Fastmarkets publishes a daily price assessment for cobalt, standard grade, in-warehouse Rotterdam ($/lb), which serves as the settlement reference for CME's cash-settled futures contract, alongside a separate alloy-grade assessment and twice-weekly cobalt sulfate, 20.5% Co basis, exw China (yuan/tonne) and daily cobalt hydroxide, 30% Co min, CIF China ($/lb) assessments (Fastmarkets, Cobalt Price Data). Prices have been extremely volatile: Fastmarkets' standard-grade Rotterdam assessment fell as low as $12.60–14.80 per lb in 2025 amid oversupply, before a Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) export ban drove prices up 100% to $22.03 per lb over six months, and by early January 2026 the assessment had climbed further to $24.75–25.65 per lb (Center for Strategic and International Studies, Stabilizing Cobalt Markets, 12 Oct 2025; Meltwater, Fastmarkets cobalt pricing digest, 12 Jan 2026). Fastmarkets has also amended its standard-grade brand composition and sulfate specifications multiple times over the past several years to keep pace with shifting trade flows between Rotterdam, China, and DRC-linked intermediate products (Fastmarkets, cobalt standard-grade brands amendment, 16 Apr 2025).
CME Group launched cash-settled Cobalt Metal (Fastmarkets) futures in December 2020, sized at 2,204.62 lb (one metric tonne) per contract and settled against the monthly average of Fastmarkets' standard-grade Rotterdam assessment, with no physical delivery (CME Group, Cobalt Metal (Fastmarkets) Overview). By contrast, the LME Cobalt (Fastmarkets MB) contract, first launched in 2010 and relaunched with a cash-settled cobalt contract in 2019, has struggled for liquidity from the outset: LME open interest on its physically deliverable contract collapsed to just 13 tonnes by late 2022, down from roughly 800 tonnes in December 2018, while its cash-settled cobalt contract had not traded at all since launch as of late 2022 (Investing.com, CME cobalt contract use soars above LME, 1 Dec 2022). One industry estimate of 2025 volume splits put roughly 80% of financial and physical cobalt activity in OTC/physical trade against Fastmarkets assessments, 17% in CME's cash-settled futures, and just 3% in the LME's listed contract — a stark illustration of where real price discovery actually happens (Commodities 101, Cobalt Market Structure, Morgan Downey). Even CME's more successful contract remains thin in absolute terms, with open interest measured in the low thousands of contracts, dominated by trade houses, cathode producers, and automakers hedging term exposure rather than speculative flow (Commodities 101, Cobalt Market Structure, Morgan Downey). Fastmarkets separately confirmed plans to launch new cash-settled lithium, spodumene, and cobalt contracts with ICE, extending price-reporting-agency-referenced derivatives further across the battery-metals complex (Fastmarkets, ICE cash-settled contracts announcement, 24 Apr 2025).
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is by far the world's dominant cobalt source, accounting for an estimated 73% of world mine production in 2025 according to the US Geological Survey, following a 76% share in 2024 per the Cobalt Institute's own market report (USGS, Mineral Commodity Summaries — Cobalt, Feb 2026; Cobalt Institute, Cobalt Market Report 2024). Nearly all of this output is a byproduct of copper mining on the Katanga copperbelt rather than primary cobalt mining, and the DRC also holds an estimated 55% of global cobalt reserves (Commodities 101, Cobalt Market Structure, Morgan Downey). Refining is separately concentrated in China, which controls roughly 80% of global cobalt refining capacity even though it mines almost none of the raw material itself — meaning the DRC-to-China corridor represents the single most consequential chokepoint in the entire battery-metals supply chain (Ti22 Strategies, The DRC Cobalt Paradox, 24 Feb 2026). The DRC government's export-quota regime, which authorized only 18,000 metric tonnes for export in the final months of 2025 before stepping up to 96,600 metric tonnes per year for 2026 and 2027, has become a direct policy lever on global cobalt prices (Ti22 Strategies, The DRC Cobalt Paradox, 24 Feb 2026).
Beyond the thin-liquidity problem described above, cobalt carries an ESG risk profile that gold, silver, and even lithium do not: roughly 30% of DRC cobalt output is mined artisanally, and artisanal, small-scale mining (ASM) in the DRC has been repeatedly linked to child labor and unsafe working conditions, drawing sustained scrutiny from the Enforcement Investigation Agency, the World Bank, and downstream buyers including Apple, Samsung, and major automakers (CORP 2025 conference paper, DRC Cobalt Supply Analysis; Environmental Investigation Agency, Toxic Transition: Cobalt Mining in the DRC). A gold-style token model — one troy ounce, one bar, one vault, one custodian — simply does not translate to a commodity where the critical due-diligence question is not “is the metal real” but “which mine, which mining method, and under what labor conditions did this material originate.” Any credible cobalt-backed token would need to embed a full chain-of-custody verification layer tracing material from mine to refinery to token issuance — a materially harder engineering and compliance problem than sourcing LBMA Good Delivery gold bars from a handful of accredited refiners. This is precisely the gap that responsible-sourcing frameworks such as the RMI Cobalt Refiner Standard and RCS-M pilots (detailed in Section 2) are trying to solve, and any future tokenization effort would almost certainly need to build directly on top of that verification infrastructure rather than around it.
The Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI), part of the Responsible Business Alliance, operates a Cobalt Refiner Supply Chain Due Diligence Standard that assesses cobalt refiners against OECD due-diligence guidance, publishing a public list of Conformant Cobalt Refiners that downstream electronics and automotive buyers can reference directly in their own sourcing policies (RMI, Conformant Cobalt Refiners List). RMI has separately worked with the Responsible Cobalt Initiative (RCI) to publish revised versions of this refiner-level standard, and with the DRC's Ministry of Mines to pilot a dedicated ASM Cobalt Criteria framework specifically designed for artisanal and small-scale mining sites, informed by the Global Battery Alliance's multi-stakeholder consultation process (Responsible Business Alliance, RMI and RCI Revised Cobalt Refiner Standard; Fair Cobalt Alliance, 2022 Annual Report). This refiner-level, RMI-verified conformance list is the closest existing analogue to the LBMA's Good Delivery refiner list that underpins gold tokenization — any future cobalt token issuer would almost certainly need to source exclusively from RMI-conformant refiners to make a credible ESG claim to institutional buyers.
The Fair Cobalt Alliance (FCA), working alongside RCI and RMI, has developed a holistic environmental, social, and governance framework for artisanal cobalt operations, and has pivoted toward a “cobalt credit scheme” designed to connect downstream buyers with upstream artisanal production while channeling investment into mine-site improvement plans with clear, time-bound milestones (Fair Cobalt Alliance, FCA Quarterly Q2 2023; Signify, Fair Cobalt Alliance Summary). Separately, an early blockchain traceability pilot — first reported by Reuters in 2018 — set out to tag each sealed bag of cobalt from an approved artisanal miner with a digital record logged at every step from mine to smelter, creating an unalterable custody trail intended to verify the absence of child labor in phones and EV batteries (Reuters, Blockchain to Track Congo's Cobalt, 2 Feb 2018). A more recent, commercially deployed version of this concept is Circulor's blockchain traceability platform, used by automakers including Volvo and Tesla to assign each batch of cobalt a digital identity at the point of extraction and track it through smelting, manufacturing, and assembly (Sustainability Directory, Blockchain Traceability in Renewable Supply Chains). Glencore separately piloted Re|Source, a blockchain-based end-to-end cobalt traceability platform integrating ICMM, RMI, IRMA, and the Cobalt Industry Responsible Assessment Framework (CIRAF) standards across its EV supply chain partners (Glencore, Re|Source Blockchain Traceability Pilot). These pilots demonstrate the technical feasibility of exactly the kind of mine-to-token custody chain a cobalt-backed digital asset would require, even though none has yet been extended into a tradeable financial token.
The Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA) conducts independent, third-party site-level audits against a 400-plus-requirement standard, assigning mines one of four achievement levels — IRMA Transparency, IRMA 50, IRMA 75, or IRMA 100 — based on performance across business integrity, social responsibility, environmental responsibility, and positive-legacy planning (IRMA, Assessment Overview). In September and November 2025, independent auditor ERM CVS conducted on-site IRMA assessment visits at the Tenke Fungurume Mining (TFM) copper-cobalt operation in DRC's Lualaba Province — one of the DRC's largest cobalt-producing assets — with results to be published on IRMA's public audit page once finalized (IRMA, TFM Audit Announcement, Africa Archives). RCS Global separately worked with Mercedes-Benz starting in 2020 to review specific DRC cobalt mines against a subset of the IRMA Standard as a first step toward full third-party audits, part of Mercedes-Benz's stated goal of exclusively sourcing cobalt and lithium from IRMA-certified mines (RCS Global, IRMA Standard Expansion with Mercedes-Benz, 12 Nov 2023). Public, auditor-verified, mine-level IRMA scores are exactly the kind of granular, source-attributable data a tokenization structure could hard-code into issuance and redemption rules — for example, restricting token backing to only IRMA 75-or-above sites.
The EU's Battery Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 requires economic operators placing batteries on the EU market to operate a formal due-diligence policy covering supply-chain risks for four critical raw materials — cobalt, lithium, natural graphite, and nickel — including a management system, third-party verification by a notified body, and annual public reporting (InfoDPP, Battery Due Diligence Delay Explainer, 17 Apr 2026). Amending Regulation (EU) 2025/1561, adopted in July 2025, pushed the original 18 August 2025 due-diligence deadline back by two years to 18 August 2027, with the European Commission's implementing due-diligence guidelines now expected by 26 July 2026, aligned with the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive timeline (InfoDPP, Battery Due Diligence Delay Explainer, 17 Apr 2026). Crucially, the battery passport requirement under Article 77 — which will require digitally recorded, traceable supply-chain data for every battery placed on the EU market — still applies from 18 February 2027, unaffected by the due-diligence delay (InfoDPP, Battery Due Diligence Delay Explainer, 17 Apr 2026). Once live, this regime will functionally mandate exactly the kind of auditable, blockchain-compatible chain-of-custody record that RMI, RCS-M pilots, and IRMA audits already produce voluntarily today — creating a regulatory forcing function that could push the pilots described in Section 2 above from voluntary ESG initiatives into mandatory compliance infrastructure, and, plausibly, into the backbone of a future auditable cobalt token that markets itself on responsible-sourcing credentials rather than on capital efficiency alone.