$1 Put Into a Gold Deal Brought Back Over $500
One $2 million gold deal brought in over $1 billion in revenue, more than 500 times its cost, and helped build a stock market giant.
Small Gold Mine in Nevada
Pierre Lassonde had a gold fund to run in Toronto and a small mining company on the side. He’d started Franco-Nevada with Seymour Schulich to look for gold in Nevada. Their early exploration projects had fizzled out. Schulich knew royalties from his years in oil and gas and thought gold might work the same way, so Lassonde asked a geologist they worked with to keep an eye out for one.
The geologist spotted a tiny ad in the Reno Gazette. A royalty on Goldstrike was up for sale. Western States Minerals was already pulling gold from shallow pits there, with about half a million ounces identified. Lassonde knew the area and went to meet the seller.
He and Schulich had figured the royalty was worth around $1 million. The seller needed $2 million. His bank had called in a loan and given him 90 days to repay it. Lassonde called Schulich in Toronto, and they agreed to the price. Another buyer showed up with a checkbook shortly afterward. Lassonde had already signed the deal.
Franco-Nevada was still a small mining company. Now it had a claim on a share of the gold revenue from the land covered by its Goldstrike royalty.
$2 Million Bet on Gold
The deal covered 3,416 acres around Goldstrike. Franco-Nevada would get a 4% cut of gold sales from the land covered by its royalty, after certain processing charges. It also had a 5% interest in net profits. The people running the mine would keep digging, and Franco-Nevada would receive payments as gold came out of that ground.
Back in Toronto, the young company’s treasury was empty. Lassonde had worked through the gold Goldstrike was already producing and believed the deal could pay for itself. The contract covered more ground than the small pits being mined at the time. Any new gold found on that land could add to the payments.
Franco-Nevada reported its first royalty income in 1987, just over $500,000. The mine was still growing into the size of the bet they’d made.
50 Million Ounce Discovery
In 1986, a drill hole beneath the Post deposit found gold much deeper than the shallow pits miners were working. Barrick bought Goldstrike and sent in more drill rigs.
Brian Meikle, the geologist leading the work, had a hunch that the gold went further down. One hole passed through 391 feet of gold-bearing rock. Another went through 620 feet. His team kept drilling and began to see just how large the deposit was. They found more gold nearby, including a deposit that would later be named after Meikle.
Barrick had a much bigger mine to build, and the deeper gold needed new equipment to process.
The early estimate covered roughly half a million ounces in the known workings. Years of exploration revealed a Goldstrike deposit later described at around 50 million ounces. Franco-Nevada’s royalty still applied to gold mined from the land covered by its deal.
Decades of Royalty Revenue
Pierre Lassonde figured the $2 million royalty might pay for itself in about six years. Barrick’s discoveries changed that calculation fast.
As gold came out of the land covered by the deal, Franco-Nevada received its share. Over the years, the Goldstrike royalty brought in more than $1 billion in revenue. That’s over $500 brought in for every $1 of the original purchase price. And the payments continue. Franco-Nevada reported $25.6 million from its Goldstrike royalties in the first half of 2026.
Goldstrike gave Lassonde and Seymour Schulich a business to build on. They bought royalties on other mines, and the small company they’d founded grew well beyond its first deal. Newmont bought the original Franco-Nevada business in 2002. In 2007, Lassonde and his team took a new Franco-Nevada public through an IPO and bought Newmont’s royalty portfolio.
By 2026, Franco-Nevada had become a global royalty and streaming company valued at roughly $45 billion on the stock market.
Our Participation Model
Goldstrike took a $2 million cheque, a mine owner willing to sell, expertise to judge the gold underground and a contract securing the royalty. Direct deals like that still take serious money and a specialist team. For most people, they’re out of reach.
At Ayni, we built Gold Units as a simpler way to take part in a mining-linked programme connected to an operating gold concession in Peru. Each Gold Unit has a set amount of mining-linked capacity, measured in cubic centimetres of material per hour. Tiers start at $30.
Gold from the operation is extracted and sold to authorised buyers. Its value, along with operating costs, royalties, taxes and programme fees, feeds into the reward calculation. Rewards become available to claim in PAXG, which is backed one-to-one by physical gold.
