Overview
Palmyra is an online wholesale marketplace that lets businesses buy commodities like tea, spices, and honey directly from the producers who grow them. Think of it like an online farmers market for businesses: buyers can search by product or region, contact sellers, and place orders starting at one thousand dollars. Listings show the seller's name, the product origin, and a price per kilogram, so a buyer can see who they are dealing with before reaching out.
The marketplace is run by zenGate Global, a Dublin-based technology company whose CEO was part of the founding team at Input Output Group that launched Cardano. Underneath the marketplace, a separate framework called the Winter Protocol records each shipment's journey on Cardano. The protocol is designed for eUTxO chains and the docs include an Ergo path, but the live Palmyra integration runs on Cardano. Each event (packaging, processing, transfer between parties) is written to the chain so the history of a product cannot be rewritten after the fact12. Buyers and sellers do not need a crypto wallet to use the site.
Key Features
- Buy direct from the producer. Listings come straight from named producers in regions like India and Sri Lanka. These are tea estates, spice growers, and honey producers, not a chain of middlemen. Buyers see the seller, the product origin, and a price per kilogram on every listing3.
- Built-in product history. Each shipment's key events (packaging, processing, transfer between parties) are recorded through the open-source Winter Protocol, which writes those records to Cardano. The result is a record buyers can show their own customers or regulators, with each step written to the chain so it cannot be edited later24.
- Payments held safely by a regulated provider. Money never sits with zenGate Global. Payments run through MangoPay, a European-licensed payments company that holds funds during the order and releases them once the deal is complete. Sellers complete identity checks with MangoPay before they can receive payouts5.
- Built for smaller wholesale orders. The platform is set up around a one-thousand-dollar minimum order. This is small for a commodity exchange but large enough to be a serious business deal. It makes the site usable for specialty buyers, like independent tea companies and regional spice importers, who get squeezed out of the largest exchanges3.
- Open-source backend. The code that powers the product-history layer, including the Cardano integration, is published in zenGate Global's public repositories on GitHub. Outside developers can review how the on-chain records are written and read.
What to Expect
Most of the site is what a buyer sees. You land on a homepage of current product listings, filter by commodity (tea, cinnamon, cardamom, pepper, nutmeg, mace, cloves, honey, ginger, turmeric) or by region, and click into a listing to see the producer, the origin, and the per-kilogram price. To ask about a product or place an order, you create an account and complete identity checks through the platform's payment provider. There is no crypto wallet step.
For sellers, Palmyra handles the parts of an export deal that are usually the slowest: discovery, identity checks, payment, and a record of the transaction. Pricing is per-transaction, so producers do not pay a subscription to list. Disputes go through informal negotiation first and then arbitration in Ireland, which is a more conventional path than most blockchain platforms offer.
The product-history layer sits quietly in the background. A regular buyer never has to think about Cardano, the Winter Protocol, or automated rulebooks to use Palmyra. But a buyer who needs to prove a product's origin, for real-world-assets reporting, regulatory paperwork, or their own marketing, can pull a verified history of the shipment6.
