Bullet Vault Launches as a New Ammunition Buying, Storage, and Payment Platform

Buying and holding physical assets as a hedge against inflation has long been one of the ways people protect what they own. Those assets — silver and gold coins or bars — have have their own intrinsic value. You only have to watch the Fox News Channel for about seven minutes at any point during the day to know there’s a large market for these kinds of investments.

Ammunition is another physical asset that has its own intrinsic value. The problem is, the average person has only so much room to store and hold ammo. Worse still, if and when they want to convert some or all of it to cash — rather that converting it to noise — the process is more than a little cumbersome.

Bullet Vault is a new venture created by gun industry people who have set out to solve those and other problems that come with buying and storing your own ammunition.

Clay Tippins is the majority owner of a couple of gun companies you know, Primary Weapons Systems and Lone Wolf Arms. He’s spent the last year or so building Bullet Vault in order to meet gun owners’ needs and solve some very specific problems.

Tippins tells SNW he had four goals when he set out to build Bullet Vault . . .

1. He wanted to create an e-commerce platform for buying ammo and other gear.
2. He wanted to give individuals the ability to buy and sell physical ammunition, using it as liquid reserves and a hedge against inflation.
3. He wanted the platform to have Venmo-style payment capability where depositors customers could use their accounts to pay others.
4. He wanted the platform to grow into a full-blown transaction processing system for retailers with lower fees that Visa and Mastercard and no threat of cancellation or transaction tracking by banks.

First, Bullet Vault allows anyone (who’s legally able) to buy and store ammunition. Tippins has built “know your customer” identity verification into the Bullet Vault system to ensure security.

The standard Bullet Vault medium of exchange is American-made 9mm 115 grain FMJ ammunition. You can buy 9mm ammo on Bullet Vault’s site any time, 24 hours a day at the current spot price.

As of this writing, that price was $.30 per round. Bullet vault continually scans scores of online retailers’ prices for brand name, American-made 9mm FJM ammo to keep its “BulletReserves” price current.

Think of it like a bank account. You can deposit or withdraw funds from your Bullet Vault account as you wish. You can make one-time deposits or schedule regular monthly payments to your account. The difference here is that every dollar you deposit with Bullet Vault is backed by hard assets…actual ammunition stored in Bullet Vault’s warehouse in Idaho.

Since there are hard assets behind every dollar in your account, that makes your Bullet Vault deposits a hedge against inflation. The value of your reserve moves with the price of ammunition.

Anyone with a pulse knows that ammo prices fluctuate, sometimes wildly. The bad old days of the post-Parkland and pandemic buying binges during which ammunition prices skyrocketed are well within living memory.

We’re currently in an election year when gun demand and ammunition prices historically have risen. America is also helping to fund and supply two hot wars right now, one in Ukraine and one in the Middle East. The resulting increase in the price of gunpowder has already begun to affect the price of ammunition. And then there’s the fact that the federal government continues to print money at a historic pace.

Bullet Vault is designed to give its customers a way to protect themselves against that.

What about security? In addition to the bank-style know-your-customer checks built into the system, Bullet Vault is built on secure blockchain technology. That means that as long as you have your 12-digit account identifier, you — and only you — have access to your account.

Bullet Vault also makes your deposit exchangeable. Your deposit may be priced on and backed by 9mm 115 grain FMJ, but the cash value can be converted to a range of other calibers. If you want to withdraw some or all of your deposit in .22LR, 5.56, 300 Blackout, or OO buckshot, you can do that.

That kind of fungibility makes your deposit a liquid reserve that you can convert to other calibers and have delivered too your door. Or you can withdraw it as cash based on the current 9mm spot price.

But wait, Tippins tells us there’s more.

Bullet Vault can also be used as a payment system. Let’s say your Bullet Vault account is currently valued at $1000 and you want to pay someone $200 for something. You can transfer that amount to your friend instantly through the Bullet Vault platform. If the other person isn’t a Bullet Vault member, he’ll get an email letting him know he can set up and account and withdraw the funds as cash or let it sit as a store of value.

Right now, you can gift or transfer reserves (and their cash value) to someone else through the Bullet Vault system. The work needed to make Bullet Vault a full-blown payment system is still being done and is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

Think of it as a ballistic version of Venmo.

Bullet Vault has spent a lot of time making their site look and work like an app on your phone…but it’s not an app. The reason for that is Tippins and Bullet Vault have put a lot of effort into making their system as bulletproof (sorry) and un-cancellable as possible. An app has to pass muster with Apple or Google in order to be available to phone users. A website that looks and runs like an app doesn’t.

Bullet Vault is just being rolled out to the public this month. You’ll be hearing more about it in the weeks and months to come. Tippins and his crew will be doing a lot of work to expand the platform’s functions and features in the months ahead. That includes adding warehouses around the country to store more ammo as the platform grows and reduce shipping costs when physical ammo is withdrawn.

Bullet Vault plans to locate those warehouses in states that — unlike Idaho — don’t charge a sales tax on ammunition purchases. Bullet Vault’s Montana warehouse will be online in the next four to six weeks. That will eliminate the sales tax they currently have to charge when buying reserves that are stored in Idaho.

Tippins and company will also be building out Bullet Vault’s functionality as a full-blown payment platform so that, as the platform’s user base grows, they can sign up gun stores and other retailers to accept Bullet Vault payments just as they would Visa and Mastercard.

The difference — and big advantage — for retailers in taking Bullet Vault payments is there’s no bank involved that can be pressured into refusing to process payments based on their line of business (think: Operation Choke Point). There won’t be a gun store merchant category code, either. Tippins can also offer payment processing services with a lower transaction fee than retailers are paying to Visa and Mastercard.

So if you’re looking for a safe, secure way to buy and store ammo that also gives you the ability to easily convert some or all of your inventory to cash should you ever want to do that, Bullet Vault may be just the thing for you. We’ll be watching the platform’s development and adoption rate over the coming year to see how this progresses.