💎 DiaVest — Winning solution for the hackfordiamonds hackathon

Last weekend, we participated in a hackathon called “Hack For Diamonds” organized by Junction. We participated in a mixed team from TheLedger, Craftworkz and 0smosis. This event started on Friday and ended on Sunday, which was the start of the Carat+ diamond event where we together with 8 other teams had to pitch our solutions.

The problem

We tackled 2 problems with our solution, but our main problem we focussed on was invoice financing. When diamond traders sell diamonds, there is a due date for the invoice like any other invoice. These buyers have time until the due date, while the seller doesn’t have enough liquidity and is missing out on business because the seller agreed to pay after only 30 or 90 days.

Diamond traders used to be able to go to a bank with their invoice for financing. But after some fraud, there are only a few percentage of banks who still allow this.

The other problem, which we also had to solve to be sure there was no fraud in our financing platform was invoice fraud. Anyone in the process can say a certain invoice has a certain diamond. But there is no real validation whether or not the diamonds match the invoice.

Our solution

Like last hackathon, we built our solution on Hyperledger Fabric, since this seemed the right technology for the job.

Our first part is invoicing, after a diamond trader agrees to sell his diamond, he is able to create an invoice on our platform. Once the invoice is created, a buyer can validate whether or not the invoice is made up correctly. The buyer can accept and at this point, an integration with a shipping company will be made to track it’s way to the Diamond Office. This was mocked of course, since we only had 36 hours. When the Diamond Office receives the diamonds, it’ll act as a third validation for the invoice. This party will be able to check if the diamonds in the invoice actually match the shipment.

At this point we had 3 validations and we’re sure the invoice is correct, so we’ll send the invoice to a reverse auction marketplace. On this marketplace, investors (large or small) can bid on these invoices. They will be bidding against other investors towards a lower rate for the diamond trader. This allows the diamond trader to bridge their invoices without having to loan at high rates. After certain amount of time has passed, a diamond seller will be able to select a rate he’s most comfortable with.

After the invoice is financed, we’re back to the invoicing flow. The buyer can mark the goods as received and send the payment after x amount of days. The payment will then be made directly to the investor since he loaned the money to the seller.

Our pitch

Check out our full pitch.

Thanks

A huge thanks to all the experts who were at the event. Our knowledge about the diamond industry was minimal. But with the help of the people from the AWDC, everledger and other, we were able to bring our idea to a next level by actually focussing on the needs of the industry.

If you would like to know more about our “housing pass” solution we made for a hackathon last month, read What we’ve built to win the worlds biggest blockchain hackathon of 2018!

Also check out all the content we wrote about Hyperledger Fabric.

If you would like us to develop your blockchain project or offer expertise. Please contact us at www.theledger.be/contact. We’re technology agnostic so we’re not only familiar with Hyperledger Fabric, but also Bigchaindb, Ethereum,…