A Fireside Chat with David D'Onofrio

0:04 Good morning, everyone. I'm joined today by White Gold Core CEO and Director David D'Onofrio. David, how are you today? I am great. Great to be here. How are you? Good. I'm well, thank you. So I got a number of questions that span from kind of your personal experience through to White Gold's projects. So I hope you're ready for a bit of a grilling. That's okay. Go. I have no other way. Perfect. So I know you spent over a decade in corporate finance with, as far as I can see, a good focus on natural resources. I'm curious, what drew you to the mining sector and what lessons have you applied to your

0:35 leadership at White Gold?

0:38 It's amazing. In Canada, we have this very sophisticated ecosystem for venture style investing. I think we see a lot of North America, but in Canada, that focus has always had a slant towards natural resources. Toronto, where I'm based, is the natural resource mining capital of the world. So growing up in Toronto in the corporate finance industry here, that's a big part of the industry.

1:08 We were very fortunate to come onto the scene in the early 2000s. I think that's when venture investing, international resource, especially exploration development type companies really became popular and there was tremendous returns that were made over those years. And the experience, the relationships, has really positioned us uniquely as Power 1 to be able to take advantage of those opportunities. So something we continue to focus on and fortunately been able to be involved with some of the best new exploration discovery stories in the world and through that you continue to learn, continue to make new relationships in an industry that is actually shrinking when it comes to intellectual capital and human personnel. So that's just increased the value of our experience. So it's something that I've been very passionate about. We've also seen the opportunity of how these new discoveries can really change the lives of people, cities, towns, and even countries.

2:04 And that altruistic aspect of it is something that's also been very important to us. And we have discoveries where they're now in full production and are some of the leading taxpayers in small countries and really has changed the dynamic of life for a lot of people. So there's a lot of different things. Obviously the potential for significant financial reward is a big part of it, but like anything else it's an amazing

2:30 opportunity to get to travel the world, meet some great people. It's something that's been very good to us and we continue to be very passionate about. That's great. I know both a CPA and an exec within PowerOne, you've got a good background in finance, which is one of the archetypes for sure that you see of mining CEOs. I'm curious, how has that background in finance influenced your approach to building value at White Gold? Listen, at the end of the day, you need to have a product that's going to create a return, right? So as an accountant,

2:59 that's how I look at these things. We are the principal investors, the largest principal investors in most of our investments,

3:06 or one of obviously amongst other larger institutions than ourselves. And we are doing this to be able to provide a return for ourselves and our other partners and co-investors. So, you know, a lot of times you may have a technical success. Listen, there's technical people and that has it more important than some of the other people on the team, but if it's fundamentally not going to be a commercial or financial success, you're going to lose support of the capital for that venture and future ventures. So you need to understand the prospectivity for financial returns very early on. And I think that's where my background can help in assessing some of these opportunities. Great. Now I know speaking of big players, White Gold has strategic partnerships with some of the big guys like Agnico Eagle and Kinross. Can you tell me about 1, how these partnerships were formed and what it means for shareholders perspective and existing at White Gold? Yeah, we're incredibly fortunate to have companies like that involved. These are some of the best gold mining companies and general mining companies in the world. So what does that mean for us as investors,

4:11 to be alongside those types of, these are some of the most sophisticated teams on the planet. So it really validates and substantiates our theory. When we put White Gold together, as your viewers may or may not recall, our goal was to own a district. This is an undeveloped district in one of the most prolific classroom mining camps in North America, possibly on the planet. And we believe that we were early, we were able to, with our team led by Sean Ryan, able to really crack the code and make several very significant gold discoveries.

4:46 And we currently believe that we're just literally scratching the tip of the iceberg here. And I think that our partners view that as well. These guys are so big, right? For them to get involved and to be passionate about something, the price, the size of the price has to be absolutely enormous. That's actually something I've really learned at Part 1 over the years working at Capital is that you want to be going after a very, very big price to substantiate the risk in this business. And that's what we have here. This is, I think, one of the biggest potential prizes that we've been involved with because not only have we made a discovery, have we had success, I believe that we're unlocking a camp and our portfolio is a true district scale portfolio. It's probably one of the largest owned by any junior in Canada, maybe in the world.

5:34 And as we continue to have success as the infrastructure continues to develop, I liken this opportunity to something like going back in time, being able to own this type of a portfolio in the Abitibi or Timmins or in Arizona 75 or 100 years ago. These are very unique opportunities and the fact that we are able to have this in a tier 1 mining jurisdiction within Canada is really the icing on the cake. We're not able to grab this type of land in some jungle or war-torn country is the absolute one of the best places you could ask to work and with the current sort of economic backdrop, I think the importance of minerals, precious metals, critical minerals has never been more prevalent to the investment community or the world.

6:23 So it's kind of like the perfect time and the perfect place. And those partners are aligned in that type of a vision and give us a lot of confidence in the opportunity that we see in the original thesis that Sean Ryan had coming from a mining camp to go and sort of follow up this incredibly prolific mining camp to see what lies beneath.

6:46 Great. I do want to zoom out actually and talk about that market environment a little bit as well. I know there's been speculation, you know, it's written about almost every day that increased M&A is coming into the mining sector, particularly among gold producers looking to replace their, at this point, kind of dwindling reserves. So I'm curious, do you anticipate consolidation in Yukon gold space specifically? And how's White Gold positioned for any potential strategic transactions? I anticipate significant consolidation in general across the mining sector. This is a cyclical industry.

7:18 We've seen a very significant move in the gold price. That's fantastic. Obviously, it brings attention, brings capital to the sector. For ourselves, that is not something we necessarily need to rely on to validate the prospectivity of our projects. I think we have incredibly valuable projects at significantly larger, lower, sorry, gold prices. But going back to the cycle. So we saw the gold price really start to move probably about a year ago. And when, you know, historically, we've seen those types of moves, the cycle has once the attracted, you know, a more diverse and broad investment community, that capital first comes into the largest companies. So those are the big producers like Nikko, like Ken Ross. Those will have a re-rating. Then the capital moved to the smaller producers, we've seen those have a rerating.

8:07 Then the capital move to kind of like the tier, like top, top, top of the new discovery type companies.

8:14 Collective Mining is one that comes to mind. That's something, you know, Power 1, we're very involved with. We're a partner with our assessment. Phenomenal team, phenomenal new discovery, high grade, enormous project. That's gone now north of a billion dollar market cap. Snowline Gold is another example. That's in Yukon. That's gone over a billion dollar market cap. These are true world-class generational type discoveries.

8:38 And then the next sort of step is to early maybe companies with maybe not as big, but projects that are also like world-class type discoveries in good places. And I think that is where the white gold of the world fit, where our deposit, our flagship deposit is over 2.3 million ounces. We're one of the largest in Canada. We're the fifth highest grade in Canada for an open pit deposit. And that's sort of that next step. So you sort of need to see that cycle play out a little bit. And I think we're just at the point where it's starting to come into these highest quality of the smaller explorers, which is us. Now we're a smaller explorer today. We've only explored a fraction of our property, but we've certainly led to those discoveries. I think it's going to lead to many, many more. So I think that's incredibly important. I think your comment was on M&A. Sorry, I got off on a tangent there.

9:28 But part of what draws the attention into that next bracket of expiration company is the M&A. And we've seen the big M&A happen. We've seen the intermediate M&A happen. And now we're starting to see the M&A happen amongst some of these top tier companies with the smaller deposit. Because Like you said, these production companies need to replace their resource. There has been a significant underinvestment in true exploration in the last decade. There are not a lot of high-quality deposits in good places.

9:57 And this dynamic, once the M&A starts, I think that's what really builds the FOMO in the producers, the mid-tier producers that are looking for a second or third asset, assets in good places and where you see valuation start to drive up. There was a M&A transaction announced today for a property that assets smaller than ours, I think the ticket price was over 500 million and the premium was over 70%.

10:24 That kind of, I think, gives you a sense of where this is heading and that builds on each other. Obviously, that excites the market. People want to invest and get ahead of that kind of stuff. So we're in this cycle. I think we're starting to get into that next phase of target investment, being these high quality juniors, where I think companies like White Gold for sure will get the top of that. We're seeing that. We're seeing the interest. I think my phone's rang more in the last month than it's rang in the last 2 years. So and that's amongst retail investors, institutions,

10:58 sales desk, everyone. People are now, they're getting it. This gold trade is on. How can I get ahead of it and position myself? And mining when it happens, it happens all at once, I think. So as you mentioned, your flagship project, I'm going to get in the nitty gritty here, has over 1.2 million ounces of indicated and 1.2 million ounces of inferred. I'm curious, what's White Gold's strategy for growing that resource further and what's the timeline for potential development there? So that just, you know, to put in context, that's critical mass now. There's probably maybe less than 2 dozen undeveloped resources in Canada that are worth 2 million ounces. So now you're on a very short list. The other thing you want to look at is grade. I mentioned before, white golds, our flagship deposit is the fifth highest grade open pit deposit in Canada. So we are true quality when it comes to deposit potential.

11:51 Now, what is it that we're going to do to help continue to grow this and advance it? So our strategy has been to demonstrate the growth prospectivity of our deposit, not by delineating the core body, but by finding new zones of neuralization in a small radius of proximity. And we've done that almost every year we're making new discoveries. And once we make discoveries, once we drill them, once we show there's some critical mass there, we move on to the next, with the understanding that if we, if and when we do come back or someone else comes back or a partner comes back with us, then we can easily continue to demonstrate that, you know, that

12:25 these things will grow and they will, right? They're open in every direction. And so I expect there's a ton of growth opportunity amongst what we've discovered so far. But in addition to that, there are still many, many untested targets within that close radius of prospectivity, many of which look very similar to the ones where we made our discoveries. So I'm extremely optimistic about the prospectivity for gold from that respect as well. And now at this size,

12:51 this is now coming to the realm of, you know, maybe it should be moving towards production, right? This is, this would lead to, I think, a very robust deposit. You know, we've done some back of the envelope calculation. Well, more specifically than that, this is a proper scoping study internally done. I think I had a $2,000 goal and it was coming off really strong results. We saw, you know, plug in the numbers where we are today, there's going to be an upward chart. So again, back to my accounting, I'm very conservative, I always sort of go from bottom up approach, I wanna take the most conservative assumptions possible and knowing that we were able to achieve the results that we saw from that perspective just makes me incredibly optimistic about the prospectivity of what we know and then when we layer on what I think can come with more work it's going to be attractive on a global scale. Awesome. Now I do want to talk about the Chris Creek target specifically because I know that the 2024 drilling showed consistent gold mineralization across multiple holes. I'm curious, what makes this target particularly exciting to you and what are the next steps there? Yeah, so again, what I come back to is our aspiration approach. It took Sean Ryan a long time to develop this. He's now seen what's worked, what's led to the discovery.

14:05 He's made the majority of the discoveries in our part of the district, and we're talking millions and millions of ounces. This Chris Creek target is almost exact analog to the target we originally drilled to make this discovery of our flagship Gold Satellite Pocket, which is on its own, that ore body over a million ounces, extremely high-grade.

14:26 This has a lot of similarities. What's even more exciting is its size. It's over 2.4km, It's open in both directions and it's on a trend that's over 5km long. If you look at the ore body we've discovered, they're all starting to wind up and they're on these large trends where we've made 1 or 2 small discoveries and they continue to be wide open and they continue to have other targets.

14:50 Probability-wise, your best chance of finding new zones of Gold mineralization are near-existent deposits. And now we're sort of testing within that sweet spot, within that envelope, which is why we're kind of so excited by what we're seeing, what we've seen as like a success in the past, where it is relative to our existing deposit. It's all really, you know, checking the boxes what can lead to significant discoveries. Awesome. And this is again, it's just on 1 small part of our property, right? What's even more exciting to me in this business is that pure grassroots exploration opportunity, and we really own the rest of the district. It's like going back to Timmins 75 years ago and making that first discovery, and people are like, oh wow, that's an amazing mind. And I'm like, yeah, well, now let's go do the work on Everworld.

15:36 300,000 hectic, that is absolutely enormous. And, you know, this is part of what makes White Gold just such a unique company. We are thinking extremely big here. And everything we've done has, in my mind, increased the odds of achieving our goal. We set out and created this company, Sean Rye, and we're going to T-Rocks and Power 1. And speaking of, I mean, it is really an enormous land package.

15:58 Given that it is so large, How do you prioritize exploration targets with a portfolio this big? That's a good question, and there's a simple answer, based on data. So we have a protocol, we follow it, we advance it, first we're based on soil geochemistry. Sean has been able to identify that as the key indicator to making discoveries in our district. We've actually now assembled one of the world's largest geochemical databases to identify these targets in our district. We've cherry-picked the best of the best projects. Once they achieve the merit that's required from the soil geochemical standpoint, we move it to subsurface testing, move to geophysical testing, and when all those check out, and only when all those check out, is when we start to drill it. So it's basically when it's ready, when the data says it's prospective enough to drill it. Good answer, data's probably The best answer you can give to that. There you go. I do want to talk about Yukon.

16:50 So I know the government there has committed $360 million to the Resource Gateway Road infrastructure project. Curious if this investment impacts White Gold's operations at all? And generally, what other advantages does Yukon offer to mining companies like you guys? It's like it's almost a dream come true. You know, you couldn't ask to be in a better situation. Most places in the world, we've always talked about jurisdiction, how important is, I think, in this day and age, you see more than any time before how important it is in the jurisdiction. A lot of places in the world you're worried about the government taking away your projects. Here we have governments that are putting in hundreds of millions of dollars to support the development of your projects. So it is an incredible blessing to be in that type of environment. White gold stands to benefit immensely from these investments.

17:35 Some of them are the end, be reminded that these are specifically to support the development of mining exploration. It's not just general infrastructure. Obviously, there'll be tremendous benefits to the rest of the stakeholders in the area, which is phenomenal, but it is for natural resources is so important to the Yukon. And that's why it's rated so highly every year as a place to do mining, exploration, development activity. 2 of these road systems will directly benefit the White Gold portfolio. 1 set comes up from the South, comes up to our Betty property where we had an extreme high-grade discovery 2 years ago. That's right beside Newmont's coffee deposit, which Sean Ryan discovered, which was acquired for $550M and is comparable in size and grade to our gold and saddle deposits.

18:25 The other road system is coming from Dawson at the North Bar portfolio down to that coffee deposit that I just mentioned and that come right through our portfolio. That will totally unlock accessibility to all of our projects and totally change the requirements for discovery to be economic. As you see the evolution and development of camps, that's usually what happens. The first few discoveries need to be very large to justify the investment in a mill infrastructure. But once that's in place, now all these new discoveries, they can be much smaller, 234,500,000 ounces. And you make the discovery, you just need to truck it to 1 facility. So I see going forward, a heap-league facility potentially at the coffee, a mill facility at our project, and then depending on the type of ore you're finding, you're within short trucking distance to being able to bring it to one of the others. So it's like owning a bunch of buildings and the government decides to put a subway line right down to your property package. You just couldn't ask for a better situation.

19:24 And we're very fortunate to be having governments that are that supportive of the mining. Not so true everywhere around the world. So it is good to see you. Now, I know we've talked about gold a lot because it's hot right now, but I did want to close by talking about critical minerals. Because I know that white gold's properties show potential for copper porphyry systems. Some targets have moly, lead, zinc. I'm curious how the presence of these critical minerals factor into the long-term proposition for investors. Why this diversification, I guess, is my question. The Yukon in general probably has some of the most prolific geological potential of anywhere in Canada. And it's also the least explored area in Canada. And we've seen the most success for the work that's been done in recent years of anywhere in Canada. So you're kind of, you know, the setup, it couldn't be any better for that. Obviously there's a tremendous amount of Gold. There's also a very significant critical mineral endowment there.

20:23 Contiguous to our land package is 1 enormous Copper-Corp free project called Xeno Project that's owned by Western Copper and Gold. It's got something like 20 million ounces of gold and 14 billion pounds of copper. And notwithstanding this gold environment we're in with gold over $3,000, 1 thing I continue to find interesting is a lot of investors still see copper as one of the number 1 investment areas going forward. Again, going back to what we chatted about earlier, there's just been such an underinvestment in the copper, like gold, like we said, but copper is harder to find. It's harder to bring into production. So when you have those types of discoveries or you're in an area that's endowed with that type of metal, that is an extremely valuable opportunity.

21:10 And for ourselves, being in the shadows of this behemoth of a deposit in a casino, that's a great place to be. But more than that, we've gone and done the work over the last 3 or 4 years to evaluate 2 very significant targets in that area and they've really started to check the box, to have significant prospectivity in terms of what we see in the storage of chemistry, in terms of what we see in the soil geochemistry, in terms of what we see in the geophysics as well. So these are areas that are now moving towards that being able to drill time, going back to your question, when you drill these things. And what we're going to do to sort of simplify the story a bit is we're actually going to isolate all these critical mineral projects because there's bismuth, there's tungsten, there's all kinds of stuff, antimony, you can only imagine. And again, we're just scratching the surface as we drill, I'm sure we'll find more. We're going to isolate that into a separate vehicle and spin that out to capacity. So shareholder of white gold will now get shareholders of this new company as well. Bit of a bonus for our shareholders.

22:09 But again, you know, that I think is what you want to be as an investor right now. I think you want to, you know, in this industry, you have a lot of exposure to gold, a lot of exposure to critical minerals. These commodities in general have become so politicized and those 2 are amongst the most highly sought after. So it's really, you know, we're really very fortunate to have that type of endowment on both sides of the commodity spectrum and continuing to have the support of a constructive market that's looking to seek this out is a perfect place to be. Awesome. Well, David, thanks so much. This was fun. Appreciate your time. No, listen, glad to be here. There's time information on our site. We're just really thrilled to have a project like this. We've made the great discoveries. That's beating the odds. That's your 1 in 10,000 type probabilities. We've seen what's led to that. We have this enormous land package where We think we've cracked the code with so much prospectivity on the gold side. And then this copper and mineral aspect is extremely exciting.

23:08 We couldn't be more optimistic about what's going to lie ahead of us as we're getting into the drill season now. It's a really great time of year for our company. And please stay tuned and look forward to coming back and updating you further in the coming months. Awesome, lots more to come. Thank you