You've written the answer there right in your post. Both titanium and iridium are metals. Iridium is 6 times more expensive than gold. Panasonic need to deposit these metals on top of the silicon wafer to manufacture their reram.
Panasonic make one microcntroller with their reram for low power applications. At 40nm. As per UMC. The only advantage their reram appears to has over flash is lower power.
FYI 8/16/BIt micros - the embedded space wbt is initially targeting - store the firmware on flash. Smaller micros fetch execute code directly from flash which is a big speed limiting factor. Also at 40nm with many masks Flash is a front end of line process and can't go smaller. Wbt reram can go smaller and run much much faster. With wbt reram reram these micros could run 1000 times faster at no increase in power and be manufactured back end of line at a smaller node increasing manufacturing yield. FYI I spent my entire 9 to 5 today coding and flashing embedded micros squeezing as much out of them as I can.
Cobi and Dadi have stated many times how well wbt are protected. We have the patents. The protection. The people. The know how. The head start. A fab. And a best in class product.
AIMHO but also distilled from the publicly available announcements.
WBT Price at posting:
$3.19 Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)