Earlier this week, blockchain company Insolar announced a partnership with Canadian miner Uranium One to explore Distributed Register Technology (DLT) for the uranium market. The research project aims to enable improvements both in the supply chain and in the regulation of trade in commodities.
Uranium One is a unit of the Russian company Rosatom, the national nuclear power company, and is one of the best uranium miners in the world. Currently, like the rest of the commodity market, uranium is traded using paper. It is therefore ineffective and time consuming.
The majority of the world’s uranium is produced by Kazakhstan, Canada, Australia and Namibia. Due to the sensitive nature of the uranium trade, miners and traders must meticulously provide documents for cross-border transactions. Insolar said the blockchain could be an “ideal solution for providing a reliable and standardized format, including shared governance”.
“We
explore the potential that the implementation of new technologies
can offer in very specific areas of our operations, “said Fletcher
Newton, President of Uranium One Americas.
“A
blockchain platform with advanced capabilities can significantly
simplify trading activities in the market, responding to
security requirements of market players, “said Andrey
Zhulin, CEO of Insolar.
Based in Switzerland
Insolar is an open source blockchain platform and serves businesses
in the supply chain and logistics, energy, retail and automotive
sectors. Based
by a group of Russians, he led an ICO in late December 2017 in which
he collected $ 45
million. In February of this year, he launched his public Mainnet.
The company’s blockchain solution can be deployed as a public or private network.
Latest
year Ledger Insight reported that
Insolar integrated its blockchain platform with the
cloud
Microsoft and Oracle services.
The blockchain is revolutionizing the raw materials markets by offering a better audit trail and better compliance. It is also possible to symbolize the assets, and the Russian commodity company NorNickel intends to do so.
Minehub of Canada launched its blockchain supply chain platform for the metals and mining industry. The solution was developed with the support of ING, Wheaton Precious Metals, Newmont Goldcorp and others.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) has formed a mining consortium with Glencore, Tata Steel, De Beers and a few others. It aims to enable transparency in the supply chain and to develop sustainability solutions for the metals and mining industry.
And IBM has set up the Responsible Supply Chain Network (RSBN), initially focused on Cobalt, and includes Ford, VW, Volvo, Glencore and others.