Critical-minerals supply chains face a structural tension: regulators and buyers demand verifiable provenance, yet upstream actors are hesitant to disclose supplier identities, assay grades/yields, and prices that verification appears to require. We report a design science account of OreProof, a prototypical traceability platform addressing this verifiability-disclosure trade-off. Instantiated for gold, OreProof combines a hybrid on-chain/off-chain data model, Groth16 zero-knowledge proofs for selective disclosure, a Merkle-batched anchoring pipeline, and UNTP-aligned verifiable credentials on a public zkEVM testnet. Against a transparent baseline, directly inferable confidential attributes fell from three of four categories to none under a defined attacker model, while batched anchoring substantially improved throughput. Our contributions are the artifact prototype as well as four nascent design principles: prove over committed data rather than exposing it; credential only verifiable origin and flag unknown inputs for blended commodities; emit standards-aligned credentials from the outset; and partition disclosure by supply-chain role.

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