mintBlue, led by CEO Niels van den Bergh, stands out as a trailblazer with a mission to make the public blockchain as accessible as the Internet. The company achieves this by developing cutting-edge APIs and SDKs that empower enterprises, entrepreneurs, and innovators to seamlessly integrate their systems with the blockchain, unlocking the true potential of Web3.
During the London Blockchain Conference (30 May – 2 June 2023), we had the chance to speak to van den Bergh about mintBlue and its mission to create web3 platforms that empower users with absolute data ownership.
Watch the interview with mintBlue CEO Niels van den Bergh here:
E-invoicing and beyond
mintBlue is a leading player in the blockchain space. The company specialises in providing a comprehensive software-as-a-service (SaaS) API platform that seamlessly connects to the public blockchain. mintBlue focuses on advancing interoperability, self-sovereign identity, and verifiable credentials. Actively participating in the e-invoicing market, mintBlue integrates with bookkeeping systems to enhance authentication and streamline accounting processes.
With its headquarters in Antwerp and additional offices in Amsterdam, mintBlue primarily focuses on the European market. Van den Bergh highlights that mintBlue is currently specialising in electronic invoicing, identity authentication and facilitating transparency. At the time of the interview, mintBlue was ‘expanding into making multiple bookkeeping interoperable via the blockchain, so authenticated invoices can be exchanged’, as van den Bergh explains.
Web3: Empowering users with data ownership and control
Another notable focus of mintBlue is its emphasis on Web3. The CEO explains that mintBlue sees Web3 as centred around data ownership and user control as opposed to the governance model of current platforms. The open protocol principle, ensuring permissionless access without gatekeepers, resonates with the company’s commitment to transparency and user empowerment.
What this means in practice is highlighted by mintBlue’s partnership with a smart wearable brand called NOWATCH. In the interview, van den Bergh is demonstrating a smartwatch of NOWATCH:
‘This is a smart wearable brand, one of the world’s first that takes absolute data ownership seriously. It is an authenticator device to your on-chain wallet, where all your biometric information is stored. And now you’re the owner of your data. You can exchange it with third parties like research labs, health facilities, hospitals, universities and even maybe fitness gyms.’
Strategic partnerships and interoperability
mintBlue has several other strategic partnerships, including a notable collaboration with Facebook, which highlights the company’s innovation in making multiple bookkeeping systems interoperable through blockchain technology. This adaptive approach positions mintBlue at the forefront of seamless connectivity, showcasing its commitment to addressing evolving industry needs.
Another significant partnership with the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) underscores mintBlue’s dedication to advancing self-sovereign identity and verifiable credentials on the public blockchain. Van den Bergh highlights the strategic value of this partnership:
‘There’s an actual European-wide data strategy, where interoperability is key to enhance and enable competition to make fair competition possible on the Internet. And they are truly trying to set legislation and boundaries for competition to come in and not let Google or Amazon take over the market. And there are a couple of large initiatives like Gaia X, but we think that mintBlue and blockchain can offer a very interesting underlying framework to enable data ownership, data, provenance and a fully decentralised cloud platform.’
Niels van den Bergh also details mintBlue’s commitment to sustainability through a collaboration with Sumthing, a nature restoration organisation:
‘What we’ve built with them is a public protocol where you can place nature restoration orders directly on a chain in a transaction and something listens on the blockchain for these transactions coming in and they execute it. So now you can create a transaction where you say, I want to plant five trees, I pay 50 pounds for it. Sumthing uses mintBlue’s infrastructure to listen to the blockchain like there’s a transaction with an order, takes the transaction, plans the trees, proof that it’s done, and you have full provenance of carbon offsetting.’
Scalability and commitment to environmental sustainability
The commitment to sustainability is also reflected in the fact that mintBlue is built on the BSV blockchain. As the most scalable blockchain, the BSV blockchain is the most sustainable solution for blockchain technology. The sustainability index that the company publishes on its website showcases that the BSV blockchain has the lowest CO2 emissions per transaction among major proof-of-work blockchains.
Van den Bergh points out that the unlimited block size is the reason for the scalability of the BSV blockchain and that it is therefore also low in emissions. As comparable amounts of energy are consumed per block, efficiency increases the more transactions are processed in a block. To further highlight the scalability of mintBlue they have also pushed the most transactions onto the BSV blockchain earlier this year, when more than 50 million transactions were published by mintBlue within 24 hours.
