There are moments when you realize a project you've been following inside the Tezos ecosystem is starting to be noticed well beyond it. Seeing metals.io featured in the Financial Times this week was one of those moments. We've watched the platform grow from tokenized uranium into a much broader commodities offering, so seeing it become part of a serious conversation about where global commodity markets could be heading felt significant.
That sense of discovery carries through the rest of this week's edition too. Cryptonio is back with Part VI of his Hidden Gems series, somehow finding five more community built Tezos tools worth adding to your bookmarks. We also cover Arts & Culture in the Tezos Ecosystem, we're giving everyone another reminder to save the date for Responsive Signals at the Museum of the Moving Image during Armory Week this September.
Overall, It's a nice mix this week, a Tezos project reaching the pages of the FT, developers creating useful tools for the community, and artists preparing to meet again in New York. So grab your coffee, get comfortable, and let me catch you up on what happened around Tezos this week.
Metals.io Lands in the Financial Times
If you've been reading The Baking Sheet over the past few months, you've probably noticed how often metals.io has found its way into these pages. What started with tokenized uranium has steadily expanded into gold, nickel, cobalt, and a basket of strategic metals, with each addition making the bigger ambition behind the platform a little clearer. This week, that story reached a much wider audience.
The Financial Times featured metals.io in a broader look at the growing overlap between commodities and crypto, examining how tokenization could give investors new ways to access and trade physical metals. For a Tezos-based project we've been following closely, appearing in the FT alongside a wider discussion about the future of commodity markets is a pretty significant moment.
The article spends quite a bit of time on a problem metals.io has been trying to address from the beginning. Commodity investing can still be surprisingly difficult for everyday investors, particularly once you move beyond familiar assets such as gold. Markets for uranium and cobalt have traditionally relied heavily on bilateral agreements and long-term contracts, while nickel trading through the London Metal Exchange was never really designed with retail investors in mind. Metals.io approaches that problem by giving investors direct exposure to physical commodities without requiring them to navigate many of the costs and complexities associated with traditional futures markets.
The FT spoke with Ben Elvidge, Head of Alternative Assets at Trilitech, who explained that demand has come from crypto-native investors looking to diversify into real-world assets, alongside interest from institutional groups. The uranium, nickel, and cobalt tokens offered through metals.io are backed by physical metal, and eligible holders can redeem for the underlying commodity subject to the necessary approvals.
There are already some interesting numbers behind the platform. According to the FT, metals.io has recorded approximately $24 million in cumulative trading since December 2024, with roughly 9,000 token holders. Its tokenized uranium has also expanded beyond the metals.io platform itself and is now traded through exchanges including Kraken, Gate, and KuCoin, giving investors several different routes into an asset that has historically been difficult for individuals to access directly.
What I appreciated about the FT piece is that it doesn't assume tokenization has already solved every problem. The article raises legitimate questions about demand, accessibility and interoperability, along with the added complexity that comes with industrial metals. Unlike gold, specifications such as purity and provenance can matter considerably to the eventual buyer. Ben reiterates that this complexity could eventually become part of the opportunity, with different specifications and qualities of a metal developing their own onchain pricing as these markets mature.
That broader discussion makes the coverage particularly interesting for Tezos, tokenized commodities are increasingly entering conversations taking place well beyond crypto, and metals.io is now being examined alongside established commodity markets, mining companies, regulators and traditional financial products. After watching the platform expand over the past several months, seeing it featured in the Financial Times feels like another meaningful step in that journey.
The full Financial Times article is behind a paywall, but it's worth a read for anyone interested in where tokenized commodities may be heading and the questions the industry still needs to answer.
This Week in the Tezos Ecosystem
Hidden Gems of the Tezos Ecosystem Returns for Part VI
How many Tezos websites do you have bookmarked at this point? If you've been around the ecosystem for a while, there's a good chance the answer is more than you can remember. Every so often, another useful little tool appears that solves a problem you didn't realize someone had already tackled.
That growing collection is exactly what inspired Cryptonio's Hidden Gems of the Tezos Ecosystem series, and this week he's back on Tezos Spotlight with Part VI, adding five more community-built tools to the list. What started back in 2024 as a series he thought might last three or four editions has now covered 30 different Tezos tools, which says quite a bit about how much gets built around the ecosystem outside the projects we hear about every day.
This latest edition has a particularly fun mix:
colleKT turns any Tezos wallet, collection, or Objkt curation into an interactive 3D gallery that you can walk through in your browser.
Teztree gives Tezos users a customizable home for their links, NFTs, latest mints, tez tips, and featured artwork, with a newer crowdfunding feature that sends contributions directly to campaign creators.
ELEVEN is a wonderfully simple 11x11 pixel-art editor where the finished artwork is stored fully onchain. Its larger sibling, TWENFIDDY, expands the canvas to 25x25.
TEZGOV, built by TezCapital, brings Layer 1 and Etherlink governance into one interface while giving delegators and stakers a way to signal their voting preferences to bakers.
NFTBiker's Event Manager lets artists and organizers create their own Tezos art event pages, define tags and participation details, and automatically collect qualifying minted works in one place.
A couple of those names may look familiar to regular readers. We've recently spotlighted both colleKT and TEZGOV right here in The Baking Sheet, so it was nice to see them turn up in Cryptonio's latest collection alongside three more tools worth exploring.
I think that's what has made the Hidden Gems series such a useful one to follow. These projects aren't necessarily the announcements that dominate your timeline, but they're often the tools you end up keeping open in a browser tab once you discover them. Six editions in, Cryptonio somehow still has another list waiting for Part VII.
You can read Hidden Gems of the Tezos Ecosystem [Part VI] in full on Tezos Spotlight and, if you've missed the earlier editions, work your way back through all 30 community-built tools featured so far.
Arts & Culture
Save the Date: Responsive Signals Comes to MoMI This September
We gave Responsive Signals a mention in last week's Baking Sheet, but with September getting closer, it deserves another spot on the calendar. The partnership between the Museum of the Moving Image and the Tezos Foundation has given us plenty to follow over the years, and the next gathering brings another interesting group of artists together during New York's Armory Week.
Presented by the Museum of the Moving Image and Art on Tezos, Responsive Signals will be an evening of artist talks, demonstrations, and interactive installations. Jonas Lund and Yoshi Sodeoka will discuss Terms of Agreement, their commission currently on view on MoMI's Media Wall, while Nick Fox-Gieg will premiere a new interactive work created using Telidon/NAPLPS, an early vector-graphics format developed for networked communication in the late 1970s.
Kat Zhang, The Poet Engineer, will also present two interactive works exploring gesture, coding, and machine memory, followed by a conversation and demonstration of her practice. It's a lineup that should make for a pretty interesting evening, especially if you've been following the different ways artists in the Tezos community have been experimenting with technology beyond the usual digital canvas.
This will be the second of two events organized by MoMI and the Tezos Foundation as part of their annual partnership and is also part of the Museum's Open Worlds 2026 programming. So, consider this our friendly reminder from last week: if you're going to be in New York for Armory Week this September, put Responsive Signals on the calendar. You can RSVP here.
🔴 Now Streaming: Ben Elvidge | metals.io
We opened this week's Baking Sheet with metals.io making its way into the Financial Times, so it feels fitting to close by going back to a conversation that explored the thinking behind the platform before this latest attention arrived.
In TezTalks Radio 123, host Brandon Langston sits down with Ben Elvidge to talk about the evolution from Uranium.io to metals.io and the larger idea of making physical commodities easier for everyday investors to access. The conversation covers gold, uranium, and strategic metals, the infrastructure connecting physical assets with their on-chain counterparts, and why Tezos became part of that equation.
If the FT story left you curious about how metals.io got here and where the team sees tokenized commodities heading next, this episode is a great companion listen to this week's headline.
Now streaming on YouTube.
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