Alex Dolesky thought his startup's push to "financialize" the sleepy uranium spot market would be a hit as nuclear energy stages a global comeback. All that tokenized yellowcake's looking more like gold. Months after netting its first $1.7 million from venture investors, Uranium Digital raised another $6.1 million in a seed round led by Framework Ventures. The financing will accelerate Uranium Digital's buildout of a spot trading platform for uranium that uses crypto infrastructure on the backend. It claims to be the first institutional market — crypto-powered or not — for a critical clean-energy commodity that, perplexingly, doesn't enjoy the same easy trading of its dirtier peers, coal, natural gas and oil. A radioactive mix of high regulations and low mainstream demand previously stymied the emergence of a robust uranium spot market, Dolesky said in an interview. While the strict rules over who can take settlement of yellowcake, a powdered form of uranium oxide concentrate, aren't going anywhere, the global demand for nuclear energy is taking care of the rest. Nuclear power is on its comeback tour. The energy source once derided by unfortunate disasters — most recently the Fukushima meltdown — is cropping up as a salve for rapidly increasing electric needs. The surge is fueling newfound interest from investors and institutions for an accessible spot market. In crypto Dolesky said he's found an efficient avenue to create the first. He says he's "abstracting away" the usual pain points of on-chain trading so that Uranium Digital will look and feel familiar for institutional clients. "Crypto rails for efficiency, speed and execution purposes — it's a unique opportunity," he said. As the platform nears its launch date Dolesky plans to pour more capital into his business and engineering teams. He realized after the pre-seed that the company's proposed solution had an even deeper well of potential users than what he called his most optimistic projections. Meeting the excess demand meant moving faster and raising more money. "The response we've gotten from the traditional market has been such that we're effectively going live sooner than anticipated," he said.
