Blockchain Technology Drops its Anchor in the Shipping Industry
The words import and export inevitably conjure up pictures of open waters, sailors, loading cranes, and cargo boxes big enough to fit a small family — things that we normally see as much removed from ourselves, confined to a certain industrial sector. But a cursory glance around the room is enough to contradict this notion. Imported furniture, electronics, clothing and even food is stacked in every corner of our room.
Container ships move 95% of all manufactured goods around the world. In 2017 more than 4 trillion dollars worth of products were sent over the ocean. The economic advantages of this mode of heavy load transportation are many — the containers themselves not only protected the products but when the ships dock at ports, trucks and freight trains can take them without repackaging, cutting costs of both making provisions of added security and boxing of items. Container ships as high as the empire state building if put upright can move 20, 000 containers each, transfer products worth millions from continent to continent and making stops at dozens of ports along the way. The resulting logistics, therefore, is staggering.
In an attempt to enhance the efficiency of the operations, blockchain is being seen as the future of the shipping industry. With a transparent, decentralized digital ledger in place, tracking of the imported/exported items becomes infinitely easy, even allowing provisions for real time tracking of each registered article. The immutability native to blockchain makes it impossible to change the entered data without disrupting all data entered before and after any specific transaction, and the attempted change would have to be verified by a number of individuals serving as check points. Misplacing of valuable items or losing them in transition would become a thing of the past. Global cargos distributed through blockchain technology will eliminate paperwork and further cut costs.
The advantages that this revolutionary technology could bring to the complex business of heavy load cargo shipping is being increasingly recognized by leading shipping corporations in many coastal countries, and they are collaborating with blockchain companies to bring their operations to customized networks. California based Blockchain company, HashCash is one such firm that is working on developing a logistics platform to carry out the supply chain mechanism of the transportation process, following the ships and its contents across international ports.
Modern shipping has come a long way since 1956 since American truck driver Malcolm Mclean stacked 58 metal boxes on a ship going from New Jersey to Houston. Today global shipping behemoths like Denmark’s Maersk, France’s CMA CGM, and China’s Costco are viewing blockchain as the future of the shipping industry, and could include crewless behemoths, running on batteries that can move 50,000 containers, in future. And with a so-called Tesla of the seas hitting the water in a Norwegian fjord later this year, the blockchain makeover in nearly here.
