Blockshipping: Making Seaborne Logistics a Little More Perfect
Yet another sphere of business has fallen victim to the Distributed Ledger technology – a Scandinavian startup Blockshipping is going to give the shipping container business a friendly push with their smart platform called GSCP. Meaning Global Shared Container Platform, GSCP presents a blockchain- and Internet-of-Things-powered system, which you may call a container asset registry. Project’s authors are inspired by an idea to register every cargo container in the world (by the way, it is nearly 30 million units) and supply them with Artificial Intelligence Sensors to automate key processes and improve overall sea container management.
Using this platform, all parties engaged in the marine shipping segment could track each GSCP-enabled container in the real-time mode, and this potentially would bring the industry huge benefits including diminution of operational costs and minimization of carbon dioxide emissions. Moreover, the team believes that GSCP would address the following pain points of the traditional shipping sphere:
- Complicated document flow associated with leasing and selling shipping containers
- Compromised security of containers and loaded goods while shipping
- Ever-changing environmental regulatory pressures
- Inefficient repositioning and utilization of empty or half-full containers
- Lack of coordination between shipping industry parties
GSCP Concept
Futuristic GSCP is to be designed on the base of a permissioned blockchain that will ensure scalability, transparency, security, control, agility, and low transactional costs within the platform. Blockshipping chose Microsoft’s open-source Coco Framework as a foundation for their blockchain. Blockshipping authors gravitate towards a private blockchain framework because it allows industry players to interact with each other and make payments in a decentralized environment, controlled by all participating nodes, where no trust between participants is required.
Marrying distributed ledger and IoT technologies, Blockshipping is introducing a central inventory for intermodal freight containers which will track containers location, process transactions, and record ownership changes.
Putting it simply, Blockshipping will create a container registry platform that would facilitate a broad array of transactions involved in managing containers. GSCP will endow the industry with optimized and efficient processes for organizing and controlling container movement, documentation, sharing, and financing via the usage of blockchain-enabled tracking devices that will be mounted (or supposed to be mounted) in every cargo metal container in the world.
So, GSCP will ensure a real-time container information exchange and automation of key processes (like subleasing, equipment interchange receipts, one-way contracts, etc) and reciprocal payments between all participants involved. Thus, such a system will allow industry stakeholders to dramatically reduce their costs spent on admin/control work.
It is believed that GSCP would be adopted by:
- Beneficiary cargo owners
- Containers manufacturers
- Freight vessels
- Leasing and trucking companies
- Ports, and other associated parties
Token Economy
GSCP will be supported by two crypto coins simultaneously:
CPT, an internal utility token (an abbreviation for Container Platform Token) – suitable for transactional operations between industry participants.
CCC, an external ERC20-standard Container Crypto Coin – meant to distribute a percentage of revenues generated in the network to the CCCs holders.
The Danish Maritime Fund and big investors are already investing in the Blockshipping project, but to ensure a rapid development and worldwide adoption of their platform, Blockshipping took a decision to have a crowd fundraising as well.
Their ICO is live now, and you can participate if you wish so. They are selling CCC tokens at a rate of $0.62 per coin. The total CCC token supply is 50 million out of which, 42.5 million tokens are allocated for sale. A minimum contribution is $100 or equivalent in BTC or ETH.
45% of the money gathered during initial coin sales will be transferred to the company’s Market Maker Fund, which serves to maintain the price of CCCs at an appropriate level. If you buy CCCs via a pre-sale or public sale, but suddenly coins market price catastrophically drops, you still will be allowed to convert and redeem these tokens in USD at the initial price – at any time. By doing so, Blockshipping gives you a peace of mind that you will never regret participating in their ICO.
Final Thoughts
The legacy container shipping sphere is prohibitively inefficient. It has no central registry to keep track of containers and automate related business processes. Repositioning empty containers from A to B is not only highly expensive but involves additional CO2 emissions. Blockshipping is willing to tackle these issues by creating an innovative shipping solution known as GSCP. This solution presents intelligent sensors connected to the private blockchain which would be installed in every freight container in the world, thus, forming a global inventory of traceable containers.
If you consider this project as an investment opportunity, please, conduct your own research before giving to any ICO your hard-earned money.
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Authored by: Will.Smith (@iwgeiw)