Even the backbone of the world-economy, shipping, wants its blockchain, that is the technology behind Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. One of the most promising IT validation registers is also being tested by the first shipowner specialized in container transport, the Danish shipping company Maersk Line, which carries around the globe almost a quarter of the containers you see around. In March last year it started a collaboration with International Business Machines (IBM). On Tuesday, the two companies announced the signing of an agreement “to improve the efficiency and safety” of merchant transport, to create “an ecosystem of companies”. In practice, an ad hoc company to adapt Satoshi Nakamoto's block and node technology to the myriad of documentary services required to make the goods travel from one port to another.
Beyond the innovation behind the blockchain – an accounting ledger that, by virtue of its intrinsic inability to be modified, self-legitimizes the operations it stores – the great potential behind the use of this technology for shipping lies in the possibility of assisting in “Live streaming” on notification of each authorization, which saves a lot of time. It is a bit as if ambassadors, government officials, shipping agents, freight forwarders, customs agents, brokers, shipowners and hauliers all assisted together, at the same time and in the same place, in approving the documents required to travel a commodity, for example. , from Shanghai to Southampton. It is the realization of a dream that in the environment is called “single window” – a bit the dream of bureaucracy in general – that is the compression of time up to an eternal present: every documentary process, authorization, clearance, customs bill, not only is it notified to everyone at the same time but it is the notification itself, as it is encrypted, that constitutes an endorsement.
The example of live streaming is fitting: the notable element is not so much that every administrative act is processed electronically (in some customs, for some shipping companies, this already happens) as that it is possible to create a single administrative environment in which to process everyone. the necessary acts. It is the internet revolution: the possibility of participating simultaneously, in one place, in events distant in space.
What is a blockchain
The blockchain (chain of blocks) is an open computer ledger that has revolutionized the world of “cryptocurrencies”, the virtual currency to which Bitcoin is the most famous. Simplifying a lot: every user who participates in the ledger is connected with everyone else and holds a copy of a kind of ledger, called a blockchain. The blockchain records all the transactions of all users ever since that chain was used for the first time. To do this, the blockchain is open and can be consulted by anyone who uses it. It is self-sufficient, decentralized, it does not require an authority to approve its operations because its own operations, due to the way they are done, are self-legitimizing.
This is possible because every single transaction resides within a chain of blocks that goes back to the very first one from the last, and because each user of the chain is always aware of all the other operations that are made by other users (with Bitcoins , for example, this is to prevent someone from using the same Bitcoin to pay for two different things). Each transaction on the chain generates a block which in turn suggests a node to hook to the next block (the next transaction). Any modification of a block, which is not a transaction, affects all previous blocks, thus destroying the chain itself. You can't tamper with such a thing: it would be like forging a dollar by drawing George Washington's profile on a piece of paper. The first “hash block” system dates back to 1991 but the most used type today is the one described and created by Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym behind the inventor (or inventors) of Bitcoin, conceived in 2008 in a white paper and implemented the next year.
Back to shipping
The new company managed by IBM and Maersk does not yet have a name but already has a seat, New York, a president (the head of Maersk North America, Michael White), a distribution of shares (the majority to the shipowner) and should start offering this service to ports and operators from the second half of this year. IBM and Maersk have been collaborating on blockchain and cloud since June 2006 and have already sold their services to DuPont, Dow Chemical, Tetra Pak, Port Houston and Rotterdam Port Community System Portbase, one of the most advanced IT platforms dedicated to port logistics. General Motors and Procter and Gamble expressed interest. Other major customers are the customs of the port of Singapore and the ports of Peru, Apm Terminals (the terminal operator of Maersk, with dozens of container terminals around the world) and the Singaporean PSA International (among the first port operators in the world). The peculiarity, as always when it comes to shipping, lies in the size of the project.
For Maersk's commercial director, Vincent Clerc, it is about grasping the “enormous potential” behind “a neutral and open digital platform”. A type of blockchain, according to Bridget van Kralingen, senior vice president of IBM Global Industries, Solutions and Blockchain, capable of “promoting new business models to millions of organizations”. The most effective synthesis is White: «Technology is changing everything in today's world. It's a matter of time for our way of doing business to change too ». Beyond the emphasis, the point, for shipping as for any bureaucratic operation, lies in a principle as generic as it is powerful: a technology that changes the characteristics of the shipment to the point of being able to intervene on the time factor.
The impact of the blockchain on shipping
The transport of goods by sea is so extensive and structured that it has one of the largest bureaucracies. Taking an average of the numerous government, university and entrepreneurial studies, shipping moves 60 percent of world GDP, 80 percent of goods – for a value of about 4 trillion – and its logistics costs almost 2 thousand every year. billions. It is the backbone of the world-economy, a dizzying space capitalism, on which China wants to get its hands. A transport logistics of this size generates an abnormal amount of documents, mostly paper, which can even cost more than shipping, even if on average, on a 2,000 dollar journey, 300 (15% of the value of the cargo) are for customs bills and health clearances.
Sending a package of flowers from the port of Mombasa to Rotterdam involves at least 200 communications between thirty people (real and legal): shipping companies, brokers, governments, port authorities and shipowners. It starts with the authorization of three agencies. Six other documents describe, among other things, the phytosanitary treatment received, the quality of the product and the tariffs applied. The container has not yet left Mombasa. With the blockchain, everything could be notified on a single back-office, on desktop, in live streaming, when they are made and, above all, approved when they are shared. At the same time, again on a “blockchained” back-office, the port of Mombasa would receive the response on the health inspections of the flowers, the state of the refrigerated cells of the container, the loading on the truck and the approval of the customs authorities.
A single chain of events in one place for processes that normally take place even a week before departure and that could start and run out here in half an hour. According to Maersk's calculations, a shipping blockchain could increase global traffic volume by 15 percent. After the publication of Nakamoto's “white paper”, virtually every bank has started working on its own blockchain. From today the shipowners also work there.
