ALKEVA

ALKEVA Logo representing the digital FinTech saving platform and precious minerals Marketplace
“Identity check verification process for user compliance”
“Login screen for the ALKEVA platform”
“Price alert setting feature on the ALKEVA platform”
"Deposit options with payment channel limits"
“Dashboard view showing asset balances on the ALKEVA platform”
"Deposit amount entry screen"
“Chart showing precious mineral market
"Main dashboard overview"
"AI assistant interface"
"Detailed dashboard performance view"

Inspiration

1st, Severe Birr Currency Devaluation and Inflationary Impact. Local currency devaluation and volatile inflation rates severely erode the purchasing power and savings of local populations, trapping people in a cycle of poverty despite nominally having the same amount of cash. 2nd, Severe Foreign Exchange (Forex) Restrictions and Delays. There are critical shortages and strict governmental regulations regarding currency exchange, making it difficult for international investors to repatriate profits or convert local currency to global currencies. 3rd, Inaccessibility of Digital Trading for Physical Mining Assets. Unlike traditional global financial systems, the regional mining sector lacks robust digital platforms to trade or liquidate mining assets online, forcing miners to rely solely on physical, face-to-face transactions.

4th, High Exploration Risk and Uncertainty. The high cost of initial geological surveys makes it difficult to secure funding because investors are hesitant to take on the financial risk before discovering if minerals are even present. 5th, Opaque Local Mineral Pricing. Local miners often lack access to real-time global market data, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation by middlemen and informal traders. 6th, Lack of Credit Scoring for Miners. Artisanal miners typically lack a formal banking history, making it nearly impossible for them to secure loans or financial services. 7th, Uncontrollable Illicit Smuggling. Without a transparent supply chain, substantial amounts of minerals are lost to illegal trafficking and smuggling out of the region. 8th, Lack of Verifiable Data. There is a critical shortage of up-to-date, digitized geological and production data to help properly assess regional mineral wealth. 9th, Middlemen Exploitation. A dense network of middlemen in the supply chain often siphons off the majority of profits, leaving primary producers with very little return. 10th, Lack of Traceability. The lack of a system to verify ethically sourced minerals prevents regional operations from accessing premium international markets. 11th, Lack of Insurance. There is an absence of specialized micro-insurance or risk-assessment solutions tailored specifically to the mining industry. 12th, Lack of Fractional Ownership. Small investors are currently barred from participating in or benefiting from large-scale mining projects due to high financial barriers. 13th, Complex Licensing. Overly complicated institutional procedures hinder the efficient tracking and management of mining rights. 14th, Price Volatility. The lack of hedging strategies leaves miners exposed to severe financial downturns when global commodity prices drop. 15th, Lack of Cooperative Ledger Systems. Mining cooperatives struggle to maintain transparent financial records for their members and activities without modern, digitized operational tools.

What it does

ALKEVA is an AI-integrated digital asset platform designed to democratize access to precious mineral investment and safeguard personal capital against economic volatility for all users across Africa. Dtails: ALKEVA serves as a multi-language digital financial and savings ecosystem that transforms how everyday individuals protect and grow their assets. By providing direct, real-time access to precious minerals—including gold, diamond, and platinum—the platform enables anyone, from students saving for their education to institutional investors, to effortlessly convert fiat currency into tangible mineral assets. Regardless of geographical location or capital size, users can execute fractional purchases and sales instantly from their mobile devices, ensuring that even small savings are protected from severe inflation and local currency devaluation. At the core of the platform is an intelligent AI recommendation engine. Rather than relying on static transactions, ALKEVA leverages integrated market APIs and historical price analytics to offer predictive market trends, dynamic forecasting, and personalized investment guidance. The system analyzes historical volatility to present actionable percentage-based risk assessments and growth predictions, helping users decide when to buy, hold, or liquidate their mineral holdings. Designed for comprehensive accessibility across diverse regions, ALKEVA features specialized user dashboards and native support for localized and international languages, including English, Amharic, Tigrinya, Oromiffa, and Somali, with plans to integrate additional regional languages as operations expand across the African continent. By merging automated trading mechanics, AI-driven advisory tools, and fractional precious mineral ownership, ALKEVA provides an inclusive, transparent, and resilient financial refuge against economic instability.

How we built it

A TypeScript monorepo: Next.js 15 for the web app, NestJS for the API, a standalone price worker, PostgreSQL, and Redis.

The ledger is the spine. Money is integers everywhere — birr in cents, metals in milligrams — and rounding happens exactly once, in the quote engine. Postgres triggers enforce the invariants: ledger rows are append-only (UPDATE and DELETE are rejected at the database), and a deferred constraint trigger rejects any transaction whose entries do not sum to zero per asset. Concurrency is handled with ordered SELECT … FOR UPDATE row locks rather than serializable isolation, so a burst of simultaneous confirmations produces one order, not several.

Pricing comes from a worker that ticks every 30 seconds: metal spot from a primary feed with an automatic fallback, multiplied by a cached USD→ETB rate, converted to integer birr cents per gram. Every tick records which feed and which FX source produced it, so any receipt can be traced back to the exact market data behind it. The tick is published on Redis and pushed to every open browser over Server-Sent Events, so the ticker, the chart, the trade ticket and the AI all quote one identical number.

The assistant runs on the Gemini API with three read-only tools. Tool results are pre-formatted so the model quotes figures rather than computing them — an LLM doing arithmetic on someone's balance is a bug waiting to happen.

Payments go through Chapa. The webhook is treated as a trigger and never as truth: it only ever prompts a server-side verification against Chapa's API, and a single idempotent code path does the crediting.

Challenges we ran into

website/technical challenges and community challenges with their technical solutions. 1,Website & Technical Challenges

Real-Time Price Synchronization
- Challenge: Mineral prices fluctuate rapidly, making static database queries outdated immediately.
- Solution: Built a high-frequency WebSocket pipeline to stream live market fluctuations directly to the UI without page refreshes.
Multi-Language Dynamic Localization (5 Languages)
- Challenge: Supporting 5 local and international languages seamlessly without degrading application performance or bloating load times.
- Solution: Implemented a lightweight i18n internationalization framework with cached translation dictionaries to ensure instant context switching.
AI-Powered Investment & Price Trend Forecasting
- Challenge: Providing accurate, non-hallucinating market intelligence for precious metals.
- Solution: Trained an AI intelligence engine on historical trading datasets and real-time market feeds to output structured predictive insights.
3D Interactive Asset Trust & Security Module
- Challenge: Users were hesitant to believe they actually owned physical gold or minerals represented digitally.
- Solution: Rendered an interactive 360-degree 3D hologram animation locked behind pattern/biometric authentication to visually verify item ownership.
Automated Price Spike & Drop Alerts
- Challenge: Users lost money because they couldn't monitor market dips or spikes 24/7.
- Solution: Developed an automated notification engine that triggers push/SMS alerts whenever user-defined price thresholds are crossed.
Secure Payment Integration with Local Banking Systems
- Challenge: Interfacing complex mineral transactions with local payment processors safely.
- Solution: Integrated Chapa API alongside strict JWT bearer tokens and Argon2 hashing for bank-grade financial authorization.
Handling Heavy Background Processing Jobs
- Challenge: Large data aggregations and user transaction histories slowed down the main server thread.
- Solution: Offloaded long-running asynchronous tasks to Inngest background workers to keep the platform fast and resilient.
Strict Data Validation & Type Safety
- Challenge: Malformed transaction inputs or database mismatches could corrupt financial records.
- Solution: Coupled Drizzle ORM with strict Zod schema validation to enforce end-to-end data integrity across the entire stack. 2,Community & Social Challenges
Skepticism Towards Digital Mineral Ownership
- Challenge: The public doubted the legitimacy of owning physical metals through a software platform.
- Solution: Integrated official digital license verification certificates directly into the app from the Ministry of Mines, Ministry of Trade, and the National Bank.
Reluctance to Leave Traditional Cash/Saving Habits
- Challenge: Users were comfortable with traditional financial methods and hesitant to shift to digital asset holding.
- Solution: Designed a mobile-first interface optimized for extreme simplicity, making digital asset trading as familiar as sending a phone text.
Low Digital & Financial Literacy
- Challenge: Many potential users struggled to navigate complex investment platforms.
- Solution: Created step-by-step embedded video tutorials narrated in local languages ("How to Use") directly inside the app interface.
Connecting Rural Communities to Global Markets
- Challenge: Rural miners and buyers lacked exposure to international gold and mineral pricing standards.
- Solution: Built a simplified offline-first mobile view that displays live international market conversions in local currency and units.
Fear of Data Privacy & Cyber Fraud
- Challenge: Users feared their personal wealth details and identity records would be leaked.
- Solution: Enforced strict data privacy policies with end-to-end encryption and minimal data exposure protocols.
Pushback from Traditional Financial Intermediaries
- Challenge: Middlemen resisted the transparency introduced by a direct digital marketplace.
- Solution: Established a transparent, verifiable transaction ledger that guarantees fair profit distribution for legitimate stakeholders.
Cultural & Language Accessibility Barriers
- Challenge: Diverse regional demographics needed customized user experiences beyond simple text translations.
- Solution: Built localized dashboard layouts adapted to regional preferences and voice/video guidance for inclusive onboarding.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The ledger has held zero-sum across every asset through every test: no money created, none destroyed, enforced by the database rather than by discipline.
Five Ethiopian languages ship at 100% key coverage, including the AI.
ALKEVA is a copyright-registered work with the Ethiopian Intellectual Property Authority (registration 8/1/00317).
Ten rejection reasons — insufficient funds, expired quote, reserve halt, tier cap, frozen account, KYC required — are each a recorded, machine-readable outcome a user can actually read, not a generic error.
- Secured Massive Investment Pledges: Successfully secured pledged investment commitments totaling 100,000,000 Birr, demonstrating overwhelming market confidence and massive demand for our financial technology model.
- Validated Public Demand for Mineral Savings: Launched a highly successful public relations and social media validation campaign that definitively proved everyday users prefer saving in precious minerals over traditional fiat currency.
- Engineered Multi-Lingual Accessibility: Built a high-performance web architecture natively supporting five regional and international languages with cached i18n localization, ensuring frictionless onboarding for diverse demographics.
- Integrated Real-Time AI Market Intelligence: Deployed live WebSocket data streams for instantaneous mineral price tracking, paired with an AI intelligence engine that delivers real-time predictive insights to users.
- Pioneered 3D Interactive Asset Verification: Designed a 360-degree interactive 3D visual verification system embedded within user wallets, successfully bridging the gap between physical asset value and digital trust.
- Established Institutional-Grade Regulatory Transparency: Incorporated dynamic, verified licensing credentials from the National Bank, Ministry of Mines, and Ministry of Trade directly into the UI to guarantee absolute transactional legitimacy.
- Innovated Government Revenue Integration: Developed a seamless, automated tax and fee integration model that processes government regulatory deductions on a per-transaction basis rather than relying on traditional annual payments.
- Built Enterprise-Level Security & Frictionless Payments: Implemented end-to-end security using Argon2 password hashing and JWT authorization, fully integrated with the Chapa API for safe, instant local currency transactions.
- Architected for Continental Expansion: Established a highly scalable infrastructural foundation designed to support future African Union integration, paving the way for cross-border mineral trading bureaus across the continent.
- Overcame Digital Literacy Barriers: Embedded localized, step-by-step video tutorials directly into the user onboarding workflow, making complex financial tools instantly understandable and actionable for rural and non-technical users.

What we learned

Building ALKEVA taught us that bridging the gap between traditional asset savings and modern digital finance requires deeply integrating cultural trust, multi-lingual accessibility, and regulatory transparency into every line of code. Details: Throughout this engineering journey, we gained invaluable insights into simplifying complex financial models for diverse user bases. We discovered that building for regional markets across East Africa demands far more than basic translation; it requires a complete rethinking of user onboarding to accommodate varying levels of digital literacy. Implementing video-guided workflows and localized interfaces in five languages proved that intuitive design is the ultimate key to driving user adoption. Technically, balancing real-time data streaming via WebSockets with an AI forecasting engine taught us how to optimize state management and backend responsiveness without compromising high-level enterprise security. Furthermore, navigating regulatory compliance alongside key national institutions reinforced that absolute legitimacy and transparent licensing are non-negotiable when handling physical-to-digital asset conversions. Ultimately, this experience proved that technology is at its most powerful when it honors local socio-economic realities while empowering everyday communities to achieve long-term financial security.

What's next for ALKEVA

Our vision is to scale ALKEVA into a unified pan-African digital commodity exchange, expanding beyond precious minerals to empower millions across the continent with accessible, inflation-proof wealth preservation.

Live Chapa keys and the regulatory work to operate as a real dealer; native speaker review of the three newest translations before launch; physical delivery fulfilment; and more Ethiopian languages — Sidaama, Wolaytta and Afar are each now one translation file away.

Details: Building on our foundation, the next phase of ALKEVA focuses on three key strategic pillars:

Geographic & Regulatory Expansion: We are expanding operations across East Africa and pursuing continental integration with African Union trade frameworks, establishing licensed physical-to-digital trading hubs in key mining regions.
Commodity Diversification: Beyond precious metals, ALKEVA will introduce fractionalized trading for agricultural commodities and strategic industrial minerals, enabling smallholder farmers and retail investors to hedge against local currency volatility.
DeFi & Credit Ecosystem: We are integrating decentralized credit mechanisms that allow users to leverage their verified digital mineral holdings as collateral for micro-loans, unlocking liquidity for underserved entrepreneurs and rural communities.
Enterprise Supply Chain Tracking: Enhancing our platform with blockchain-backed provenance tracking to ensure end-to-end OECD-compliant responsible sourcing from small-scale artisanal mines to global buyers.