Big shipping lines, and industries related to them, as port authorities, banks, brokers and manufacturers, have decided to team up with technology companies to work together towards the designing of a protocol, which integrates all new systems onto one extensive platform system. To uphill with these challenges, Blockchain could be the solution.
Blockchain, “the biggest innovation in the industry since the containerisation,” according to Rahul Kapoor, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence in Singapore, is here to help to stop filling out forms on paper and start filling them out on websites instead. Blockchain will bring significant benefits like:
More transparency and efficiency.
Documentation that takes days will eventually be done in minutes.
Much of it without human intervention.
It Avoids human errors.
The cost of moving goods round continents could decline radically.
Adding renewed incentive to transfer manufacturing or resource materials and goods from abroad.
“Not all stakeholders are looking at deploying the same Blockchain solution and platforms,” This can pose a challenge if stakeholders are expected to trade via a common platform or solution."
And rather than your data living in a proprietary database maintained by one company, or even by an industry-wide consortium, it would live in a shared database maintained on the Blockchain by the shipping industry collectively, which might make the database more secure, reliable, adaptable and trustworthy, and perhaps more likely to be used.
But the truth today is that each shipping company has employed a technology company to build its proprietary cargo-tracking website, its Blockchain. If you pretend to do it on your own, you are missing to get all the significant benefits of upgrading your processes in conjunction with others within your related businesses around the world on a vast platform.
Summing up: Shipping industry can’t work if everyone's using a different Blockchain system. The problem is a social, coordination problem, rather than all the big shippers coming together to agree on and build a massive new platform for the industry to use, each of them seems to be developing its system and hoping that everyone else adopts it. But if everyone does that, then it won't work. Be a part of this movement towards designing an integrated new protocol in which all stakeholders are involved.
“Shipping industry can’t work if everyone's using a different Blockchain system."
Dave Food
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