‘Not a storage token’ — Vytautas Mackonis on ALCUM’s industrial approach to copper, yield and the future of RWA

ALCUM’s xCUP token doesn’t park copper in a warehouse; it tokenizes a 30‑day, hedged recycling cycle so USDC allocators earn audited industrial margin, not spot‑price roulette.

In any exclusive interview with crypto.news, Vytautas Mackonis, founder of Swiss-based copper protocol ALCUM, says that model misses the point.

Most “tokenized commodities” are dead weight, he admits. You get a token, somewhere there’s a bar of metal in storage, and your upside is whether the chart goes up before you exit.

xCUP, which hopes to rectify that, is a token issued by Swiss-based ALCUM that lets investors participate, in roughly 30‑day epochs, in the processing margin generated when the project procures, recycles, and resells copper through European industrial supply chains.

In his words, “xCUP is not a storage token. It is a yield instrument backed by an active industrial cycle.”

“Most tokenized commodity products offer static exposure,” he says, “you hold a digital claim on an asset sitting in a warehouse. The asset doesn’t work. The return, if any, comes entirely from price appreciation of the underlying commodity.”

“ALCUM is built on a fundamentally different premise,” noting that the industrial cycle of the product is paramount, given what they call epochs of commodities.

Tokenizing the industrial cycle, not the warehouse

Structurally, ALCUM flips the usual commodity logic. Each Epoch, investor capital in USDC is converted to euros, used to buy secondary copper from the recycling market, processed via a certified industrial partner, then sold to verified buyers. “The holder is not speculating on where copper trades tomorrow,” Mackonis says. “They are participating in the operational margin of an industrial business that buys raw material, adds value through processing, and sells a finished product.”

That makes xCUP feel much closer to industrial private credit or trade finance than to a copper ETP.
“The copper is not sitting still. It is working,” he adds, stressing that the tokenization layer sits on top of more than 20 years of metals trading and processing experience, not the other way around.

Copper is the first test case, but more assets are in the works, Mackonis says. The long-term supply deficit narrative into 2030 — driven by grids, EVs and energy transition build-out — is real, but ALCUM’s near-term focus is simpler: recycled copper’s cost advantage and relatively stable processing spreads.

Institutional-grade yield, with industrial risk

Mackonis points to four pillars they care about: regulated Swiss issuance, physical commodity backing, independent third-party verification, and a yield mechanism “tied to operational output rather than market price movement.”

He lists feedstock supply and quality, copper price volatility, counterparty concentration and smart contract risk — and then walks through how ALCUM structures around them: long-standing sourcing relationships, hedging via StoneX Group to lock processing economics, audited partners like Mirada Levante S.L., and Halborn-audited smart contracts with zero critical or high findings.

On top sits an audit stack designed for allocators who actually read footnotes. SGS performs physical inspections of copper weight, grade and custody at Epoch boundaries; ALCUM’s smart contracts record NAV inputs on-chain against Chainlink LME price feeds; and Accountable runs a parallel, zero-knowledge–reconciled verification of procurement, processing and sales documentation within 30 days of each Epoch close.

For Mackonis, copper is just the start. “The architecture was designed to be replicable,” he says — a modular template for tokenized industrial assets that can meet institutional due diligence and deliver “verifiable, audited yield from real-world operations,” even when the commodity price tape is moving the wrong way.

“The larger opportunity is demonstrating, with copper, that tokenized industrial assets can meet genuine institutional due diligence standards and deliver verifiable, audited yield from real-world operations,” Mackonis adds.

“If we establish that credibility with copper — a well-understood, high-demand commodity with a clear industrial supply chain — the template becomes applicable to other commodities and industrial cycles where the same structural advantages apply.”