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The Glass Box

Traditional trade finance is a black box: investors put in capital, receive a report now and then, and never really see the deals underneath. Trade Dollar works the other way around. We call it the Glass Box, because you can verify every position, the stage of every deal, and every update to the vault's value on-chain.

One thing to be clear about first: the Glass Box lets you verify where your capital sits and what stage each deal is at. It does not remove the risk of loss. See Risks.

What you can check, at any time​

  • How much capital is working in live deals, and how much is held in the cash buffer.
  • Which trades are active, and what stage each one has reached in its cycle.
  • The full history of the vault's value (its Net Asset Value, or NAV). Every update is recorded on-chain and traces back to the trades behind it.
  • Your own position: your share tokens, their current NAV value, and the status of any withdrawal request.

How to verify it yourself​

The point of the Glass Box is that you do not have to take our word for any of this. After mainnet deployment, this section carries the practical walkthrough:

  • The vault contract. The address, verified on Etherscan, and the events that record deposits, NAV updates, and redemptions. [Published at mainnet deployment.]
  • A sample NAV update. A real update traced from the on-chain event back to the settlement behind it. [Published after the first settlements.]
  • A sample DWR. What a Digital Warehouse Receipt looks like and what fields it carries. [Published at mainnet deployment.]
  • What is deliberately not visible. Counterparty names and commercial terms stay private. The Glass Box proves existence, stage, and value, without exposing the underlying parties' commercial information.

Digital Warehouse Receipts​

For each trade the vault finances, the Salus layer issues a Digital Warehouse Receipt (DWR) in the financing vehicle's name: a tokenized copy of the underlying trade documents. The DWR carries a hash, a kind of digital fingerprint, that proves the documents are genuine and unchanged. It covers details like the quality, location, and release terms of the goods, without exposing any private commercial information.

One honest limit: a hash proves a document has not changed. It does not, by itself, prove the goods exist. That is what inspection, grading, and custody agreements are for. See Risks for how documentation risk is managed.

The DWR sits on the Salus documentation layer, which runs on IOTA. The vault, along with all on-chain settlement and LP accounting, runs on Ethereum. The two layers serve different roles and operate independently.

How the vault's value is set​

Trade finance settles off-chain, on real-world timelines, so the vault's value updates each time a trade closes rather than smoothly over time. This is why the NAV initially moves in steps. The Curator keeps the on-chain records in line with the off-chain settlement records, covering the capital in use, the income earned, and the returns paid back, and writes every update on-chain so the full history stays open for anyone to check. See NAV, liquidity and withdrawals.

Moving toward proof of reserves​

Today the Curator runs these checks and publishes the results on-chain. As the platform grows, it adds more automated verification over time, moving toward independent, on-chain proof of reserves and smoother, more frequent NAV updates.