Britannia Mining Aligns With Blockchain Technology to Broaden Its Commodities Trading Business
On 28 Jan 2016, Britannia Mining $BMIN announced the formation of a strategic alliance with Everledger Ltd (‘Everledger’).
Everledger is a UK based company that is capturing the full DNA of certified diamonds and uploading that to its ledger stored on the Blockchain. The ledger is immutable and functions as a secure, verifiable information source that makes it possible to track the provenance of diamonds.
Britannia is a natural resources development company that has shifted its focus from exploring to trading mineral commodities enabling the company to participate across the entire value chain.
Growth, efficiency and compliance lie at the heart of this venture. The alliance partners believe that Everledger’s proprietary ledger has the potential to incorporate tracking rough diamonds and possibly other high value minerals and metals from mine pit/shaft through to end buyer.
The collaboration of the companies will enable Britannia to further its growth strategy and support a vision to reduce risk and add greater transparency in diamond procurement. Verifiable knowledge of the origin of diamonds is particularly important for KYS - Know Your Supplier compliance.
Commenting on the alliance CEO Kenneth Roberts said:
“Our goal is to position the Company to leverage the best practices for our downstream sales business. This year we plan to incorporate innovative and proven technologies to address some of the obstacles we have seen impede mineral commodity trading, such as slow inefficient paper based systems, risk, theft and fraud. We believe that this collaboration with Everledger presents the best opportunity for us to embrace state-of-the art digital solutions to reduce risk and improve the execution of trading deals”
Britannia and Everledger will endeavor to consummate their relationship in a formal Memorandum of Understanding.
Mr. Roberts went on to outline the Company’s vision for 2016:
“At the dawn of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, our vision is global and it is focused on addressing trading bottlenecks that are systemic. We anticipate announcing new major initiatives supporting this vision as this year progresses.
Managing risk lies at the heart of trading high value precious gems and metals. Digitization at source could go a long way to add value to due diligence, fraud detection, custody settlement and title transfer mechanisms. Last year we demonstrated that we can source quality products. This year, our focus is on adding an additional layer of transaction security to augment our offering and potentially speed up deal closing procedures.”
