Nornickel to use blockchain for its new ETCs on Deutsche Börse and LSE

The world’s largest producer of palladium and high-grade nickel, Norilsk Nickel, is pressing ahead with its digital technologies strategy. As of Jan. 18, Nornickel's Global Palladium Fund has launched exchange-traded commodities, or ETCs, for metals on the Deutsche Börse, which are custodied by TokenTrust AG and also make use of its distributed ledger platform, Atomyze.

Nornickel's Global Palladium Fund intends to launch the ETCs on the London Stock Exchange "within a few days." An ETC, which is an instrument that is tradable like a stock or share, offers traders and investors exposure to an underlying commodity — in this case, metals. Nornickel's fund will contribute palladium, platinum, gold and silver to the newly-launched ETC instrument and will collaborate with the Swiss-based company TokenTrust AG on metals custody arrangements and a tokenization strategy.

TokenTrust provides the fund with a distributed ledger technology-based platform called Atomyze, built on Hyperledger Fabric that will be used to immutably record metals information and tokenize a part of the mining group's contractual volumes.

The ETC instruments will be offered at the LME — London Metals Exchange — spot price and will provide additional guarantees about the provenance of the underlying commodities due to the usage of distributed ledger technology for monitoring and verifying standards. The CEO of Nornickel's Global Palladium Fund, Alexander Stoyanov, said:

"Our way of digitalization of commodities allows one to capture and trace the source of underlying metals and the way they were produced, coupled with ESG credentials. Nornickel, whose products we carry, sets a new standard for responsible mining by fully endorsing the UN2030 charter and the existing LBMA source of metal standards. This gives our ETC platform a [...] clear differentiator.”

As reported, Nornickel has recently joined an initiative called the Responsible Sourcing Blockchain Network, which was set up to improve the transparency, traceability and verification of sustainable practices in the global minerals and metals industries. The network is built on the IBM Blockchain platform, similarly powered by Hyperledger Fabric.