Maalexi is a business-to-business marketplace that enables cross-border trading of excess inventory, allowing sellers and buyers to connect, communicate, and transact in an easy, secure and reliable manner. With a lack of trust in the excess inventory marketplace industry, Maalexi turned to the public distributed ledger Hedera Hashgraph. Hedera helps Maalexi log an immutable and verifiable log of business transactions, transactional documents, and buyers / seller ratings; this increases trust between buyers and sellers customer organizations, leading to greater adoption, retention, and platform usage.

Inability to prove the authenticity of transactional documents and counter-parties

In today’s global economy, excess inventory sales tops $151 billion in a market of over 63 million companies. Trust in company reputations and fair business dealings in these global marketplaces are critical for preventing fraud, reducing third-party mediation costs, reducing counterparty risk, and improving the speed and breadth of participants across various transactions.

Maalexi needed a way to ensure that buyers and sellers can trust the credibility of stakeholders and the integrity of cross-border transactions, while providing a high degree of security due to the financial nature of these agreements. Without trust between stakeholders, companies buying and selling excess inventory are less likely to adopt the Maalexi platform for business dealings. Maalexi also required high-throughput and predictable pricing in a public distributed ledger technology — this is especially important when operating at scale.

“We thought through how to solve the problem of trust between buyers and sellers, especially those residing in countries with varying degrees of risk — all while expanding market opportunities for everyone;” said Azam Pasha, Co-Founder and CEO of Maalexi “Creating a trusted marketplace for buyers and sellers of excess inventory requires public infrastructure and technology with robust performance, security, and stability.”

Maalexi evaluated Ethereum as their first choice of public distributed ledger to power its platform but took issue with price volatility, high transaction costs, performance, and uncertainty in its long-term stability in governance.

Building trust and in a global online marketplace

To solve for data integrity authenticity, Maalexi utilizes Hedera Hashgraph’s Hedera Consensus Service to log and make verifiable a variety of important documents and data points across the platform. This includes standard legal contracts digitally signed by users, invoice issuance and payment receipt, buyer acceptance, proforma and final tax invoice, delivery order, and company ratings & reviews.

By hashing documents and creating an immutable and verifiable log of transactions within their platform, Maalexi offers trust for all stakeholders and third party participants (banks, auditors, and more), unmatched by alternative marketplaces. This unlocks working capital through the reduction of carrying costs, enables companies to more easily approach banks for raising trade and supply chain finance, and enables small & medium-sized companies, in high-risk countries, to trade with larger, more established companies, in developed countries.

Maalexi continues to attract global companies looking to buy and sell excess inventory in their marketplace. To accommodate for the scale and growth they anticipate, they needed a stable public distributed ledger that offers the performance and security required of a modern marketplace application. Hedera creates trust for Maalexi users and third parties, leading to financial and opportunistic benefits for platform stakeholders and the market in its entirety.