// PLATFORM JOURNAL
Thoughts, write-ups, and developer highlights from the creators of Ascendance.
Article
Chinese operators kept mining cobalt, stopped selling it, and poured everything into copper. Six months on they are richer, more liquid, and holding the tonnes the state gated.
Article
An investor can hold a treaty-backed first claim on a Congolese asset and still lose the tonnes it produces. Nothing in either instrument says which claim comes first.
Article
America’s new Africa envoy is on his second tour of the continent, and the deal his pitch is built on isn’t on the itinerary. The omission isn’t a snub. It’s the clearest available signal of how Washington is actually using the SPA: as a precedent text, not a relationship that still needs tending.
Article
Sibéka was judicially dissolved in Belgium in December 2023. It still holds 20 percent of MIBA, the Congolese state diamond producer. That stake has outlived three owners and one death certificate, and its percentage never changed once.
Article
The first published economics of the Dilolo-Sakania concession settle what the state gets. They leave open who pays for it, and that answer is written in a tariff nobody has seen.
Article
Katanga is short 2,000 MW. Angola has the surplus. The capital wiring the two together answers to Luanda and the Gulf, not to Washington’s treaty.
Article
Both things are true, they are in the same release, and only one of them made the headlines. The localisation is real. So is the relocation of oversight, and the timing tells you which one the release was written to show.
Article
Three consecutive US assessments have asked the DRC to disclose how its sovereign wealth fund is financed. The disclosure exists. It cites a decree the government itself described as rewriting the Mining Code, and which is reported to be before the Conseil d’État.
Article
The Sanctions Architecture of the Washington Accords Faces Its First Courtroom Test with Joseph Kabila, sanctioned by the US Treasury on April 30, 2026 for material support to the M23 and AFC, taking his designation into a US federal courtroom.
Article
Two states moved on the same company for the same metal within six months. Neither named the Congolese mines that make both deals work, and neither used the treaty signed to govern exactly this.
