What a moment. What a moment. We're sitting here in an amazing market, and the secret in this business is to have a tier one discovery with an amazing group of shareholders and then front face a market like this. And that's the magic mix, and that's what this company has: Southern Cross Gold. We're listed here on the TSX and we're also listed on the ASX, so we've got the benefit of both markets. I'm very happy to be in Canada, where I spent most of my career, and the Canadian market has got its mojo back.
Like my peers, I have disclaimers, but because I'm listed on a number of exchanges, there's three pages that you can read later. The investment case here is that this is the best gold discovery in the space. This is a multi-million ounce 10 g discovery. On a hit rate basis, you won't see anything like it in terms of the gram meter hits divided by the amount of drilling. So I encourage you to go and do your research. That 10 minutes won't allow me to give you all the stats around this. We have 20% of our in-situ value, recoverable value, in antimony. It's one of the larger antimony deposits in the Western world. So we say gold at 80% will pay for it. Antimony at 20% will permit it.
Victoria had produced one third of the world's gold in the 1800s. It built the expansion of the English Empire and then was forgotten. There's 80 million ounces that have come out. Only just recently, in less than the last 10 years, Fosterville was the world's highest grade, lowest acid deposit. It's just down the road from us. And we came in with a thesis to find another one. Very different geology, less than 10 years old really in terms of understanding. So it's a new terrain that has opened up in the backyard of what was an amazing terrain and Victoria, California for gold production during the day.
And one other key part of the renaissance is that Victoria has permitted four mines in the last year. It is the best place to permit a mine in Australia. And those words haven't been used together very often for the last 30 or 40 years. But four mines permitted is certainly a very good metric to base ourselves on. We're going underground. We've got a decline permitted and construction started. That took four months to permit. So the mix of critical minerals and the way that it's sanitized mining for governments is quite an incredible thing.
We have a shareholder base that I'll just talk to you about. With that shareholder base and management, we focus on per-share metrics. Every decision around this company is made with share price in mind. So we didn't want to go to a resource too early before we'd determined what our footprint was between drilling. So we wanted to get to 3 million ounces at 10 grams, which we put out in an exploration target, and now we've raised the capital. We raised $160 million mid-last to start to drill it out.
The shareholders are Pierre Lassonde, who is the greatest value investor in the space. He owns just under 10%. Darren Morham and Kir Sakalof own another 10% each essentially. So that's 30%. Institutions are 25% across Australia, Europe, and North America.
This is what we're doing. We've got it fully funded. There's 130 million Aussie in the bank. We got a $60 million drill program. We've got 10 rigs today going to 11 in the next week. We've got 22 rigs that will be on the property by the end of the year once the decline is completed. That will be one of the biggest drill outs in our industry. The decline is under construction. I'll show you a photo in a minute. That's a $30 million budget. That's a kilometer long decline, and that will make drilling three times as fast. If there's only one thing I can complain about this project, it's that we can't get enough drill rigs onto it quick enough.
We're really going for it. But the decline actually creates drilling three times faster because we can get 24/7 drilling and more than double the rigs. We'll go into technical studies and a resource in Q1 next year.
And not forgetting, I was just talking about the fundamental value, building a project, and we're underway and going underground, but we can't forget about the market value. So a quarter of our budget is exploring the other 90% of this trend that we haven't even touched. A series of old mines — we're not that smart, we drilled under a series of old mines over a kilometer and found this amazing multi-million ounce 10 g deposit — but 90% remains, and that's where a quarter of our drill budget goes, to keep the market value increasing as we go through and develop this project.
Here's a picture of — we're underway. So it's no longer just an exploration project. There's a lot of dirt being moved around. I'll just talk to you about where it is. This is Melbourne. Magic Melbourne, they called it, because of the gold rush in the day. We're 60 kilometers from Melbourne. We own 3,600 acres of freehold land or fee simple land. We bought 10 farms over the property. We can develop for 3 kilometers south of the project where there's nobody, all on our own land. So that gives us lots of flexibility.
And here are our peers, Fosterville and Costa Field, about 60 and 100 km away. In terms of the crow flies, simply put, the orange deposits are the ones you want to look for. They're the supersonic deposits. We found another Fosterville in one of these orange gold fields. And once you find one of these, you want to go deep, because that's when the Cinderella zone starts. And that was the Swan zone at Fosterville. And that's what you're seeing in this deposit that we have.
Three minutes to go. I'm not going to go into the deep geology, but this is basically how you make a discovery and create a multi-million dollar company through the drill bit. What an amazing industry we have. So basically the deepest hole on this property three years ago was the shaft from 1880, and we started putting holes in. I focus you here just to the gray. Just look at the pink, greater than 100, and red, greater than 50 gram hits. And the discovery hole was here, where we had a lot of very high grades going from 3 to 500 m. And we infilled that over the years.
And now we've got ourselves to here just a month or so ago, and this is the footprint where we have 2.2 to 3.2 million ounces that was defined a year ago, and we've expanded beyond that, you know, into a much larger area. So keep your eyes on that exploration target upgrade as we infill parts of the system, building to that first resource.
An amazing, amazing discovery. And arguably, this is — perhaps for the scientists in the audience — an arsenic over antimony plot. The blue is when you're in the upper parts and you've got the antimony in the system, and the red is where you drop the antimony off. When you drop the antimony off, that's where you hit the Cinderella zone of these very high grades, where our plus 300 g hits are. You can see we've hit a lot of red here, but we're just starting to hit it in the other four or five parts of the system. So arguably this deposit hasn't even seen the best that's yet to come, science would suggest.
Now, I was just talking to you about this little square here, and this is the longer 10 kilometer trend with a comparison against Fosterville, which is just down the road. We are putting holes 500 m down beneath this as we speak. We've just completed one hole that's in the lab, and there's another hole being drilled. So that will show growth beneath that 1 km by 1 km box in the red. And then here are the old mines that we drilled under over that 1 km. And over 10 km you can see the rest of the old mines. So there's a hell of a lot of exploration to come. A lot of exploration optionality, we say, in this story. Nine kilometers of the 10 yet to explore.
The network — quite a detailed slide, but it's gravity and flotation, a simple standard flow sheet. And I stand here with my peers, and you want to keep it simple in this industry, and that's a simple flow sheet.
I mentioned Victoria, it is open for business. The announcement of our decline was made by the premier of the state as a key element of our economic statement. You don't see that very much in our business, in the mining business, let alone in this part of Australia. But it's a very supported project, and one that we're looking to build out the midstream on — not just create a hole in the ground, but from a mine-to-metal strategy. We are building this to build it.
The guy who built the mine down the road, Costafield, for 10 years is now on the team. We've got a CFO from Evolution. We've got Ian Smith, who is the CEO of Newrest, has just joined the board. So we are here to build this. We're not here to flip it. We're here to build it. You don't find a 10 g deposit, multi-million ounce, in a tier one discovery. And we know we're just on the start of this trajectory, not the end. So why the hell would you sell it? And that's the view of our shareholders, the best in the industry.
So to finish up: an incredible discovery, the strategic optionality of antimony, one of the biggest in the Western world. We're only just starting on the exploration path. We've got a jurisdiction that is open for business. We're fully funded with 130 million bucks in the bank, and between shareholders and management, we really all think like shareholders to increase that shareholder value. So thank you very much. I shall welcome you on the journey.
