B2B rare-metals trading platform.

Rare-metals trading is high-value, low-volume, and built on trust between counterparties who often don't share a country, a language, or a common audit standard. Disputes about condition-on-arrival are routine and expensive to resolve, and most platforms in the space rely on paperwork, manual photographs, and after-the-fact certificates.

The founder needed an MVP credible enough to put in front of buyers and sellers — not slide-ware. Three things had to be true on day one: orders had to flow through a real ERP, the metal had to be physically tracked between the two ends, and the audit trail had to be verifiable by either side without taking the platform on faith.

We standardised on Frappe Framework with ERPNext as the trade-management backbone — orders, customers, settlements, lot tracking, and certificates all live in one system rather than across spreadsheets and email.

A custom Frappe app handles the rare-metals-specific flow: assays, batch tracking, dual-end quality protocols, and the integration points the IoT layer writes to.

An IoT-instrumented transport box carries the metal between the two ends. Onboard sensors log temperature, shock, and location for the full journey; quality is verified at both origin and destination, with the result signed digitally and anchored to a blockchain so neither side can later dispute what the box recorded.

The blockchain layer is deliberately minimal — it's a tamper-evident log, not a token economy. Every state change a counterparty cares about is hashed and pinned; the rest of the data stays in ERPNext where it can be audited the way any modern business gets audited.

The founder went from concept to a demoable, end-to-end MVP — order placed in ERPNext, box dispatched, sensors streaming, quality verified at both ends, and a verifiable trail anyone could check.

More importantly, the engagement produced an architecture the founder can take to investors and to the first paying counterparties without rewriting at the next stage. The boring parts — auth, settlements, audit — are done properly. The interesting parts — the IoT box and the on-chain anchor — are doing real work, not playing buzzword bingo.

Boring choices for the load-bearing parts; the inventive choices live where they earn their keep.