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Across emerging markets, access to growth capital remains uneven, even in industries with deep global demand. In the gold sector, micro, small, and medium-sized producers (MSMEs) generate around 20 percent of global gold output, or approximately $75 billion annually, yet face an estimated $6.5 billion annual gap in funding for equipment, infrastructure, and production expansion.
This challenge is not unique to gold production. Similar gaps exist across emerging-market industries across diverse industries where productive activity is strong, but capital remains difficult to access, slow to move, or misaligned with local realities. The Lisk EMpower Spotlight series looks at how founders are working to close these gaps by building practical solutions at the intersection of real economic demand and modern infrastructure.
The series highlights teams backed by the Lisk EMpower Fund, sharing the stories behind the businesses they are building and the real-world problems they are solving, with a focus on long-term systems rather than short-term experimentation. Each feature focuses on teams operating at the intersection of real economic demand and modern infrastructure, where long-term systems matter more than short-term experimentation.
The Lisk EMpower Fund was created to support founders addressing structural challenges across emerging markets. Previous recipients have focused on areas such as payments, financial inclusion, and digital infrastructure, building solutions for markets that remain underserved by traditional systems.
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- Lisk EMpower Spotlight: IDRX – Bringing the Rupiah Onchain for Southeast Asia’s Largest Economy
SigraFi represents a continuation of this focus, applying the same principles to small and mid-sized gold producers. Founded by a team with decades of experience across structured finance, specialist lending, and commodities, the company is developing a financing model aligned with gold production and offtake, designed to support growth without relying on conventional balance-sheet lending.
Founding Story: Identifying the “Golden Gap” in Gold Financing
The Problem: A Productive Industry Locked Out of Capital
SigraFi was founded by a team with decades of experience across structured finance, banking, specialist lending, and commodities, led by Stefan Allesch-Taylor. Much of that experience was built through direct involvement in operations across emerging markets, where access to reliable growth capital often determines whether businesses can scale or stagnate.
Over time, the team repeatedly encountered the same constraint facing micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises: a lack of non-predatory, fit-for-purpose financing, even in sectors with strong global demand. This disconnect became particularly evident in gold production.
Despite operating at smaller scales, MSME gold producers account for roughly one-fifth of global production, yet remain largely excluded from traditional capital markets, limiting their ability to invest, grow, and build long-term resilience.
Traditional lenders are often poorly positioned to serve this segment. Banks struggle to justify relatively small loan sizes, navigate jurisdictional complexity, or underwrite limited credit histories. Established mining finance models, such as royalties or streaming arrangements, are typically designed for larger, long-life assets and can work against the economics of smaller producers.
“The result is a clear market failure: a large, productive segment of the gold industry facing an estimated $6.5 billion annual shortfall in funding for equipment, infrastructure, and expansion,” explains Allesch-Taylor.
The Solution: Gold-Flow Financing Enabled by Onchain Infrastructure
Gold itself offered a way to rethink this problem. As one of the most liquid and universally valued assets in the world, with physical trading volumes of approximately $65 billion per day, it made it possible to design a financing structure based on production flow rather than balance-sheet lending.
Instead of charging cash interest, SigraFi structures financing around gold offtake over a contracted loan term, securing a fixed percentage discount on production. This approach aligns capital provision directly with operational reality, allowing risk and reward to be shared with producers rather than extracted from them.
“That structure lets us share risk and reward with producers without speculating on gold price movements,” says Allesch-Taylor..”
At the same time, broader shifts in the financial landscape created the conditions for this model to scale. Investor demand for private credit was accelerating, while onchain capital markets had matured to support compliant issuance, settlement, and transparency at institutional standards.
“That convergence created a practical opportunity to bridge a financing gap we had observed for years.” adds Stefan
Through its gold-backed loan notes, SigraFi has built a mechanism to mobilize private credit, deploy it into productive gold supply, and reinvest returns into a growing bullion treasury. The company’s mission is to modernize small-scale gold production financing in a way that works for both producers and investors, using structures that reflect the real economics of a segment where traditional finance has consistently fallen short.
Designing Finance for a Segment Traditional Banks Cannot Serve
Micro, small, and medium-sized gold producers operate in fragmented, often informal markets that sit outside the lending models used by traditional financial institutions. Many lack audited financial statements, long credit histories, or balance sheets that meet standard underwriting requirements, and the security they can offer is frequently non-standard. For conventional lenders, the cost and complexity of assessing these businesses often outweigh the potential return, particularly when production takes place in remote regions beyond traditional banking infrastructure.
These challenges have been reinforced by broader structural shifts in global finance. Following the 2008 financial crisis, large banks retrenched from smaller-scale lending in emerging markets as regulatory frameworks such as Basel III increased capital and compliance requirements. This retreat has left a large and productive segment of the gold industry effectively excluded from formal capital markets.
Where financing is available, it is often offered on highly unfavorable terms. Producers may face extreme price discounts on their output, in some cases reaching up to 85 percent, or be forced to accept high-interest lending that prioritize short-term extraction over long-term sustainability. These conditions trap producers in a subsistence cycle, limiting reinvestment and growth for both businesses and the local communities that depend on them, even as global gold prices reach record highs.
SigraFi was designed to address these gaps directly. Rather than applying generic banking frameworks, the company operates as a specialized non-bank private credit provider with deep expertise in gold production and supply chains. This allows SigraFi to assess risk where traditional lenders cannot.
“From a bank’s perspective, MSME gold producers present an unattractive risk–reward profile,” explains Stefan Allesch-Taylor. “Without specialist insight into gold production and supply chains, conventional lenders struggle to assess risk accurately and therefore choose not to engage.”
SigraFi bypasses these constraints through specialist, in-depth vetting and underwriting processes. The company works with established producers that have a verifiable track record of gold production, evaluating each operation on a case-by-case basis. Its due diligence framework includes independent assessments covering security and default risk, AML and KYC compliance, traceability, technical reporting, references, and in-country oversight, alongside on-site visits by members of the senior leadership team.
This approach enables SigraFi to tailor each financing arrangement to the local context, structuring terms around the producer’s specific situation and collateral to ensure agreements are both equitable and enforceable.
“We combine old-fashioned long-term relationship building with modern capital markets,” says Allesch-Taylor. “That’s what allows us to deploy capital into a segment that traditional finance is structurally unable to serve.”
Bringing Gold-Backed Loan Notes Onchain
When SigraFi began structuring its gold-secured loan notes, it quickly became clear that traditional financial infrastructure was not designed for the type of capital formation the company needed. Issuing debt through conventional channels is slow, expensive, and heavily intermediated, particularly when capital is raised in repeated tranches and deployed into emerging and frontier markets. Legal coordination, settlement delays, restricted distribution, and complex enforcement mechanisms all introduce friction that directly limits how quickly capital can be raised and deployed into productive gold supply.
For SigraFi, this friction was not incidental. It was a structural constraint.
“That friction isn’t just inefficiency,” says Zara Shirwan, Co-Founder and Director of Digital Investments at SigraFi. “It fundamentally limits how quickly capital can be put to work.””
Onchain capital markets fundamentally changed that equation. By issuing gold-secured loan notes on regulated digital infrastructure, SigraFi is able to raise private credit more efficiently, with issuance, settlement, and investor access natively digital and global. Processes that previously required weeks of coordination across banks, trustees, and administrators can now be executed far more quickly, with transparency and automated compliance embedded directly into the instrument.
Onchain markets also expand the potential investor base. With global, 24/7/365 access to capital and a growing pool of onchain participants, issuance costs are reduced while liquidity improves. For SigraFi, moving onchain was less about experimentation and more about building the most efficient capital formation engine possible.
“We’re putting physical, vaulted gold to work using blockchain technology,” Shirwan explains. “That juxtaposition made sense to us, and we believe the future of capital markets is ultimately onchain.”
This infrastructure plays a direct role in improving access to capital for MSME gold producers. At the center of SigraFi’s approach is its growing, vaulted gold bullion treasury. The company reinvests 50 percent of net profits into acquiring and vaulting physical gold, which forms part of the collateral backing its loan note issuances. This asset backing provides downside protection for investors and supports more efficient capital raising.
Alongside this, SigraFi applies risk-management tools commonly used in institutional commodities markets, including exchange-cleared hedging instruments, to mitigate downside exposure. The result is a debt instrument designed to meet institutional standards while remaining closely tied to physical production.
By issuing these loan notes onchain, SigraFi is able to access global pools of private credit and deploy that capital into small-scale gold production. This is capital that would rarely, if ever, reach MSME producers through traditional lending channels.
“Our goal is to make capital attractive to investors and accessible to producers at the same time,” says Shirwan. “Onchain markets allow us to do both.”
Turning Point with Lisk
SigraFi’s collaboration with the Lisk EMpower Fund came at a pivotal stage in the company’s development. As SigraFi moved from structuring its model to scaling execution, the support provided by the fund played a catalytic role in accelerating momentum across both product development and market engagement.
Beyond capital, the association with Lisk provided early external validation of SigraFi’s approach. The backing helped signal to investors and partners that blockchain infrastructure could be applied credibly to real-world financing problems, strengthening conversations across private credit and digital finance at senior decision-making levels.
As SigraFi scaled, what stood out most was alignment beyond the transaction itself. The partnership was grounded in shared intent around long-term impact, professionalism in execution, and a clear understanding of the responsibility that comes with deploying capital into frontier and emerging markets.
“Lisk understands that the next chapter of financial innovation is about using technology to solve real-world problems and deliver real economic utility,” Shirwan explains. “That long-term mindset aligns closely with our mission to make capital flows available where traditional finance won’t go.”
From a strategic perspective, this alignment has allowed SigraFi to proceed with confidence, backed by funding and collaboration with a partner that understands both onchain capital markets and real-world deployment. As SigraFi continues to scale its financing model, the partnership with Lisk remains central to expanding access to capital where it is needed most.
Looking Ahead: Real-World, Production-Backed Finance
For SigraFi, this is not about grand claims of financial transformation. It starts with a simple observation: onchain infrastructure now makes it possible to move private credit efficiently into parts of the real economy that traditional lenders have struggled to reach.
In SigraFi’s case, that means addressing the “golden gap” in MSME gold financing, unlocking value in a large and productive segment of the industry that conventional finance has consistently failed to serve. As financial systems continue to evolve alongside globalization and technology, structured financing models are adapting with them.
What is emerging is a clearer path for capital to flow into real, production-backed assets at scale. Models that can bridge global private credit into segments underserved by traditional finance are likely to define the next phase of financial innovation.
SigraFi represents one example of how this shift is already taking shape, applying onchain infrastructure to long-standing, real-world financing challenges. As these tools continue to mature, similar approaches are expected to emerge wherever productive assets exist but access to capital remains constrained.
Interested in building real-world solutions in emerging markets?
👉Learn more about the Lisk EMpower Fund and how it supports founders using blockchain infrastructure to solve real economic challenges.
