Commodities trading platform with smart contracts

Our client is an experienced commodities trader who came to Artelogic with a detailed PRD (Product Requirements Document) for development the trading platform

Description

Year
2021
Industry
Region
Switzerland
Status
In process
Node.js Front-End

Client

Commodities trading company

End users

Commodities traders and brokers

Project overview

Our client is an experienced commodity trader who came to Artelogic with a detailed PRD (Product Requirements Document), which describes the main business processes and user flows. The objective of this project was to develop a fully functional private platform for trading that comprise two main components:

– Marketplace for the trading of goods B2B and signing the smart contracts via Blockchain.

– CRM system integrated with the marketplace with different communication capabilities.

Business analysts performed research on clients’ ideas to turn them into understandable features for the client and the development team.

Challenge

1

year

5

developers

2

main components

There is a platform with a strong focus on the security policy and resilient algorithms of access on the different levels. The client constantly improves its business processes and it impacts the development of the platform. For example, the additional requirements for access policy that were endorsed during the Pilote mode period entailed the reconfiguration of the application’s logic. 

This was a non-trivial solution, limited by delivery time, and it required a lot of effort to create new logic at different points with the ability to enable/disable many features. In some cases, we had to correct users’ roles and create alternative user flows for this purpose.

The project aimed to develop a platform for trading to gain a profit as a percentage of contracts executed through the marketplace. Accordingly, in order to reduce all the risks of losing confidential information and avoid hidden deals, one of the project’s goals was to loop all the necessary actions of negotiations, communication, and contracts signing only on the marketplace.

Another challenge was the development of a consistent architecture for saving and exchanging the contracts given the performance and security requirements. On the other hand, engineers have to develop a user-friendly interface with API connection the third-party services like messengers and email. 

The variety of resources that Artelogic has was impressive. Our project required several different skill sets and parts of our platform used blockchain technologies. Still, they were able to use an expert that they had in-house to tackle that part of the project even though this resource wasn’t on the team they assigned initially

Solution

Artelogic’s team has created a web application with complex logic that ultimately met the client’s expectations. The marketplace has all the necessary integrated communications: internal chat, WhatsApp, calls with the history, e-mails, and app notifications. All of these actions and communications are subject to certain rules and restrictions that are managed by an administrator. 

The signing of the contract is organized as a Smart contract using Blockchain (Ethereum). Given the non-functional requirements, developers also implemented the microservices architecture, an application is built as independent components that run each application process as a service (built with Node.JS). Because they are independently run, each service can be updated, deployed, and scaled to meet the demand for specific functions of an application 

For interaction between the website’s backend and Blockchain Artelogic’s solution architects decided to exploit the IPFS (peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol) that enabled the higher bandwidth for data exchanging and make the service faster and more resilient.

 

Results

The trading platform will allow all stakeholders to find what they are looking for, conduct successful negotiations, and get the desired result. Traders and brokers can do their job – sell and buy commodities. The administrator has control and ownership of all activities in the marketplace and it favors the increasing trust of all market players. 

 

The Pilot mode period helps to understand all strengths and weaknesses of the app and market players’ behavior before launching the app globally. So the trading platform with such unique and flexible settings will allow our client to run the business effectively and get profit on every transaction without any risks of missing deals.