Protocols nobody owns. Not even us.
mintBlue is the expert, integrator and operator of open, public data-sharing protocols. The agreements are public and the audit layer belongs to nobody, so you choose us for our expertise and can switch providers whenever you want.
Trusted by enterprises and governments across Europe
mintBlue turned our nightmare of invoice exchanges into a dream of automation. Now we strive to make taxation less of a headache for everyone involved.
Claire Arens
Innovation & Strategy, Netherlands Tax Administration
6 million invoices annually validated and processed automatically. No manual reconciliation. No disputes over what was agreed.
Sebastian Toet
Solutions Architect, VISMA | Yuki
Real-time, verifiable carbon tracking across our entire supply chain without exposing sensitive supplier data.
Pauline Van Ostaeyen
Cofounder, Dockflow
THE STACK
Four layers, three of them open.
The same structure that made email and the web work: public agreements at the bottom, competing operators at the top.
- 01
The public audit layer
The foundation is a public, tamper-proof ordering layer that nobody owns and that no single operator, mintBlue included, can rewrite or reverse. It carries proofs, timestamps and audit trails. Your data does not live here; only the evidence that it exists and was handled by the rules.
- 02
One open data-sharing protocol
A single open agreement on how organisations encrypt, address, exchange and prove data. It includes a register standard for discovery: look up who a party is, which credentials they hold and how to connect, without asking a trusted third party. Data itself stays on European nodes under your control, deletable for GDPR. mintBlue initiated the standard and maintains the reference implementation, which we are opening up for anyone to reuse or replace.
- 03
Use-case taxonomies
Per domain, a light agreement on what you exchange and what it means: photo authenticity, fraud signals, product passports. Each taxonomy belongs to its working group, not to us. Joining one, or starting your own, requires nobody's permission.
- 04
Machines and applications
The commercial layer, where operators compete. Machines are the running software services that do the work on these protocols: state machines, registries, integrations. We build, provision and run them, and anyone can build machines that compete with ours. We wrote the reference implementation, but nothing in the architecture forces you to pick us.
What the stack guarantees
1
open data-sharing protocol
0
gatekeepers anywhere in the stack
Any
provider can serve your data
Platform or protocol? The difference is who holds the power.
Every data-sharing platform asks the same thing: hand over custody and trust the operator. That works until the operator changes its pricing, its roadmap, or its owner. Governments and multi-party ecosystems cannot build public infrastructure on that bet.
With open protocols, you no longer have to make that bet.
Centralised Platform
- The operator sees the data and sets the rules
- Switching means migration, so pricing power sits with the vendor
- Every participant must trust the same company, indefinitely
- The platform's roadmap becomes your roadmap
mintBlue on Open Protocols
- Agreements are public; the audit layer belongs to nobody
- Any provider can serve the same data, so you keep the freedom to switch
- Trust sits in the protocol and is verified cryptographically
- We keep your business by being the best operator to run it
A selection of use cases running on the stack today
Each pilot below is designed as a reusable taxonomy on these protocols, so the approach carries over instead of starting from scratch each time.
01
Photo authenticity
In a pilot with the Dutch National Office for Identity Data, passport photos are cryptographically verified from capture to acceptance. The underlying agreement is a taxonomy any photographer, vendor or government can adopt.
02
Fraud signals
In an R&D programme with the Ministry of Justice and Security, organisations match fraud patterns without sharing the data behind them. The matching rules are a shared taxonomy that anyone can adopt.
03
Registries
The register standard powers discovery across these pilots: look up who a party is, which credentials they hold and how to connect, without a central directory. Anyone can run their own instance, the way anyone can run an email server.
04
Real-time tax
The Netherlands Tax Administration piloted real-time VAT settlement on the same stack, work that won an Innovation Award from the Dutch Ministry of Finance.
Frequently Asked Questions
Open Protocols
JOIN IN
Adopt a taxonomy, or start a working group.
A 30-minute call with our architects shows you which layer fits your case: adopt an existing taxonomy, run your own machines on the protocols, or bring a new use case to the table.
JOIN IN
Adopt a taxonomy, or start a working group.
A 30-minute call with our architects shows you which layer fits your case: adopt an existing taxonomy, run your own machines on the protocols, or bring a new use case to the table.