Maalexi is a buyer focussed business-to-business ecosystem that enables wholesale cross-border trade of food and agriculture products, allowing sellers and buyers to originate deals, execute deals, and finance deals faster, cheaper, and safer than the traditional international trading process. With a huge lack of trust in the cross-border domain, especially so when small & medium-sized businesses want to engage with each other, and when financial institutions want to extend funding, Maalexi turned to the public distributed ledger Hedera Hashgraph to create a stringent solution for providing ‘transactional’ safety for these kinds of complex trade flows. 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, and this allows financial institutions to extend credit to users and deals that transact over Maalexi.com.

Inability to prove the authenticity of transactional documents and counterparties

In today’s global economy, food and agriculture trade top $2+ trillion in a market of over 15+ million small & medium businesses that range from manufacturers, distributors, and retailers on the buyer side, to export traders, processors and producers on the seller side. ‘Trust’ in company reputations (‘corporate credibility’) and fair business dealings or conducting transparent and indisputable transactions (‘transactional integrity’) in these global marketplaces are critical for preventing fraud, reducing third-party mediation costs, reducing trade risks, improving the speed and breadth of participants across various transactions, and most-importantly allow financial institutions to extend credit based on the merits of the transaction, rather than the weak balance sheet of small & medium-sized business (a reason because of which small & medium-sized businesses have very low access to finance for their cross-border trade).

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 food and agriculture products in cross-border trades, 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 small and medium businesses to participate in mainstream international wholesale food and agriculture trading” said Azam Pasha, Co-Founder and CEO of Maalexi “Creating a trusted ecosystem for buyers and sellers of food and agriculture, requires public infrastructure and technology with robust performance, agility, 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 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 acceptances (for quality and quantity), proforma and final commercial invoice, shipment and export documents, 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 by enabling companies to more easily approach banks for raising trade and supply chain finance, and enables small & medium-sized businesses, in high-risk countries, to trade with similar-sized or larger companies in international markets.

Maalexi continues to attract small and medium businesses, looking to buy and sell through their ecosystem. 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 benefits for platform stakeholders and the market in its entirety.