EmerTrace Gold
EmerTrace Gold
EmerTrace Gold is a government-grade chain-of-custody, formalization, risk, revenue, and evidence platform. It connects mine records, licensed trade, measurements, payments, export approvals, and destination-buyer decisions into one auditable trail, with tokenization available as an optional later module.
Africa is a leading source of the world's mined gold and, by a wide margin, the largest source of gold that moves without records. The value drains through that gap: lost state revenue, financing that never reaches the miner, and a permanent discount on every honest producer treated with the same suspicion as the smuggler.
Artisanal and small-scale mining supplies roughly a fifth of global gold and supports about 20 million people worldwide. In Ghana, the small-scale sector alone exported over USD 10 billion in 2025, close to half of national gold exports.
World Gold Council, 2026; Ghana Gold Board, 2025.
Gold is fungible, easy to carry, valuable relative to weight, and often traded without complete records. It changes identity through splitting, merging, melting, and refining, so a finished bar may carry no physical link to the material it came from.
ICGLR Regional Certification Mechanism guidance.
Refiners can be removed from a Good Delivery List for sourcing failures. EU importers carry legal due-diligence duties. Buyers ask not only for purity but for the trail behind it. Provenance has become part of the price.
LBMA Responsible Sourcing; EU Regulation 2017/821.
A credible platform helps an authorized institution answer the same five questions for every lot it controls. Everything in the product exists to build defensible answers to these.
Source location and operating status.
Any actor in the chain, with ownership.
Physical material and its current quantity.
The receipt, assay, photo, or record behind an event.
Four identifiers stay persistent across the entire chain, so a claim can always be traced back to the record that supports it.
The physical and institutional chain runs from the mine to the downstream buyer. Tap any stage to see what is captured, where the data comes from, and the risk it defends against. A formal mine has fewer informal handovers; an artisanal chain may pass through several local actors before the first licensed buying point.
An immutable record of a false entry is still false. So every material field carries two separate labels: how it was captured, and whether it has been verified. A typed scale value stays labelled as manual entry even when the operator says it came from a scale.
Typed or transcribed from paper by a person.
Geotag, photo, or direct field observation at source.
Direct read from a scale or assay device.
Licence, permit, or record from a government source or API.
Hash, signature, and timestamp preserved on a permissioned ledger.
Calculated or reconciled by the platform, such as fine-gold balance.
Evidence strength is always visible. A self-declaration, a device reading, an official registry match, and an audited record never look identical. Release requires the relevant controls to pass and any contradictory evidence to be resolved.
Change the country, source type, assay method, corridor, and certificate track. The lot record recomputes fine gold, updates verification status, raises the right risk flags, and tells you whether the export dossier is ready. All data is synthetic and labelled illustrative.
Fine gold grams = gross material grams multiplied by assay purity. The platform keeps gross weight, purity, and fine gold as separate fields and treats fine gold as a conserved quantity for reconciliation.
The field application works without a connection. It queues signed events, shows the last policy version locally, and synchronizes when a trusted network is available. Every field records who captured it, the capture method, and its verification status. Device time, server receipt time, and ledger anchoring time are kept separate.
Device signing does not prove the claimed time or location. An offline event reads as pending synchronization until the server receives it.
This is the story that shows government value: a lot is created at an artisanal site, moves through buying, transport, and refining, hits a weight and assay mismatch, and is placed on hold. The evidence is preserved, a case is assigned, and a corrected event is recorded. Nothing is silently cleared.
Lot and identities are synthetic and labelled illustrative. Simulated devices, APIs, registry results, and ledger receipts are shown to demonstrate the logic, not to imply a live instrument or government system supplied the data.
At every processing step, total fine-gold input is compared with output, documented loss, and retained residue. An output with more fine gold than all its inputs is the classic signature of unaccounted material entering the chain. The system flags it and holds the lot.
Gold changes identity during aggregation and refining. Lot genealogy plus fine-gold balance is what survives that change. After a merge, every contributing source and its evidence status is preserved. Material with unresolved origin stays visible in downstream genealogy.
Calling material recycled, melting it, replacing its tag, or routing it through another country does not reset its history or remove a hold.
Field XRF results are treated as provisional unless a laboratory has validated the method and sampling. A discrepancy is a reason to investigate, not proof of criminal conduct.
Coverage, risk, revenue evidence, and export readiness in one government overview, plus the risk and case queue and the OECD evidence pack. Figures below are synthetic pilot-scale illustrations.
Synthetic. Estimate collections only after defining the tax base, lawful rates, exemptions, and a defensible baseline.
Each field and workflow is labelled as a binding national requirement, a regional or treaty obligation, a buyer or refiner expectation, or a recommended control. Standards versions are tracked, because they change.
| Instrument | Status in the platform | What it requires | Version note |
|---|---|---|---|
| OECD Due Diligence Guidance + Gold Supplement | Global baseline | Five-step framework: management systems, risk assessment, risk management, independent audit, public reporting. Traceability is a tool, not an end. | Third edition, 2016 |
| LBMA Responsible Gold Guidance | Buyer / refiner expectation | Good Delivery refiners must run OECD-aligned due diligence and pass annual third-party audit. Failure means removal from the list. | Use v9 now. v10 consultation opened 10 Jun 2026; final expected Dec 2026, implementation 2027 |
| UAE due-diligence regulations | Destination requirement | Refiner due diligence on the OECD five-step framework, third-party review after a 12-month cycle. A corridor must map applicable instruments before operating. | Audit periods from 1 Jan 2023; Ministerial Decree 68 of 2024; 2025 AML law |
| EU Regulation 2017/821 | Regional / importer obligation | Mandatory supply-chain due diligence for Union importers of tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold. | In force, fully applicable from 2021 |
| ICGLR Regional Certification Mechanism | Regional / treaty obligation | Certificates and mine tagging for 3TG including gold across Great Lakes borders, with exporter audits. | RCM Manual, 2nd edition |
| Minamata Convention on Mercury | Treaty obligation | Artisanal gold mining is the largest anthropogenic mercury source; national action plans required. | Article 7, Annex C |
| FATF guidance, dealers in precious metals | Recommended / AML control | Risk-based approach to money laundering and terrorist financing in precious-metals trade. | Current guidance |
| US Dodd-Frank Section 1502 | Buyer-specific, scope caveat | Conflict-minerals reporting for relevant SEC issuers. Not an obligation on every exporter; confirm the buyer's current position. | Rule 2012; confirm current status |
| Ghana Gold Board Act 1140 | Binding national law | GoldBod is sole buyer, assayer, and exporter of licensed artisanal gold; prior ASM licences revoked. | 2025 |
A pan-African product is a common event, lot, evidence, identity, and risk model, with a country policy layer that decides required fields, approving institution, available certificates, and shareable records. These are deployment archetypes for demo and pilot design, each needing confirmation with the relevant authority.
Strong central buying model for artisanal gold.
Mixed formal and small-scale with buying centres.
Strongest regional chain-of-custody demonstration.
Token issuance sits outside the initial government pilot. When a physical-gold corridor is working, the same verified genealogy can extend into an allocated inventory record, and from there into a regulated tokenized product. Provenance is what makes such a token investable, but provenance alone establishes neither full backing nor legal redeemability.
Honest note: a custody confirmation and an on-chain record are separate evidence. A regulated token needs explicit reserve and liability reconciliation, allocation controls against duplicate claims, minting and redemption records, and enforceable ownership. Issuance and reserve law require a separate workstream. This module is not required to demonstrate national gold traceability.
Stating the limits is the credential. Sophisticated buyers and funders have watched overclaiming traceability projects fail.
The first pilot tests the operating model as much as the software. The highest risk is not whether a screen can be built, but whether field actors, buyers, inspectors, labs, and authorities create records that are useful, safe, and accepted.