A start-up led by seasoned professionals in the shipping industry is creating a Blockchain-driven platform which, for the first time, will provide a real-time registry of the world’s 27 million containers.
Blockshipping says its solution – which is called the Global Shared Container Platform (GSCP for short) – has what it takes to address staggering inefficiencies in the marketplace, bringing significant savings for businesses throughout the supply chain and dramatically reducing the industry’s toll on the environment.
Despite being a “hugely valuable” sector, Blockshipping says the industry has been plagued for years by security threats[1], overcapacity and ever-tightening environmental policies – adding that some issues have gone unresolved for decades.
Within a three to four-year period, the Scandinavian company aspires to have 60 percent market coverage – equating to 16 million shipping containers – and hopes its utility token will become the standard currency for transactions between firms operating in the industry.
Crunching the numbers
Blockshipping believes firms will be incentivized to adopt its technology by estimates which suggest the industry could enjoy annual savings of $5.7 billion if the Global Shared Container Platform goes mainstream.
This would be achieved through the “smarter handling” that the GSCP would enable – making it easier for deficit and surplus containers to be matched. Blockshipping’s white paper[2] cites research which indicates that carriers could reduce the size of their container fleets by up to 20 percent by installing real-time tracking sensors and gaining accurate location data.
The company also claims that, at any given time, one in five containers worldwide (the equivalent of 5 mln units) is unaccounted for. To compound the problem, it can be difficult to gather information about whether containers are empty or loaded, meaning that, all too frequently, trains and trucks
