What's included

A trading desk is not one person. The director who signs the contract is rarely the person chasing the export permit, and neither of them should be the only route into the account. Nelum is built around the company: you register the business, then invite the people who act for it.

Every seat carries one role, and the role decides what that person may do for the company. The holder holds every capability on the account. A manager runs the company's profile and its seats and works its offers and consignments. A trader posts and accepts offers and works consignments. An operator works consignments and the company's documents without the commercial side. A reader sees the company's workspace and moves nothing.

Incorporation and registration documents, tax registration, proof of registered address, ownership and control structure including beneficial owners, bank confirmation, and any export or trading licence. Submitted once, checked, and then in force for every counterparty you meet on the platform.

Documents go into storage with no read path back through the product. Once filed, they cannot be retrieved — not by a counterparty, not by you. What is disclosed to a counterparty is your verification status, your country, and how long you have been registered. Not your incorporation certificate.

A Letter of Intent carries product type, quantity, whether it is one-off or recurring and over how many periods, minimum purity, origin preference, delivery location, shipping method, and pricing — a fixed figure, or a benchmark with a differential above or below it, which is how much of this market prices.

It also carries an expiry date, and it leaves the market on that date automatically. Stale demand is one of the reasons this market wastes so much of everyone's time; an LOI that expired in March should not still be attracting offers in September.

If you hold a signed LOI as a PDF, attach it. The platform reads the terms out of the document and fills the form for you to check, rather than making you retype what you already have.

A lot is a physical quantity with an identity. Lots merge and split, and what comes out carries all of its origins. A consignment is one party's named purpose over a set of lots, and its history is that consignment read in order.

Parties are invited at a scope. A laboratory, a carrier or a vault sees only the lots its work touches and only what the owner assigns to it. Every invitation expires, can be withdrawn by its sender and can be refused by its recipient.

Each party holds its own consignment, and consignments overlap at the lots. A link between two owners' consignments records provenance without letting either side read the other's. Nelum drafts no agreement and captures no signature: the platform is not a party to your trade.

Gaps are allowed. A lot may carry a declared origin — an assay number, a seal, weights, papers — instead of a linked parent lot, and a history may show a gap between two known segments. Nothing fills a gap on its own.

Either party uploads a file and labels it. Nelum does not read documents, so the label the uploader picks is what both sides see, and the suggested list is a convenience rather than a constraint — you can name anything the corridor actually requires.

You can request a document from the counterparty with the reason attached, so a missing paper is a visible conversation rather than a silent failure. Uploading against a request closes it.

Files version rather than overwrite: upload under an existing label and it becomes the next version, with both still listed. Removing a document leaves the entry in place, struck through and stamped with the date. Message edits keep their previous wording readable by both parties.

Connections between companies make counterparties findable, and the board can be filtered to companies you already know. A second-degree link — somebody your counterparty has traded with — is the difference between a cold approach and a warm introduction, and this trade runs on that difference.

Laboratories, vaults, carriers, clearing agents and insurers register as companies that provide services rather than trade on their own account. A party asks for quotes on the work, and an accepted quote becomes a service task on that party's consignment.

The provider accepts or declines the job. Without that, a provider is conscripted — no capacity check, no conflict-of-interest check, no ability to say no. And whatever they accept, they see the physical facts of the work and never the price, the fee, or the other party's legal name.

Document uploads and removals, requests and their answers, role changes and verification decisions are recorded with their actor and timestamp. A consignment's history is derived from those records rather than kept as a separate log, so it cannot fall out of step with what actually happened. Company governance events — a role change, a profile edit, an ownership transfer — record which fields changed rather than their values, so the trail proves what happened without becoming a second copy of your data.

This is the part nobody values until they need it. When a compliance review, a tax authority, or a counterparty's auditor asks how a particular parcel reached you and on what basis you accepted it, the answer is an assembled record rather than a search through the mailbox of someone who left last year.