How it works

Five phases, and what fails at each one

A physical commodity trade has a shape, and a set of well-known places where it goes wrong. This is the whole of it — what each side does, what gets filed, what holds, and which failure each part is there to close.

One thing to know up front: only the first three phases are a sequence. Once an order opens there is no imposed order of operations, because every company runs its own fulfilment and every corridor demands its own paper. What the platform guarantees from that point is the record.

01Both companies, before anything else

Business verification

Nothing here starts with a conversation. It starts with both companies proving they exist, that they are what they claim to be, and that the people acting for them are authorised to do so.

Verification covers the certificate of incorporation, tax registration, proof of registered address, the ownership and control structure including beneficial owners, and any export or trading licence the company holds. Each individual who will act for the company provides identity documents and a verified mobile number, and receives a credential tied to that company and their role in it. Sanctions screening runs alongside.

Verification documents are submitted into storage with no read path back through the product. Once filed they cannot be pulled out again — not by a counterparty, not by you, not by us through the interface. What is disclosed to the other side is your status, your country and how long you have been registered.

What is submitted

·Certificate of incorporation
·Tax registration
·Proof of registered address
·Ownership & control structure
·Beneficial ownership register
·Export / trading licence — where held
·Representative identity documents
·Verified mobile number

What holds

An unverified company cannot post an intent, make an offer, or accept one. That is enforced in the database, beneath the application — not by a warning on a screen.

The failure it closes

The chain of intermediaries. An offer typically arrives through three or four people who each claim a mandate, none of whom can produce the company they say they represent. Verification means the party on the other side of your order is the party that did the paperwork.

02Buyer or seller

Post an intent

A buyer posts demand — a Letter of Intent describing what they want to buy. A seller posts supply — a Soft Corporate Offer describing what they hold. Both are the same object on the platform, pointed in opposite directions, and either side can answer the other.

You state commodity, quantity in kilograms, whether it is one-off or recurring and over how many periods, minimum purity, origin, delivery point and shipping preference. Price is expressed the way this market expresses it: an absolute figure, or a discount to a named benchmark — LBMA, Platts, Argus, LME — which is how most doré actually trades.

Every intent carries an expiry, and on that date it leaves the board automatically rather than sitting there attracting offers on terms you have moved on from. If you already hold a signed LOI as a PDF, attach it and the platform reads the terms out to fill the form for you to check; the attachment stays private to your company.

What holds

Intents are visible only to verified companies, and only until they expire. You can also send one privately to named connections instead of publishing it.

The failure it closes

The letter of intent that means nothing. LOIs circulate this market as currency, forwarded until nobody can trace them to a buyer with funds. Here one is posted by a verified company, carries an expiry, and disappears when it lapses.

03The other side

Offers, and answering them

A verified counterparty answers your intent with terms: their price on the basis you asked for, origin, shipping method, and a validity date on the offer itself. Because both companies were verified before any of this, you are not deciding whether they are real — you are deciding whether the terms work.

You can accept, decline, or leave it. Declining lets you give a reason, and the reason is optional on purpose: sometimes the honest answer is history with that counterparty, and nobody should be made to type that into a box. Whoever offered can withdraw before you answer, and can come back with something different afterwards.

Purity is treated as a floor, not a target. An offer of 92% against a stated minimum of 82% is a better offer, not an exception — the platform states the difference and leaves the judgement to you.

What holds

An expired offer cannot be accepted. Accepting requires authority to bind the company, which is a role, not a matter of seniority.

The failure it closes

The offer that was never deliverable. Parcels are routinely offered by people who do not hold them, on terms that were never achievable, in the hope of finding a buyer first and material second.

04Both parties

The order, and its record

Accepting an offer opens an order. The terms both sides agreed are frozen at that moment and shown for you to paste into your own contract — Nelum generates no agreement and captures no signature, because the platform is not a party to your trade and a document it produced with signature blocks would be read as one it authored.

From there, there is no imposed sequence. Instead the order gives you a document space: upload and label anything the trade needs, request from the other side anything you are missing and say why, and watch both accumulate in a record neither party can quietly alter. Files version rather than overwrite, removals stay visible, and message edits keep their previous text.

Where the parties choose on-chain settlement, the buyer funds a wallet they control and the platform verifies the deposit against the chain — read-only. There is no Nelum wallet in the middle, no key we hold, and no balance we could freeze. Bank instruments — transfer, letter of credit, documentary collection — are arranged with your own banks, as they always were.

A recurring contract materialises its whole delivery schedule up front, so a twelve-month commitment is twelve visible deliveries from day one, and a period nobody moved on shows as overdue rather than silently not happening.

What holds

Documents on an order are visible to its two parties and nobody else. An engaged laboratory or carrier sees the physical facts of its job and never the price, the counterparty's name, or the settlement wallet.

The failure it closes

Paperwork that lives in five inboxes. When a review comes — from compliance, an auditor, or a refiner onboarding you — the evidence has to be reassembled from memory, and the parts that are missing look identical to the parts that never existed.

05Both parties

Fulfilment, agreed by both

An order finishes when both sides say it has. Each party confirms that everything they needed has been delivered, and the order completes only when both confirmations are in. Until then either can be withdrawn.

There is no stage counter closing a trade on anyone's behalf, because no two companies in this market run fulfilment the same way — and a platform that declares a trade finished when the buyer disagrees has not helped anybody.

Afterwards the record stays assembled: every document and version, every request and its answer, every message, and both confirmations, retained for the periods anti-money-laundering law requires.

What holds

Confirming binds the company, so it requires authority to do so — the same authority needed to accept an offer in the first place.

The failure it closes

The trade that was 'done' according to one side. Completion asserted by one party, or by a workflow, is how disputes start. Completion recorded from both is how they are avoided.

What Nelum deliberately does not do

These are not gaps in the roadmap. Each one is a position, and several of them are the reason the rest can be trusted.

No contract generation, no signatures

The agreed terms are frozen and presented for you to use in your own agreement. Nelum drafts nothing and witnesses nothing — it is not a party to your trade and does not pretend to be.

No price feed

A discount to a benchmark is recorded as a term of the deal. The cash figure is settled between you on the SPA. We carry no market data and quote no prices.

No escrow, no custody

Nelum is not a bank, broker, dealer or escrow agent. Where settlement runs on-chain the wallet is the buyer's own and our role is verification only.

No imposed workflow

Different companies and different corridors need different paper in a different order. The platform holds the record and lets you run your own fulfilment.

No reading of your documents

Files sit in private storage. There is no content inspection or indexing — the label the uploader picks is what both parties see.

No percentage of your trade

Revenue is company subscriptions and seats. Nelum takes no cut of what you buy or sell, which is what keeps it out of the transaction entirely.

Need to know

Who sees what, and when

Disclosure in this trade is commercial, not merely private. Knowing who is buying what, at what volume and on what schedule, is worth money to a competitor — so detail is released as the relationship progresses rather than published to the board.

On the marketplace: An intent carries its full commercial terms. The company behind it is shown with its name, country, verification status and reference — enough to decide whether to engage, without publishing what you are buying to anyone who is not verified.
Once an order exists: Full legal detail is exchanged between the two counterparties. Neither side sees the identity of anyone else who offered on that intent, or of any company they are not in an order with.
Order documents: Visible to the two parties on that order, and to nobody else. A seller cannot see what another seller filed; a buyer cannot see offers made to a different buyer.
Verification documents: Visible to neither side. They go into storage with no read path through the product. Your counterparty's verification status is disclosed to you; their incorporation certificate is not.
Engaged service providers: A laboratory, vault, carrier or clearing agent engaged on an order sees the physical facts of the job. Never the price, the fee, the settlement wallet, or the other party's legal name.
Your own team: Scoped by role. A logistics user working a shipment does not need the commercial terms, and a viewer cannot commit the company to anything.

Start with verification

Register your company and complete the check. Every counterparty you meet on the platform will have completed the same one.