Highlights

• Major commodity traders like Traxys, Mercuria, and Japanese giants Sojitz and Sumitomo are expanding into rare earth trading, bringing sophisticated financing and logistics to support Western supply chains and strategic initiatives like the $10 billion U.S. Project Vault reserve.
• A wave of new offtake deals since October 2025 is connecting non-Chinese rare earth mines in Greenland, Kazakhstan, and North America directly to Western processors, with buyers paying 15-30% premiums to secure alternative supplies amid Chinese export controls.
• An emerging ex-China market information ecosystem—including pricing agencies like Argus Media, intelligence firms, and platforms like Rare Earth Exchanges—is building the transparency and benchmarks needed to professionalize rare earth markets and support strategic investment decisions.

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In late 2025, governments ramped up efforts to secure rare earth supplies – and commodity trading firms are playing a key role. On October 28, the U.S. and Japan signed a framework to “speed development of diversified, liquid, and fair markets for critical minerals and rare earths,” including a complementary stockpiling plan. Soon after, Washington and Beijing struck a tentative truce, pausing new tariffs and Chinese export curbs (or at least the more severe ones), with China agreeing to issue export licenses for certain rare earths. This eased some immediate pressure, but Western nations kept pushing long-term solutions. As Rare Earth Exchanges reported, by early 2026, the U.S. launched “Project Vault,” a strategic critical minerals reserve backed by up to $10 billion from the Export-Import Bank. Notably, global rare earth element, critical mineral, and metals traders Traxys and Mercuria have signaled support as material suppliers to Project Vault, alongside New York-based Hartree Partners. The reserve – a public-private venture to stockpile essential minerals (from nickel and cobalt to rare earth elements like praseodymium, terbium, and yttrium) – aims to buffer domestic manufacturers against supply shocks. Traders’ involvement in Vault underscores how these once “hidden” brokers are now central to national security initiatives.

For overviews of rare earth element traders and brokers see REEx “The Hidden Hands of Rare Earth Trading” and “Rare Earth Brokers in North America: The Hidden Network Powering the Rare Earth Metals Trade.”

Major Traders Expand Their Reach

The rare earth trading arena continues to draw heavyweight commodity houses. Traxys, already a key rare earth intermediary, is expanding its footprint – even partnering on recycling projects in Michigan (aluminum)– as it aggregates supply for Western buyers.

Rivals from the energy trading world are also inching in. Mercuria, which formed an alliance (opens in a new tab) with critical-metals investor TechMet, has grown an ambitious metals desk and is positioning to source and recycle battery metals and rare earths. Glencore and Gunvor have been evaluating moves into rare earth trading (part of a broader critical-minerals push), while oil trader Vitol has hired veteran metals traders as it eyes the booming EV materials market.

In Japan, trading giants like Sojitz and Sumitomo – already instrumental in securing non-Chinese rare earth supply since 2010 – continue to invest upstream and broker supply for the Japanese industry. For example, Sumitomo recently partnered with U.S.-based MP Materials to funnel American rare earth output to Japanese manufacturers. These well-capitalized players are bringing sophisticated services (financing, logistics, hedging) to what was once an opaque niche market. With forecasts that global rare earth demand will surge several-fold by 2030, top traders are racing to position themselves as the “Goldman Sachs of rare earths” – the indispensable brokers of a strategic commodity.

New Deals Link Mines to Markets

Since October 2025, a flurry of deals has connected emerging rare earth mines with processors and end-users outside China. In Greenland, Critical Metals Corp. secured a 10-year agreement to supply 15% of its Tanbreez rare earth output to U.S.-based processor REAlloys. This followed a similar offtake with Canada’s Ucore Rare Metals in August, bringing a quarter of Tanbreez’s production under a long-term contract for North American supply.

The Tanbreez project – rich in heavy rare earths dysprosium and terbium – also won a U.S. EXIM Bank loan indication of up to $120 million (opens in a new tab), reflecting Washington’s support for diversifying heavy REE sources. Western buyers are even paying premium prices (15–30% above China benchmarks—even more for some goods at certain times) to lock in non-Chinese supplies amid Beijing’s export controls. In the MP Materials deal, the U.S. Department of Defense set a price floor of ~$110/kg for NdPr oxide in an offtake deal – nearly double the China market price – to encourage domestic production. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley facilitated the MP Materials Deal.

Meanwhile, rare earth supply lines are stretching to new regions. Realloys (which is merging with Blackboxstocks Inc.) struck a partnership (opens in a new tab) with Kazakhstan’s AltynGroup to tap Central Asian rare earth feedstock. The plan outlines a 10-year offtake and investment to pull concentrates from Kazakhstan’s mines and “push it through a North American chain that ends in metals and alloys” – keeping every processing step in allied hands.

Initial feed is slated from AltynGroup’s Kokbulak project (Karaganda and Kostanay regions), using rare earth-bearing iron ore tailings to provide both light and heavy REEs, including terbium and dysprosium. Crucially, the material would be processed at REAlloys’ U.S. facilities (which already supply the Defense Logistics Agency), rather than being sent to China.

This kind of Westward supply stitching – from mines in places like Greenland or Kazakhstan through to domestic separation and alloy production – is a direct response to geopolitical risks. It also reflects urgency: China’s top source of heavy rare earths, Myanmar, has moved to ban rare earth mining from 2026, threatening to tighten global dysprosium-terbium supply. Traders and processors are racing to fill that gap by securing alternative heavy REE streams.

Toward a More Transparent Market

The historically shadowy rare earth market is gradually opening up. Price reporting agencies and new platforms are providing more visibility into non-Chinese rare earth prices. In December 2025, Argus Media launched a suite of U.S. rare earth price assessments, calling it a response to “new market realities” after China’s export curbs. This move – alongside Argus’s earlier expansion of its European price indexes – aims to establish independent benchmarks and reveal the true ex-China price premium.

Other media and consultancies purport to offer “ex-China” pricing benchmarks. 

Market participants have welcomed the transparency as a “vital tool” for manufacturers, with Argus noting its prices now “reflect the deep cracks in the global market caused by China’s actions.”

Ex-China Market Information Ecosystem Emerges

Asian Metal, Shanghai Metal Markets, and BAIINFO are heavily used for China pricing. But what about the nascent ex-China marketplace?

Rare earth markets are not only being reshaped by new mines, stockpiles, and offtake agreements—plus a race to build midstream and downstream capacity--but by the rapid emergence of information infrastructure designed explicitly for an ex-China supply chain. A growing ecosystem of data, pricing, and intelligence providers is stepping into a void long defined by opacity and Chinese-controlled benchmarks.

Launched in October 2024, Rare Earth Exchanges (REEx) is part of this broader shift, alongside established consultancies and intelligence firms such as ArgusMedia, Benchmark Minerals Intelligence, Adamas Intelligence, Project Blue, and Wood Mackenzie. Collectively, these groups are building the pricing assessments, contract intelligence, market models, and policy analysis needed to support investment decisions, long-term offtake negotiations, and government-backed stockpiling programs in North America, Europe, and allied markets.

This evolution reflects a structural reality: rare earths and critical minerals cannot function as strategic commodities without credible, non-Chinese reference data. For decades, price discovery depended on fragmented private deals, Chinese domestic indexes, or opaque trader quotes. As Western governments and manufacturers attempt to de-risk supply chains, transparent and trusted market intelligence has become as critical as physical production capacity.

Long-standing industry observers also continue to play an important role. Rare Earth Observer, widely regarded as an insider publication with deepinstitutional memory, has spent years documenting the evolution of rare-earth supply chains, policy interventions, pricing anomalies, and corporate behavior across mining, separation, and magnet manufacturing. Its historical reporting provides context that newer data platforms increasingly rely upon to interpret current market signals.

Taken together, these information providers are helping to professionalize a market that is transitioning from a fragmented, relationship-driven trade into a more structured, financeable, and policy-relevant ecosystem. As initiatives like Project Vault, allied stockpiles, and non-Chinese magnet supply chains move from concept to execution, the parallel build-out of market intelligence is becoming an indispensable pillar of the emerging rare earth order.

Exchanges and Contracts

The idea of adedicated rare earths exchange or futures contract is also gainingtraction in industry discussions. While no such exchange exists yet ex-China, industry voices suggest it’s the next logical step as the market grows – envisioning an LME-style platform to trade rare earth oxides and alloys in an open, regulated setting. Western policymakers are encouraging these developments: U.S.–Japan cooperation plans explicitly call for “fair markets” and talk of coordinated stockpiles, and the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act pushes for market data and buying consortia. All this is chipping away at the old opacity.

Investment Banks

Leading investment banks and financial institutions have increasingly positioned themselves at the center of rare earth and critical mineral finance as demand from electrification, defense, and renewable energy supply chains accelerates. Global players such as Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley are structuring multi-hundred-million-dollar financing packages, underwriting bond issuances, and advising on cross-border offtake and refinery deals that tie upstream mining projects to downstream processing capacity. Thesebanks are also backing dedicated critical minerals funds andfacilitating strategic partnerships between sovereign entities and private sector miners — effectively bridging capital markets with heavy industry.

In parallel, boutique advisory firms and specialists within institutions like BMO Capital Markets, RBC Capital Markets, and Macquarie Group have carved out rare earth desks to support juniors and mid-tier producers in raising project finance, securing offtake monetization, and navigating evolving regulatory regimes. Together, these investment banks are helping to transform rare earths from an obscure industrial niche into a class of strategic commodities with recognizable risk-adjusted returns for global investors.

Brokers and Traders Key

Brokers and traders remain indispensable in this transition. Even as more pricing data emerges and governments underwrite new projects, rare earth supply chains are complex and high-risk. The specialized brokers – whether giant firms like Traxys or niche players like G.E. Chaplin and Hefa Rare Earth Canada – are the connectors who arrange offtake deals, manage logistics and quality, and find creative ways around bottlenecks. Their role was highlighted during recent turbulence: when China tightened exports of magnet alloys, some traders dipped into stockpiles in Singapore and Rotterdam to keep Western factories supplied (at a premium).

Case in Point: Traxys

This Luxembourg-based trader has been deepening its role in Western critical minerals supply chains through several high-profile transactions and agreements. Most notably as cited above the company was selected as a procurement partner in the U.S. government’s $12 billion “Project Vault” initiative, which aims to build a strategic stockpile of critical raw materials—including rare earths and battery metals—bycombining private capital with a $10 billion Export-Import Bank loan tosupport resilient supply chains for automotive, aerospace, and technology manufacturers.

Earlier this year, Traxys signed a binding 10-year offtake agreement with Lilac Solutions to purchase 50,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate from Lilac’s Great Salt Lake project in Utah—representing 100 % of the planned Phase 1 production—under a take-or-pay structure tied to market indices, significantly anchoring future domestic lithium supply.

On the corporate finance side, Traxys strengthened its balance sheet in mid-2025 by securing an oversubscribed USD 1.815 billion syndicated revolving credit facility, reflecting expanded banking support and improved funding capacity to back growth in critical materials, metals, and energy markets.

Collectively, these moves expand Traxys’s operational footprint, position it centrally in U.S. and allied critical minerals strategies, and reinforce its role as a major trader and facilitator of supply for the battery and rare earth sectors.

Final Thoughts

Now, with strategic reserves like Project Vault coming online, traders are helping funnel material into those stockpiles and coordinate with manufacturers on drawdowns. In short, brokers are reinventing themselves in public view – from quiet middlemen into key partners for an emerging non-Chinese rare earth ecosystem. The past few months have shown a market in flux: new deals, new policies, and nascent transparency are reshaping the rare earth trade. But behind every contract and shipment, the network of traders and brokers remains the grease that quietly keeps the world of critical materials turning.