Minery partners with Minespider blockchain to add traceability to its mineral marketplace

The Brazilian mineral commodity trading marketplace Minery announced Thursday that it will integrate Minespider GmBH’s blockchain platform to add traceability and improve efficiency.

Minery helps eliminate middlemen to make trading in mining commodities less complicated and more transparent. The platform does this by building a digital environment for small and medium-sized mining companies, in Brazil originally, to help them sell on the global market.

Minespider provides a public, permissioned blockchain designed for tracking supply chains of raw materials. It can be used to tag mineral commodities when they’re mined and inspected so that they can receive blockchain-secured digital IDs called digital Product Passports to track shipments downstream.

These digital passports can contain a great deal of information related to the raw materials including origin, composition, purity, due diligence documents, carbon emissions data and other provenance data. To provide traceability and tracking for the minerals, every time an event happens it is recorded to the blockchain including exchanges between producers and distributors, transfers between warehouses and similar events.

Minery developed its own certification standard called Certimine that ensures mines comply with international standards. This includes the use of protective equipment, lack of environmental contamination, machinery and permits that can be verified by Minery technicians onsite as part of the certification process. All mineral producers featured on the marketplace can track the origin of their minerals and the conditions under which they were produced with this certification.

“We believe that traceability is part of the future we are building, adding value to miners who work sustainably, respecting the environment and the people involved,” said Minery co-founder and Chief Executive Eduardo Gama. “With Minespider’s blockchain technology and Minery’s certification process, everyone will be able to know where their everyday metals came from and under what conditions they were produced.”

Minespider previously partnered with Volkswagen to ethically source minerals for automotive batteries using similar blockchain capability along mineral supply chains. Other examples of blockchain technology being used for minerals include the Tradewind Markets Inc. Origins platform for precious metals and automaker Ford Motor Co.’s partnership with IBM Corp. to track cobalt used in electric car batteries.

Through this partnership, Minery can also now benefit from Minespider’s application programming interface and build on top of its blockchain. As a result, it could add blockchain records to existing software applications or business processes, and design new business models.

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