The global mining market reached 1.64 trillion USD in 2020. It’s expected to grow to 1.84 trillion USD in 2021 after recovering from COVID-19’s impact. Through this supply chain, raw materials transform into the tools and equipment we use every day.
But as the world recently learned, a worldwide pandemic can have a profound impact on global supply chains. So can stricter environmental regulations and political or social unrest.
We can’t predict global diseases or politics, but even in the normal course of business we struggle to control our global supply chains. Poor and opaque supply chain processes disrupt supply chains on a daily basis, resulting in billions of lost income and higher costs. And the challenge gets bigger as supply chains get more complicated every day. Despite these challenges a robust and transparent supply chain management is feasible, provided we find new ways of automating our processes to create “one version of the truth” amongst players that everybody can rely on.
MineHub envisioned a solution that would transform the supply chain workflows and processes for the mining and metals industry. Its solution wouldn’t just improve the practical day-to-day operations – Once in place, this robust, agile platform would help users mitigate damage from unpredictable global disruptions, reduce costs and make more profit due to higher efficiencies and end-to-end visibility of their data.
MineHub understood the power of Private Data Collections (PDCs) that became available with Hyperledger Fabric 2. PDCs deliver critical functionality for bringing together a large group of diverse companies with differing needs and commercial interests and allowing them to exchange business critical data in a secure, private, and scalable manner.
KrypC saw the potential for enterprise level services with Hyperledger Fabric 2.2, and was working towards addressing the very challenges MineHub was looking to solve through its Hyperledger Fabric layer 2 platform, KrypCore.
Could a partnership between the two meet MineHub’s big needs in a short time frame?
Nearly 1.8 trillion USD of metals and minerals move across the world every year from mines, through ports, along transport lines, to processing plants and, ultimately, to the end users. This chain includes hundreds of companies making millions of transactions. Many of these still use manual processes—actual or digital—that require staff resources to process.
“I’ve been working in the intersection of technology and commodities for a while,” says Hugh Halford-Thompson, Vice President of Partnerships & Integrations at MineHub Technologies. “Large companies spend billions of dollars on their IT systems. And then they export data from their system, put it in an email, and then someone at the other end puts that all into their own company’s billion-dollar IT system. That’s wrong.”
It’s not just wrong, it’s costly. One case study puts the lost time processing documents at 5-10%. Globally, this equates to 180 billion USD lost.
MineHub wanted to create a decentralized collaboration platform to solve this problem. The company envisioned sharing unstructured data, like documents or chats, along with standardization to pull in forms and other structured data. These could be shared and managed with cross company workflows.
In the commodities industry, parties don’t always know everyone who will be involved in a transaction up front. For any transaction there are different parties, such as banks and insurance companies, who get involved. MineHub wanted to allow users to be able to choose who to pull into a transaction and when — sort of like a shared drive, but decentralized, private, and flexible.
There were two big challenges in creating this platform. The first was, could it truly scale? “I was less concerned about transactions per second than the number of users and the impromptu relationships between them,” Halford-Thompson says. For a platform to serve commodities well, it needed the flexibility to make unplanned, on-the-fly transactions between users.
His second concern was privacy, which was critical. “You can see how a sudden boost in visible communications between parties could tip off others that something’s up,” Halford-Thompson explains.
For the platform to do what MineHub envisioned, there needed to be a way to ensure privacy in a scalable manner. Unfortunately, that capability didn’t exist yet. But MineHub knew it was coming in the form of Private Data Collections.
“When MineHub and Hyperledger started talking about PDCs, it was still a bit theoretical,” says Halford-Thompson. “Once it got enough momentum, I became convinced that this was a viable solution to the sort of network we were looking to set up.”
So MineHub started its platform with an earlier version, Hyperledger Fabric 1.4. It started trials with clients, but the platform would never scale properly due to the limitations of Hyperledger Channels.
What MineHub needed was to upgrade to Hyperledger Fabric version 2.2.