Credits Blockchain and Mina Stones to support ethical mining practices in Africa

Africa is a huge supplier of gemstones to the world for jewelry, decorative, and industrial purposes: about 50% of the world’s gemstones come from Africa. Many know of Africa as a source of diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, amethyst, and others. Demand for these precious products from Africa continues to grow, but this only exacerbates historical problems associated with the extraction and transportation of such goods.

Mina Stones is a pioneer of Handcrafted African Fine Jewelry and a vertically integrated company that is involved in practically every step of a gemstone’s journey from the mines to the final consumer, in form of jewelry and accessories. Mina Stones sustains a close relationship with the miners, who are mainly in the northern and western parts of Nigeria. The company’s significant level of activity has spawned collaboration between other companies and stakeholders, including government, private sector (both foreign and local), and development agencies, with the aim of solving the issues plaguing the gems and jewelry industry in Africa. 

Traditionally the gemstone supply chain suffers from the following problems:

• Unethical sourcing (child labour, exploitation of labourers);
• Low consumer awareness of gemstone origin, caused by lack of access to information;
• Unreliable information about gemstones: easy to fake, hard to check.

Taking into account the particularities of the jewelry business, as well as the properties of the gems themselves (such as refractive index, dispersion, specific gravity, hardness, cleavage, fracture, and luster), it was extremely important for Mina Stones to find a complex approach to solving the problem. For this reason, Mina Stones decided to implement a blockchain-based solution based on the technology of the Credits company, thus fundamentally transforming the current supply chain by introducing mechanisms for tracking, validation, and complete transparency. 

Now with the solution, the gemstones mined in Nigeria will be traced through the blockchain as materials pass through the hands of couriers to the Mina Stones workshops. An immutable audit trail is created on the blockchain, which includes corresponding data to provide evidence of the gemstone production from mine to the manufacturer and eventually to the buyer.

This new partnership with Credits Blockchain Platform helps Mina Stones and the whole jewelry industry to achieve heretofore unseen levels of trustability, including the following advantages:

• Real-time access to gemstone data once mined. This helps Mina Stones to plan in advance, allowing them to work more efficiently.
• Accurate data about gemstones in handcrafted jewelry. Markets and end-buyers are able to access the data easily from the blockchain. 
• Proof of ethical sourcing. Customers are able to find all relevant information on the blockchain.
• Prevention of data manipulation and fraud. Mina Stones is able to purchase gemstones with a higher guarantee of quality, without risk of data changes by miners and shipment handlers.

“Our blockchain platform is a highly secured technology that provides a unique opportunity for a comprehensive gemstone industry to carry out full risk management procedures in the framework of the whole supply chain. Together with the Mina Stones team, we are proud to introduce this great value to our customers”, Igor Chugunov, Ceo & Founder of Credits

About Credits Blockchain Platform
Credits is an open-source and decentralized blockchain platform for the development and execution of smart contracts and decentralized applications. The project offers public and private solutions suitable for B2C and B2B markets eliminating the problems of trust and uncertainty. The peculiarity of Credits is a high-speed decentralized blockchain platform that provides from 50,000 transactions per second with a confirmation time of a single transaction around 0.1 second and low fees around 0.001 USD. The platform is intended to develop standalone smart contracts and decentralized applications.