We are proud to announce that we have entered into a strategic cooperation with International Digital Asset Management Co. (IDA), a global leader in asset digitalization. IDA will be the first official decentralized application to be launched natively on the MATRIX blockchain.

IDA is an asset digitization and tracking company which focuses primarily on Belt and Road projects — it is a key first step for MATRIX’s Belt and Road work implementation. MATRIX will work with IDA to provide technical support and solutions to IDA, who will use the MATRIX public blockchain at the core of their solution.

At the time of writing, IDA currently has assets worth approximately 3 Billion USD which has been or is to be digitalized in the form of gold mines, oil fields and forestry. MATRIX will be the technical partner to transfer this wealth into the digital world via the MATRIX blockchain.

The first project we will start with is IDA’s recently acquired Laos’s virgin forest project. Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Laos) is located in the north of IndoChina Peninsula. Covering approximately 236,800 square kilometers, Laos is the only landlocked country on the peninsula, and forests cover 52% of Laotian territory, making it a famous country of forests. One of the simplest and easiest use-cases to imagine with the MATRIX and IDA in Laos is the digitalization of the wood which is harvested from trees within the forest and sold internationally as seen in the flowchart below.

Example flow-chart of a digitalization process for logging in Laos

As can be seen in the flowchart, utilizing the MATRIX blockchain greatly allows for increased transparency through each step of the process.

Beyond this initial use-case MATRIX and IDA will go even further. Laos has been highlighted as a key Belt and Road region and will soon benefit from additional transport links and energy solutions such as high speed rail, tidal barrages and hydropower schemes which will require services such as blockchain enabled energy trading and cargo tracking. This, coupled with the rich natural resources in the area such as gold mines and water sourcesmakes it a wonderful location to initially focus on, as it will bring tremendous asset value to be tracked and exchanged on the MATRIX blockchain.

IDA have a strong emphasis on ensuring legal compliance both in the issuance of resource tokens and in the trading of them. Given that it will be a global solution there has been great care taken in the design of the application to ensure legal compliance with government bodies at home and abroad, including the SEC. IDA have begun writing a systematic framework and standardization process for the digitization of assets which will be shared with all entities who wish to digitize and trade assets via the IDA application.

More details will follow in the coming weeks about IDAs particular technical solutions and innovations, and some of these were introduced at the Vietnam meet-up on 26th May 2018. We are very proud to have them build on our platform and will continue to attract more top quality projects to join our ecosystem.