Arnoud Star Busmann, CEO of MineHub and Carl Wegner, CEO of Contour join us in this exciting podcast to discuss their cross blockchain ecosystem collaboration. Arnoud and Carl share their insights on how to identify opportunities for cross ecosystem collaboration based on customer overlaps and data to ultimately build an experience that will delight the customer.

 What is blockchain?Carl’s definition of blockchain, within the context of distributed ledger technology, is a way of managing multiple databases and keeping that data where they overlap is in sync. You have a set of consensus mechanisms to manage agreements between the multiple databases, a communications protocol and a rules-based system for them to work.

Arnould’s definition of blockchain is one of a data infrastructure that provides a shared single source of truth that is distributed across an ecosystem. The responsibility for maintaining the shared truth maintained by a neutral, unbiased machine or machines. The data is owned by the data owners but the truth is controlled by none of them. The governance model of data is really the crux of blockchain technology and distributed ledger technology in Arnould’s opinion.

ERP 2.0, it’s the ecosystem resource planning, building the apps and solutions that create value across an ecosystem instead of just one enterprise on the basis of that shared data.

 Challenges MineHub addresses

In the mining and metals industry there are many parties involved in post trade management of physical commodity transactions and across general supply chains. The multiple parties have a tendency to collaborate and coordinate themselves via email, sending PDFs or couriering paper documents. So, by the time that information is reconciled and acknowledged to be true, the cargo is already discharged or financed.

There are a number of challenges with this approach in the sense that it is easy to manipulate, hard to trust for important business decisions making such as credit decisions, stockpile optimization, purchasing, pricing and compliance. The worst problem according to Arnoud, is that the valuable information has a tendency of being locked up in courier bags or boxes.

World Economic Forum White paper: “digital transformation is estimated to generate more than $320 billion of value in the metals and mining industry over the next decade, including $77 billion”

MineHub ensures that its users have high quality information, reliable information about the most important risks and opportunities in their daily work available in real time

MineHub has developed its platform on HyperLedger Fabric. However, it is on their roadmap to go multi-ledger because they have a requirement to have a single reliable source of truth with data privacy and data residents.

 Challenges Contour addresses

Contour was previously known as Voltron before they rebranded.

Trade finance is a very paper intensive industry where information is being couriered back and forth. Goods are arriving before the paperwork gets there thus making credit decisions harder to make or slower.

Contour focuses on one aspect of trade finance which is a letter of credit, which is where a buyer and seller have some trust issues between each other. The buyer doesn't want to pay for something that he didn't want, whilst the seller doesn't want to ship and let go of his stock until he's sure he's going to get paid. They both use their banks to act as intermediaries to effectively manage the trust. That trust is managed by moving documentation between buyer and buyer’s bank and seller and seller’s bank and back and forth.

Contour facilitates all four parties ability to see information at the same time. All four parties can join one ecosystem to support a letter of credit between them using one platform, an R3 Corda platform, instead of potentially four and Contour allows transparency and veracity of information between the parties.