturers of psilocybin, the active chemical in magic mushrooms. But Angermayer has become increasingly involved in crypto in recent years, such as helping the renegade stablecoin issuer Tether build out its own portfolio of investments, including in a brain implant company and data center operator.
Angermayer says that he first heard of Uranium Digital from two of the startup’s first backers: the crypto venture firm Framework and the family office of the former head of coal trading at the commodities giant Glencore.
Financial markets for commodities like oil and coal serve as speculative instruments for traders, but they also serve an essential function for firms operating in the space, allowing them to hedge against price swings through derivatives like futures. The pitch for Uranium Digital, according to Dolesky, is that financial markets for crude oil didn’t emerge until the 1980s, natural gas in the 1990s, and coal in the mid-2000s. They go from opaque markets driven by over-the-counter trades, meaning little price transparency, to having a full financial architecture system around them. “That’s effectively what we’re doing [for uranium],” Dolesky says.
Because of the security concerns around uranium, the only way to gain exposure to the element is to buy it through facilities called converters, which hold a powdered form of uranium called yellowcake. That means that the process is highly controlled and slow, with little price transparency. Moreover, traders can only buy and sell, as opposed to building out other types of financial instruments. “There’s no way to express a spectrum of trades,” Dolesky tells Fortune.
Tokenization buzz
So why crypto? By tokenizing uranium through the Solana blockchain, the startup can create digital exposure to the element, offering traders near-instant, low-fee trading. In this sense, uranium on the blockchain is akin to dollar-backed stablecoins like Tether.
At the same time, most users would not be converting between the digital version of uranium and uranium itself, which would require physical settlement and is restricted to the vast majority of traders. Instead, they will trade the tokenized form, with physical holders able to mint more through a complex system of arbitrage that maintains the price. That connects the retail market, which can’t trade physical uranium, with the institutional market, leading to price discovery that would be otherwise impossible.
Tokenization has become one of the hottest buzzwords in crypto, with venture firms piling into stablecoin startups and traditional financial institutions like BlackRock exploring blockchain versions of money market funds. Still, most emerging products are at pilot phases or constrained to crypto-native firms. Angermayer says uranium could emerge as a tangible example of blockchain’s utility. “I get most excited when something has a real impact on the real world,” he tells Fortune.
Uranium Digital is set to launch in the fall with just spot trading at first, but Angermayer says that his main role as advisor is helping introduce the startup to the world of hedge funds and investment managers that they hope will adopt uranium as a new asset class. That, he and Dolesky argue, will help create hedging instruments, which in turn will benefit companies building in the space. “This will be another very high-profile example of why crypto really makes sense from a natural strategic [perspective],” Angermayer tells Fortune.
He says that he’s considering tokenizing another of his favorite investments: dinosaur fossils. He even has a team of paleontologists on archeological digs to discover new ones. “I’m still thinking about it,” he tells Fortune. “The question is, how big is the market, and how much time do I have?”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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Leo Schwartz
