Cape Ray Shear Zone

Overview

Matador holds a district-scale land package with several projects located along the highly prospective, yet under explored Cape Ray Shear Zone (“CRSZ”) in Newfoundland and Labrador (“Newfoundland”), Canada. The Company holds mineral licenses covering 110 kilometres of continuous strike along the CRSZ.

The Company hosts a current mineral resource of 610,000 ounces of gold grading 1.96 g/t gold predominately in the Cape Ray Project.

In 2021, the Company flew high-resolution airborne magnetics over a 40-kilometre stretch covering the Cape Ray, Isle Aux Morts, Grandy’s and Malachite projects. Later in that year, the Company carried out an comprehensive gold-in-till early-stage program at Malachite that later revealed significant gold mineralisation in soils across the entire 15-kilometre by 4-kilometre project area.

In 2022, the Company’s strategic shifted to exploring Greenfield opportunities being one of the first companies to ever explore many parts of the CRSZ and allocate more significant funds to identifying new zones of interest that could host multi-millions of ounces. The Company’s initial focus was on Malachite with works also completed at Grandy’s and Long Range.

Over the past two years, the Company conduced desktop analysis of the extensive data from the Cape Ray Project including enhancing the quality of the mineral resource and confirming it with National Instrument (“NI”) 43-101 and JORC standards. As a result of this work, the Company identified several new targets that had never previously been drilled or explored. As a result, the Company’s strategy was further revised in late 2023 to focus exploration on both the Greenfields and within the resource corridor.

As much of the Company’s projects are covered by glacial overburden, the Company has developed a Canadian/Australian hybrid approach to exploration to more effective deploy capital to better understand zones that could host major deposits by sampling through the glacial overburden to source gold in bedrock.

High sensitivity geochemistry implemented for the first time at Cape Ray by AuMEGA in 2020 has delivered a step-change in our understanding of detectable footprints associated with the gold mineralised systems.

This technique has also been instrumental in facilitating quantitative classification of alteration mineralogy, alteration intensity and host rock types under the glacial till cover. In turn we are confident we can now significantly improve our geological mapping and exploration targeting models in this otherwise challenging terrain.

The pathfinder geochemistry signal includes up to 12 critical elements. The all-important intermediate to distal mineralisation footprint extends up to 100 metres away from a significant gold intercept and comprises low level anomalism in Bi, Pb, W, Cu, Mo, As and Zn. This intermediate to distal footprint is considered the key to effectively (and efficiently) exploring through cover, as it provides a much larger footprint that can be detected with broad spaced basement geochemical sampling.

In early 2024, the Company undertook a reverse circulation (RC) drilling program at Cape Ray, the first time it has been employed in Newfoundland. The RC program was focused on the major regional bend of the CRSZ through to the Malachite breakout structure target now named “O-2”. The RC program comprised 158 holes with an average depth of ten metres per hole sampling the basal till and collect a representative sample of bedrock.

The assay results from the initial batch of the RC drill program have identified two large, mineralised zones located west of the Company’s high-priority O-2 target (Figure 1). The MAL RC-01 zone, which appears to be located on a faulted geological contact previously interpreted from magnetics and mapping, is located to the northwest of the O-2 target. This is an area where the Company previously defined two anomalous gold and pathfinder occurrences in bedrock (Figure 2). RC drilling has intersected significant anomalous gold and copper from drillhole CRC0037 with assays of 627 ppb (0.63 g/t) gold and 1.99% copper only seven metres below surface and 224 ppb (0.2 g/t) gold a further metre below.

The results from the remaining 110 holes are pending.