Commodity trading has been broken for years. Not in the sense of volume or scale, those metrics look fine on paper. Trillions change hands. Warehouses fill, ships sail, and terminals blink. But the real story, the one that starts on a farm and ends in a supply chain no one can fully trace, tells of something more hollow. Prices swell. Middlemen multiply. The producers and small businesses at either end of the chain? They earn crumbs. For example, a recent 2024 dissertation from the University of Victoria investigates the global chocolate supply chain and reveals that traditional commodity markets systematically obscure the origins and true value of raw inputs, to the detriment of cacao smallholders. The study emphasizes that increased transparency, especially through digital traceability, empowers buyers to make ethically informed decisions and redirects value toward producers at origin The system is structured in a way that the further away you are from the center, the less power and profit you hold. Layers of process, tradition, and bureaucracy keep it that way.
BLK wants that to stop. Gabriele Dadò, the company’s founder, isn’t animated by buzzwords. He doesn’t pitch like a man hunting headlines. When he speaks, he stacks logic like bricks, each backed by something sharper than opinion: first-hand knowledge. “Retail has been disrupted,” Dadò says, “but we haven’t done the same yet for business. People are just people buying from people that they can trust.” The conversation around B2B commerce often forgets its most basic truth: businesses are built by humans. And those humans want transparency, reliability, and fairness, not more intermediaries.
He watched this from two places at once: physically in Asia, mentally back in Europe. Being Italian, the shape of a small business is not academic to him. It’s personal.
“The backbone of the Italian economy, as well as the British economy, is made up of small businesses. About 99%.”
Dadò knew they were being locked out of scale. He saw a new model forming, but not for them, for everyone else. The so-called democratization of commerce had skipped over the heart of the real economy.
He did what most don’t: he built something. BLK is a horizontal raw materials marketplace. It doesn’t hide its margins, and it doesn’t hide its mission. The company has already listed more than $8.2 billion in marketplace stock and doubled revenue over two years. But that’s not the part Dadò brings up first. “We do what we do because I believe in the democratization of trade,” he says. “Then the fact that the company grows and becomes more widespread, and investors make a return, that sort of is a byproduct.” Growth, for him, is confirmation, not the goal.
The problem, he explains, isn’t a lack of buyers or sellers. It’s trust. A 2020 study by Federico Miatton and Laura Amado highlighted how systemic opacity in traditional commodity supply chains severely disadvantages small producers, making it difficult for them to secure fair prices or demonstrate product value. By integrating blockchain for traceability and transparent pricing, the study found that buyers could better assess quality and impact, leading to stronger, trust-based trading relationships. Legacy systems wrapped in bureaucracy keep deals opaque, inefficient, and expensive. So BLK introduced a proprietary vetting method. Sellers are assessed not just on cost or speed, but quality, assembly, service, and environmental impact. Buyers get visibility before they spend a cent. “Building trust has to be the first step,” says Dadò. “Otherwise, transactions simply can’t happen.” Trust isn’t built with slogans. It’s earned through structure, rules, and consistency. It’s what turns a transaction into a relationship.
In this marketplace, contracts aren’t reinvented every time. Terms are standardized. Transactions are repeatable, clean, and scalable. Price isn’t a riddle solved by brokers, it’s listed, spot-based, and visible to all. “We want to enable businesses to pay the real value for what they’re buying,” he says. “And we can only do that through price transparency.” When companies don’t know the going rate, they don’t know what fairness looks like. When pricing is murky, inefficiency becomes invisible.
Transparency isn’t just about digits. It’s about choice. In the current model, the default path often leads overseas, regardless of logic. A company in Manchester might be sourcing from Shanghai, not because it makes sense, but because it doesn’t know a supplier in Sussex exists. BLK makes proximity visible. “You could be buying from Southern England instead of China,” Dadò points out, “but you need to know those suppliers exist. That’s what we’re solving.” Search becomes a strategy when you widen the field of vision. Visibility reshapes logistics.
Every inefficiency carries an environmental cost. BLK has already reached carbon neutrality. Dadò says they’re going further. “We have a mission to become carbon negative in the coming years.” It isn’t just the optics. It’s baked into the structure, a shorter supply chain is a cleaner one. Fewer shipping lanes, fewer emissions, fewer excuses. Companies looking to improve their ESG scores don’t just need reporting tools. They need systems that actually reduce the underlying waste. BLK provides that foundation.
But it isn’t only environmental economics that supports this model. There’s geopolitical turbulence too. Trade tensions, tariffs, and sanctions have upended familiar patterns. Buyers and sellers are looking elsewhere. “We’ve been seeing an increase in demand and increasing registrations from businesses wanting to reorganize the supply chain or looking to find a new market or a new customer because they can no longer trade with the United States,” Dadò says. BLK is the fallback. It’s the new forward. Regional instability creates room for innovation. Where certainty fails, platforms step in to provide new baselines.
This isn’t Dadò’s first time scaling something ambitious. He’s taken two companies public in Italy before. BLK is the first he’s aiming to list in the U.S., a move that would stretch their story across the Atlantic. “We’re planning for an IPO because we want to take the business public and make it available for everybody.” And going public isn’t just about raising capital. It’s about broadening access, to ownership, to opportunity, to shared outcomes.
Not everyone sees IPO preparation as a moment of clarity. For Dadò, it seems to have sharpened the mission. He still talks about smallholders before spreadsheets. He names farmers before margins. He reminds investors of what made the business work before they arrived. “Our vision is essentially having a free online market where, no matter the size of your business, you can buy from the little guy.” The phrase “little guy” isn’t a throwaway line. It’s an anchor.
The pitch is simple. But nothing about BLK is accidental. Each feature closes a gap that’s been exploited for decades. Each tool is pointed directly at a wound that the industry stopped feeling because it was always there. Buyers couldn’t find suppliers. Sellers couldn’t reach buyers. Prices spiraled. Trust vanished. Intermediaries flourished. But the end points of the chain, the people who grow, mine, extract, package, and deliver, were always there, quietly getting less.
BLK puts them first. It’s built for them. It’s a correction; one that argues the best technology in the room is the one that remembers who was forgotten.
