Who is buying 50,000 thermal lenses from LightPath $LPTH On Tuesday @lightpathtech announced an order for more than 50,000 optical assemblies for drone camera systems from an unnamed “key defense customer”, with no value disclosed. My day job is advising Australian defence and advanced materials companies on getting into US defence supply chains, and from that seat this reads as a beachhead order, the first public proof that a major buyer trusts LightPath with a production line rather than a qualification lot. In this deep dive article I cover * Working through every candidate, from Leonardo DRS and Teledyne FLIR to Neros, Anduril and LightPath’s original European FPV customer, with the evidence for and against each * Why I think the buyer is a camera maker rather than a drone maker, and why that’s the better outcome for LightPath * Putting a range on what the order could be worth (roughly USD $5–$10M) and size it against FY26 revenue and backlog * Laying out what happens next if it’s DRS, whose 50,000-camera Tenum Orbit agreement from July lines up almost exactly * Mapping how LightPath now controls its own stack, from the glass it melts through to finished cameras and seekers The unit count is the story, as this is the first time Drone Dominance scale volume has shown up in a single LightPath order. A second order from this customer is what would turn it into a run rate, and I’ll be watching for it. Full article link in the first comment - enjoy. 🫦

Following the Scrap China says recycling already supplies 10% of its rare earths, and it's now cutting duties to pull Western scrap back in. My new piece on why the West can't build an independent rare earth supply chain without recycling what it already has • Ex-China magnet production is 20-25k tonnes against ~250k tonnes of global demand, and the US makes almost no dysprosium • North American dysprosium oxide sits at roughly 12x the Chinese domestic price, which is what makes Western recycling pay • The US has already started keeping its battery scrap at home • The five things I screen for in the companies that carry this trade, and why $ION.AX @IondriveASX fits • The near term catalysts, with the 5t North American campaign and pilot plant both landing this quarter Full article in comment section (free) enjoy 🫦

Metallium and Traxys - why the MOU matters I've written up what today's Traxys MOU means for @Metallium_MTM • Who Traxys is and how it has backed producers like EQ Resources, Arafura and NioCorp • Why offtake and prepayment matter for funding the scale up • How it fits with Gator Point, Glencore and Indium • The terms, and the 31 December date I'm watching Full article in the first comment $MTM $MTM.AX $MTLMY Disclosure: I'm a paid strategic adviser to Metallium.