Tag Archives: mineral supply chain

Minespider looks to scale blockchain platform following fundraising

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Minespider says it has raised a total of €2.8 million ($3.05 million) to continue developing its open blockchain protocol for supply chain tracking.

The money came from combined sources, including the EU Commission’s H2020’s SME Instrument Phase 2 program.

Minespider Founder and CEO, Nathan Williams, called the successful fundraising “an immense step forward” for the company and its “vision of a future where supply chains are transparent and sustainable”.

Minespider is an open blockchain protocol founded in 2018. As a team of 10, Minespider is based in Berlin, Germany, with operations in both Switzerland and Brazil. Its platform allows companies to create digital passports for their raw materials that keep track of where the materials come from and the conditions under which they were produced. The passports contain data that allows companies to verify that the materials they receive were produced in environmentally and socially sustainable ways, according to Minespider.

“Minespider passports separate data into three different layers, depending on whether the data should be publicly visible, visible to members of the same supply chain, or private between a company and their customer,” the company explained. “This allows companies to share sensitive transparency information with their customers and others further down the supply chain securely.”

Minespider makes this possible without a single trusted company running the system, using an advanced encryption system. This means that companies using Minespider retain total control over their own data.

Since its founding, Minespider has launched several traceability projects with industry players.

In 2018, Minespider partnered with Google to create a multi-stakeholder end-to-end mineral traceability consortium for the tin supply chain. The project formally commenced in 2019, with the addition of Cisco, SGS, Volkswagen, and Peru mining company Minsur (pictured at the San Rafael tin mine here), and has successfully tracked tin end-to-end and is now planning to incorporate new members.

In spring 2019, Minespider announced a joint project with Volkswagen to track its lead battery supply chain. This ongoing circular economy project involves two-thirds of the company’s global lead supply, according to the company. “Volkswagen intends this as a first step to employ blockchain technology for additional raw materials and supply chains,” the company said.

Williams added: “It has been an amazing experience to bring together so many industry leaders to work together on traceability. Now, with the backing of the European Commission and our investors we can scale the platform, bringing on many more participants who believe in the vision of transparent and responsible products.”

Part of funding came from the Horizon 2020 programme, where the European Commission selects potentially disruptive businesses to invest in and support as part of the SME Instrument. Minespider says it was chosen as a highly innovative SME and awarded ‘Very Good to Excellent (4.5 – 5)’ for all three key assessment criteria.

Williams said: “This funding shows how ready the EU Commission is to invest in these emerging and future technologies.”

Finboot and Minexx collaborate to improve mineral supply chain transparency

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Finboot has partnered with UK-based startup Minexx to help certify mineral production and tokenise credentials for improved transparency across the supply chain.

The announcement will see Finboot’s enterprise-grade SaaS platform, MARCO, combine with Minexx’s MineSmart mineral sourcing platform.

Finboot said: “With demand for electronics and electric cars constantly increasing, technology companies are coming under growing pressure to prove to consumers and regulators that the metals they use in these products are ethically and responsibly sourced.”

The company said a significant proportion of the world’s supply of cobalt and tantalum, both used in smartphones, for example, is produced by artisanal miners in African countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and Mozambique, where regulations can be “lax or non-existent”.

“Origin data from the mine site passes through seven stages from mine to manufacturer and can be changed along this journey, damaging its credibility,” Finboot said. “This is particularly problematic for EU and US companies, which are subject to legal requirements for traceability and responsible sourcing.”

Minexx’s MineSmart platform aims to address this issue by giving technology companies transparency on the mineral origin to avoid funding conflict or child labour, while also giving them the control to make contracts with the miners directly. “In turn, the miners benefit from a fair price for their minerals and access to mining equipment and life-changing services, such as electricity and insurance,” Finboot said.

Finboot’s MARCO platform, meanwhile, delivers blockchain capability within value and supply chains across the globe.

“By integrating this into its MineSmart platform, Minexx is now able to certify mineral production and tokenise the credentials, allowing these to be sent across the digital value chain to bring trust to the process,” Finboot said.

Nish Kotecha, Chairman and Co-Founder of Finboot, said: “The ability to verify products’ credentials and communicate these in an auditable, immutable and trusted way is blockchain’s core strength, and our innovative middleware solution MARCO can deliver these capabilities to the Minexx MineSmart platform.”

Marcus Scaramanga, CEO and Founder of Minexx, said: “Approximately one in eight people in sub-Saharan African countries is dependent upon artisanal mining, yet the industry is poorly regulated and often lacks transparency and fairness.

“By integrating Finboot’s MARCO technology into our MineSmart platform, we can now harness the power of blockchain to track and record mineral origin data securely. This mutually benefits both the artisanal miners who produce the materials and the technology companies that require them, and consequently we see a huge amount of growth potential in this market.”

Volkswagen signs up blockchain specialist Minespider to track lead supply

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Beginning in April, Minespider says it is to partner with Volkswagen in an initial pilot focusing on tracking the carmaker’s lead supply, working with suppliers and sub-suppliers accounting for more than two-thirds of the group’s total lead starter battery requirements.

Volkswagen’s ultimate aim, according to the blockchain specialist, is to ensure all of its raw materials are sourced in a socially and environmentally sound manner.

“In the automotive sector, like in many other industries, supply chain transparency is a major issue, and to ensure sustainable mobility, responsible procurement is essential,” Minespider said. “Minespider and Volkswagen are working together to make procurement both more transparent and secure. Blockchain allows participants to trace the supply chain from the point of origin to the factory.”

Marco Philippi, Head of Strategy for Volkswagen Group Procurement, said sustainability in the supply chain is one of the company’s top priorities. “We see blockchain technology as part of the solution to ensure compliance with environmental and social standards along the entire supply chain,” he said.

Minespider is an open source, public blockchain protocol that offers stakeholders the opportunity to track the origin of their raw materials and present a complete chain of custody from certified mine to end manufacturer, according to the company. It was originally founded to address increasing global conflict mineral legislation, including the Dodd-Frank Act Section 1502 and the EU’s Conflict Minerals Regulation, which require companies to know who is supplying their gold, tin, tantalum, and tungsten.

“With industry interest turning toward increased transparency, the Minespider team are also launching initiatives into other key materials,” the company said. “The public protocol approach is a departure from previous supply chain tracking initiatives that used private, permissioned blockchains. This avoids the risk of a large player with a private blockchain creating a monopoly on the global mineral supply chain. By using a token-driven design, they provide the mechanism for decentralising protocol governance.”

Minespider’s Founder, Nathan Williams (pictured), said: “Ultimately, we would like to see an industry-wide transformation, a public protocol that any responsible supplier can join.”

Minespider’s protocol uses nested encryption to ensure a company’s data remains private on a public blockchain, it says. Digital “certificates” are created at certified mineral sources, such as mines or recyclers, which are then encrypted with the company’s public key and posted in a publicly accessible database.

As mineral shipments are sold, responsibility data of the new owner is added to the certificate which is re-encrypted with the public key of the new owner, creating a layered encryption like a “Russian doll”, Minespider says. “This ensures that only the owner is able to access the supply chain data, even though it is in a verifiable, immutable public data store, enabling supply chain transparency without sacrificing data security.”