DeSci · Field Season · Open Data
Open mineral
intelligence
Field-collected gravity separation data and USGS benchmarks — machine-readable, on-chain provenance, pay per call. Built by a solo founder running real equipment in the field.
Mission
Mineral data should be open — and verifiable
Government mineral data is technically public. But it's buried in PDFs, scattered across agency websites, and almost impossible to query programmatically. No API. No machine-readable format. No provenance chain linking raw report to delivered data.
Field processing data — what actually happens when you run a concentrate through a grooved tray with ultrasound at 40 kHz — is almost never shared publicly. Every small operator runs experiments in isolation. The knowledge evaporates.
MineFlowTrack is an experiment: can you build a data layer for mineral intelligence that's open, empirical, and verifiable from field observation all the way to API response? With x402 and EAS, yes.
DeSci is the movement to rebuild research incentives and data ownership on open infrastructure. MineFlowTrack applies DeSci primitives — on-chain attestations, IPFS storage, permissionless access — to physical world data collection in mineral processing.
x402 enables machine-to-machine payments without accounts or subscriptions. AI agents can pay for data the same way they pay for any other service call — programmatically, in USDC, with EIP-3009 authorization. No OAuth dance. No API key management. Just pay and get data.
Industry context
What is gravity separation?
The oldest and cleanest form of mineral beneficiation — no chemicals, no heat, just density difference exploited by water flow. Here's the domain knowledge an AI agent needs to reason about MineFlowTrack data.
Gravity separation
Minerals with different specific gravities separate in a flowing water film on an inclined surface. Dense minerals (gold: SG 19.3, sulfides: SG 4–6) migrate to the concentrate zone. Gangue (quartz: SG 2.65) washes off.
Ultrasound cavitation
A transducer coupled to the tray generates cavitation bubbles at 28–40 kHz. These micro-implosions break surface tension, dislodge fine particles from surfaces, and improve liberation — particularly effective for gold particles below 100 microns.
Placer vs. hardrock
Placer gold is free-milling, already liberated by weathering and erosion. Hardrock gold is locked in host rock and requires crushing and milling before separation. MineFlowTrack field work focuses on placer concentrates from the American West.
Recovery rate
The percentage of target mineral actually captured in the concentrate versus what was present in the feed. A recovery rate of 85% means 15% of the gold in the feed was lost to tailings. Every run log records this metric.
Elutriation
A hydraulic sizing and classification method. In the mini-Duke elutriation setup, an upward water column separates fine particles by terminal settling velocity, allowing pre-classification of feed before gravity separation. Phase 2 equipment (from May 20).
USGS commodity summaries
The U.S. Geological Survey publishes annual Mineral Commodity Summaries covering global mine production, reserve estimates, import/export, price data, and industrial applications. MineFlowTrack serves these as x402-gated, machine-readable API responses with EAS provenance.
17-week field season
Three phases of data collection
The field season runs May–September. Each phase introduces new equipment. All runs flow through the same v1 schema — no schema changes mid-season.
Phase 1 — Baseline
May 11 – May 19
Grooved stainless tray, no ultrasound, no elutriation. Establishes baseline gravity separation recovery rates for the feed material before any enhancement equipment is introduced.
Schema: tray_geometry: "grooved_stainless_v1"
ultrasound_freq_khz: 0
Phase 2 — mini-Duke
May 20 onward
Mini-Duke elutriation rig added. Feed is hydraulically pre-classified before hitting the tray. Measures whether pre-classification improves recovery rate and reduces processing time.
Schema: tray_geometry: "mini_duke_elutriator_v1"
ultrasound_freq_khz: 0
Phase 3 — Ultrasound
Late June onward
Ultrasound transducer coupled to the grooved stainless tray. Tests whether cavitation at 28 kHz and 40 kHz measurably improves fine gold recovery compared to Phase 1 baseline.
Schema: tray_geometry: "grooved_stainless_v1"
ultrasound_freq_khz: 28 | 40
Who built this
Quetzal Collective LLC
MineFlowTrack is built and operated by Quetzal Collective LLC — a solo founder doing both the field work and the software engineering. Field days are in the American West; desk time is at most 6 hours per week during the field season.
The experiment is whether a single person can collect empirical mineral processing data, attest it on-chain, and serve it via a pay-per-call API — all without a team, without VC funding, and without interrupting the fieldwork that generates the data.
Everything is open: the EAS schema UIDs are public, the IPFS data is pinned publicly, and the API gate is mechanical — not gatekept.
Base has the lowest gas costs of any EVM mainnet. EAS (Ethereum Attestation Service) provides a standard schema registry for creating typed, verifiable on-chain records — without a custom smart contract. Both are built for production-scale usage, not experiments.
On-chain storage of full run logs would be prohibitively expensive. Instead, each run is pinned to IPFS via Pinata, and the CID is committed to the EAS attestation. The EAS record is the trustless pointer; IPFS is the content-addressed store.