New technology traces Royal Canadian Mint’s gold supply chain from mine to vault

As a London Good Delivery refiner dedicated to continually improving the accountability and transparency of its precious metal sourcing, the Royal Canadian Mint has implemented a distributed ledger technology (DLT) solution that now makes it possible to perform end-to-end tracing and certify the provenance of gold deposited and processed at its refinery. This solution has been applied in collaboration with aXedras.

The Mint is leveraging aXedras' Bullion Integrity Ledger solution to further enhance its focus on being best-in-class for its supply chain and partner management and will help to provide an additional layer of assurance and transparency to the refinery's operations, reinforcing the Mint's reputation as a precious metal industry leader.

"By innovating with distributed ledger technology in our world-class refinery, we can now offer our customers end-to-end sourcing transparency, in addition to the industry-leading purity, quality and security of the gold we refine and of the bullion we produce," said Marie Lemay, president and CEO of the Royal Canadian Mint.

This integration of DLT allows investors, financial institutions, dealers and distributors of Mint bullion products, as well as fabricators, to access secure, standardized and digitalized information about the provenance, and integrity of the production standards related to their products. Mines, recyclers and other precious metals suppliers whose material is refined by the Mint will benefit from numerous business‑to‑business process enhancements, such as seamless immutable data transfer, easy access to reports, audits and more.

There are two key aspects to the type and scope of data captured by DLT. The first is transfer/ownership custody, which will log the transfer and ownership of gold bullion, and the history will be available to anyone who has custody or ownership of the gold.

The second is transformation, meaning when the Mint processes the gold from rough deposit through refining. A provenance record for each gold bullion bar will allow the owner of the bar to view the origin of the gold within the bar. This could include fold of a specific origin such as a single mine, Canadian-mined gold, recycled gold, or co-mingled gold part of which is recovered during refining at the Mint.

Parties registered as platform users, such as refining clients, armoured car carriers/logistic providers, financial institutions, and bullion distributors and dealers, will be able to access this data directly.

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