Capital at the Speed of Cargo

Every year, around US$2.5 trillion of sound cross-border trade goes unfinanced. Not because the trades are bad. Because the system prices trust by standing: the size of your balance sheet, your credit rating, the reach of your bank, rather than the substance of the trade in front of it. A business that is smaller, newer, or trading from the wrong place is refused, pushed to costlier intermediaries, or gives up and never applies, while the trade underneath is perfectly good.

The Asian Development Bank's Global Trade Finance Gap Survey puts the rejection rate for smaller firms at around 41 per cent, down from 45 per cent in 2023, and now close to the rate large corporates face. Size is not the real divider. Sound trades are refused wherever a firm's standing and the substance of its trade come apart.

Most trade between strangers runs on credit: a bank or an intermediary vouches for one side, for a fee, and only if that side is big enough to be worth vouching for. Mithril settles the trade a different way. It is neither a payment rail nor a lender. A smaller exporter ships to a buyer they have never met, and the day the trade is proven they are paid in full, with no bank in the middle and no one able to hold the money back or pull it out early. You get paid on the strength of the trade, not the size of your balance sheet. We call this Structured Trust.

You decide what a completed trade looks like. Mithril holds you both to that, and to nothing else.

Escrow releases when someone signs off, or when a document turns up. Mithril releases on the trade itself, not on a signature and not on a piece of paper about the trade.

Escrow secures the money. Mithril secures the trade.

While a trade is under way, your money never sits on Mithril's books. It stays ring-fenced by design, safe even if Mithril itself were to fail, and it can only ever pay the seller once the trade is proven or come back to you. That protection runs on blockchain, which is what lets the money sit off our books this way. You do not need to know anything about the technology that makes it work; it sits underneath, doing one job, keeping your money safe until the trade is done.

Mithril settles under English law, the most widely chosen jurisdiction in the world for cross-border commercial contracts, and one whose courts are trusted to enforce them. Since the Electronic Trade Documents Act 2023, electronic trade documents carry the same legal standing as paper ones under English law, so digital settlement can attach to the real documents of a real trade. A UK framework for digital-money settlement is taking shape now. London is where the law that settlement has to stand on already sits.

Mithril is in active development. The core settlement engine is built and in active testing; the protocol is not yet live and is not settling real funds. We are building toward first trades with a small group of selected counterparties.