HashCash Consolidates Plans to Launch a Mineral Ore Consortium in 2019
Silicon Valley based blockchain company will be providing a decentralized digital ledger to streamline the paper heavy sector of mineral ore mining in Australia
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 2, 2018 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- One of the oldest vocations in human history will be undergoing an infrastructural revolution to calibrate the standard of procedure in the industry. Australia, the world's biggest coal exporter, and the world's fourth largest producer of coal, is gearing up to apply blockchain technology to give the supply chain in the mining industry a makeover. There are over 50 active coal mines in Australia, which in 2017 cumulatively exported 163.8 million tonne of coal, taking its export value to a new peak of $56.5 billion.
The logistics of such a mammoth industry is, not surprisingly, staggering. From the site where the coal is extracted, to the trucks that carry them from the quandary to the processing units, and then to the packaging facility where the coal is weighed, bagged and sealed. From there, the bags are sent to the distribution points where they are prepared for export. By the end of a month, the number of bags making its way through the supply chain tallies to hundreds of thousands, and the chances of losing track of or disarranging information is very high. Regulators in this sector have been troubled by this seemingly incorrigible issue, and have taken to blockchain technology to streamline the workflow.
The idea is to tag each bag with a registered number that would be permanently added to a secure data cache specifying details such as the bags weight, quality of coal, where it was packed and sealed, etc. That apart, the blockchain technology provides for the use of smart contracts and tokenization of the coal itself, reducing the paperwork that goes into taking the excavated material from one stage of production to the next.
A few coal companies are leading the way in this change and have superimposed their operations of tagging and tracking goods on a decentralized digital ledger, similar to the Ethereum network. HashCash, a company specializing in blockchain based financial solutions that are in use across several nations, is in the talks with a couple of prominent but undisclosed names in the mining sphere in Queensland, the region where 61% of Australia's black coal EDR is located. Their collaboration will hit the floor in the first half of 2019.
Raj Chowdhury, MD of HashCash, explains the attraction of blockchain in the mining sector, "The industry is very widely spread out, and has numerous participants and actors moving it along the line. A central ledger that is immutable, transparent, has no upper ceiling when it comes to storage space, and universally accessible, will make the system more efficient, reliable and more profitable."
Blockchain is an innovation that gained popularity because of its immediate association with Bitcoin in 2008, but has become the most sought after solution in innumerable industries looking to upgrade its security and accountability, such as diamond mining, space exploration, medical research, and defense.
SOURCE Hashcash Consultants
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