ASX: LIB  |  Gold Exploration  |  Guyana

Liberty Metals Ltd (ASX: LIB) has moved from transaction to execution in under two weeks, mobilising field teams across 180km² of granted permits in the fastest-consolidating gold camp in the Americas.

On 21 August 2026, Liberty Metals confirmed that maiden exploration has commenced at its Oko North and Oko South Gold Projects in Guyana’s Cuyuni Mining District. The announcement follows completion of the Company’s acquisition of a 90% interest in a district-scale package of 40 granted medium-scale mining permits covering approximately 44,288 acres (~180km²) across two consolidated blocks.

The speed matters. The binding option agreement was announced on 12 August. Nine days later, field crews are on the ground, mapping is underway and a 5,000-sample soil geochemical program is being readied for rollout. For a junior explorer, that conversion rate — deal to drill-target generation — is the single most reliable indicator of intent.

The Oko district has produced one of the most compressed value-creation cycles in modern gold exploration. Approximately 9.3 million ounces of gold have been delineated in the district, substantially all of it discovered within the last five years.

Read that last point carefully. The most successful exploration team in the belt took a multi-billion-dollar exit and immediately reinvested in the same ground. That is a capital allocation decision by people who know exactly what the district still holds.

The geology is the same story that has played out across the Atlantic. The Project is underlain by greenstone-belt rocks of the Cuyuni belt within the Barama-Mazaruni Group of the Guiana Shield — Birimian-style greenstone that formed part of the West African Leo-Man Shield before the opening of the Atlantic Ocean, and which underpins world-class gold operations in Ghana, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso. The difference is exploration maturity: West Africa has been drilled for three decades. The Guiana Shield has not.

Critically, the tenure carries widespread historical alluvial and artisanal gold workings that have never been systematically explored and have never been drilled at depth for their hard rock source. Small-scale alluvial mining conducted within the tenure by the vendor and local operators demonstrates a fertile gold system. Nobody has tested what feeds it.

Mineral exploration permits in Guyana are typically granted in blocks of 1 to 5km² held by private citizens. Assembling a contiguous package of any scale requires negotiation across dozens of separate holders — a barrier to entry that has historically kept large explorers out and left the district fragmented.

Liberty’s 40-permit consolidation delivers one of the largest contiguous landholdings in the district. It cannot be replicated quickly, and it cannot be replicated by capital alone. These are granted permits, not applications, which removes the single largest timing risk facing early-stage entrants in the jurisdiction.

Liberty is not running a conventional twelve-month assay cycle. The maiden campaign is built around throughput.

The program is fully funded. Liberty completed a A$5.0 million institutional lead placement alongside existing cash reserves, with every dollar directed at discovery rather than corporate overhead.

The board has been strengthened accordingly. On 5 August 2026, Liberty appointed Stephen (Steve) J.J. Letwin as Non-Executive Director. Letwin served as President and CEO of IAMGOLD Corporation for a decade, building it into an intermediate producer with operations across North America, South America and West Africa, and was named North American Mining Executive of the Year in 2018. He currently leads Mancal Corporation, sits on the board of Hess Midstream (NYSE: HESM) and chairs Cassiar Gold. It is an unusual appointment for a company of Liberty’s size, and it signals ambition beyond a single field season.

The macro backdrop is doing no harm. Gold traded around US$4,500 per ounce in August 2026, up more than 35% year-on-year. At those prices, discovery ounces in a permitted, pro-mining jurisdiction adjacent to a mine under construction carry a materially different value than they did two years ago.

Guyana ranks 9th globally on the Investment Attractiveness Index in the Fraser Institute’s Annual Survey of Mining Companies 2024. It is a stable democracy with a legal system based on English common law, established large-scale gold and bauxite operations, a rapidly growing oil and gas sector, and a government that has demonstrated it will permit and build large mines — Oko West received its final Environmental Permit in September 2025 and moved to construction within weeks.

Liberty has laid out a sequence, not a promise:

Each step has a defined output. The near-term catalyst is the first coherent gold-in-soil anomaly map across ground that has never had one.

As Non-Executive Chair Nicholas Katris put it, the Company has “wasted no time getting boots on the ground,” with an approach he describes as “disciplined and methodical.” Nicholas Katris · Non-Executive Chair, Liberty Metals

The short version

Liberty Metals holds one of the largest contiguous granted landholdings in a district that has delivered 9.3Moz in five years, is surrounded by a CA$14.9 billion neighbour building a mine next door, is funded, has a former multi-billion-dollar gold CEO on its board, and is analysing samples in the field to compress the path to a drill decision. The ground has never been systematically explored. That work starts now.

This article is promotional in nature and is prepared from publicly available disclosures, principally Liberty Metals Ltd’s ASX announcement dated 21 August 2026. It is general information only, does not constitute investment advice, and does not take into account any person’s objectives, financial situation or needs. Readers should obtain independent financial advice and refer to the Company’s full ASX announcements, including all cautionary statements, before making any investment decision.