We have started seeing blockchains coming up left right and center to address many of humanity’s hitherto perennial problems.
However, solutions that enable us to exponentially contribute to the environment and save ourselves gazillions of dollars have only recently started coming up. Like the Zero Carbon Project…
… and now the Global Shared Container Platform, or in other words, the Blockshipping Blockchain.
How is container shipping going to be disrupted for worldwide gain?
Even more important, how is this blockchain proposing to improve or conserve the environment, while saving the industry dollar billions?
This article will shed light on all that, but let us first…
Understand the Legacy Container Shipping trade
Malcolm Purcell McLean did not go to sleep after the second world war. He proposed the use of standard gauge containers with 20-foot, 40 and 45-foot containers as the models.
By 1956, he shipped the first world war tanker modified as a container, and succeeded in changing shipping forever.
According to Statista, The world’s container shipping industry is the biggest seafaring trade nowadays, controlling $12 trillion in revenues, which was about 60% of all sea trade in 2017.
There are slightly more than 27 million containers worldwide. In other words, McLean’s pioneering work is arguably one of the biggest innovations in world trade.
But there are major industry barriers to this trade, and we will highlight just a few;
To the shipper
Massive problems with the state of merchandise and real time tracking of goods play out in this trade. For example, perishables are supposed to be transported in reefer containers. The authenticity of the reports on the state of the goods at destination port is left to the importers, much to the disadvantage of the shipper.
It is the classic curse of the lack of Port of Arrival Neutrality.
Another hindrance to this trade is inefficiencies in clearing and tracking information flow and high fees that make the industry a cumbersome option, as corruption, ineptitude and massive fraud interpose honest business and create huge barriers and price inflations.
To the Importer
Ultimately, all the shipping inefficiencies are transferred to the importer, and by extension to the consumer. They include the risk of not knowing where most of the containers are at any one time, damage or loss litigation, extended corruption and fraud, unfair and opaque clearing fees, overpriced inland haulage fees, substandard customer care from shipping lines and outdated shipping IT services.
To the Shipping Company
There is a huge problem for a container shipping company at current. Not only do they have containers as static, internal depreciating assets, but have the added task of hauling empty containers (pollution and costs) andloss of in-freight equipment, but also the extra costs for storage and maintenance of empty idle containers.
They also bear the brunt of merchandise litigation when shipping goes haywire, with no objective evidence to apportion responsibility to where it belongs.
Centralized shipping services are not easy to maintain. You need an in-house IT team. And most of these teams have been actually running archaic systems that cannot tell where more than half of the containers of each company are.
And don’t get started on redundancy at the agencies…
To the Financier
Now Companies go bankrupt all the time. When a shipping business goes under, and there is no port-to-port provenance of containers, it becomes very hard to recover assets from funded shipments that are in the high seas.
To Inland Hauliers and Carriers
Inland hauliers are another affected lot. Whether by rail, barge or truck, inland vagaries are diverse. From highway extortion, poor pricing to worker pilferage, untold damages are transferred to haulage companies when goods don’t go the last mile as intended.
Other global problems to the industry
Other than all these problems, there are the issues of global terrorism, general insecurity, fraud, overcapacity, redundant portside workforce, delayed payments and general inefficiency in the whole industry.
And this is perfect fodder for disruption…
Modern technologies like the blockchain, AI and Internet of Things are unique in that they look at existing industries and try to look at ways of enhancing human interactions while at the same time caring for the environment which we now know we must conserve for us to thrive.
The container shipping industry is now ripe for massive disruption.
Looking around, there doesn’t seem to be so many people who are capable of doing that. No one has a clearer vision of what must be done to accomplish what many think as impossible, other than GSCP.
And they are doing this in complete fidelity to the existing laws…
Building regulatory compliance to ICOs
A framework of lawyers, blockchain and communication experts have come together to create an ICO framework that operates in full compliance to Danish Laws, and assists in the review of existing laws to coincide with the exploding blockchain based business model.
It will be known as the ICO 2.0 Framework.
Blockshipping, the company that has started the GSCP platform as a subsidiary, are running their platform in parallel and perfect harmony to the formation of this framework.
This is good news.
Borrowing from pioneering work done by the SAFT project which was started by the US SEC, the framework heralds a new era of regulation-to-blockchain co-existence with massive potential benefits for the economies and the people who use the platforms all over the world.
And now, the GSCP Blockshipping Questions.
1. Who constitutes the GSCP Blockchain Ecosystem?
It now seems that the only way to disrupt the world of shipping, probably in a similar version to the 1950 heroics achieved by Malcolm Purcell, is to introduce the blockchain and all its attendant little sisters like AI and IoT in a comprehensively thought out and implemented shipping platform.
The GSCP is here, and all these different aspects of the industry have been pieced together into a very comprehensive solution that weaves efficiency, convenience, cost reduction, regulatory compliance and respect for the environment into a beautiful and immensely powerful container shipping experience.
This GSCP enterprise is two-fold…
The Danish Connection
Denmark is the world’s capital when it comes to the design and deployment of all types of seafaring techniques and maritime technologies. Despite a low population of less than 7 million people, Denmark is ranked as the world’s 7th seafaring economy. It is home to Maersk, the world’s largest container-based shipping enterprise.
Another interesting phenomena is that the same country prides itself as the center of Europe’s blockchain solutions. In fact, the European Blockchain Center is located in Copenhagen, at the IT University.
Now, these two specialties are about to merge in one of the world’s biggest synergistic confluences of the blockchain technology and real world environmental and economic enterprises, backed by a sound regulation from the Danish authorities.
It is known as the Global Sharing Container Platform (GSCP).
Blockshipping
The GSCP has been proposed and is being developed by the Danish Company, Blockshipping.
It is the first Nordic Shipping-based ICO, and it is headed by Peter Ludvigsen as its CEO. Peter has almost forty years’ experience in shipping, e-commerce and corporate ecosystems.
He leads a very impressive array of professionals in many fields, including shipping operations, logistics, communication, Artificial intelligence, branding, Danish Law, banking & Finance and blockchain.
This ICO is a 2018 Danish based ICO.
Let me explain.
2017 was a crazy year for ICOs. Everything seemed possible, and the masses were roped in by the gold-rush to cash in on penny coins and the Fear Of Mission Out – FOMO.
2018 heralds a year that a deeper analysis of what an ICO stands for, the legal implications, safeguards for investments and a better team analysis is becoming mainstream.
Blockshipping has entered the market at the right time. They are addressing the regulatory framework and have presented themselves as the first test-case for the Danish ICO 2.0 Framework (much of that later). This in addition to presenting one of the best though out blockchain solutions with world-wide and immediate impact.
2. How will the system operate?
GSCP’s Decentralized Inclusivity
The beautiful thing about decentralization of industry operations is that it affords everyone a platform to equitably contribute to the overall success of the value chain.
From inland carriers, terminal operations, trucking companies, container leasers (exporters), importers, financial and insurance institutions, freight forwarders to container manufacturers, the GSCP opens the door for the first ever decentralized ecosystem that seamlessly inter-governs the whole industry and makes all the decisions and processes fair, transparent and traceable, immutably and cheaply.
Creating a decentralized Container Registry
The first step will be to create a global digital tracking registry for all ‘active’ inter modal containers, on a global scale.
Now this is a formidable undertaking, but one with massive global benefits.
Within the next 2-3 years, the GSCP aspires to provide a blockchain based tracking of at least 60% of all registered containers worldwide using blockchain technologies.
A permissioned distributed ledger will allow for use of IoT to enable instant updates of interchanges and container mobility across the value chains and ensure that the blockchain knows exactly who has which container, when and where.
Managing operational payments
The shipping industry has many inter-player transactions. The blockchain proposes to use its token based pay-out systems for most of the transactions that happen in the value chain.
This, apart from providing a fast, cheap and globally uniform payment module, will make the fees transparent, fair, commensurate with the transaction nature and verifiable.
Providing an blockchain based platform for container tracking
Welcome to the global sharing economy.
The shipping industry is about to see the disruptive power of container sharing through the inter modal container tracking management proposal. It is going to be two-fold;
The Greybox solution
Popularly known as the Greybox Solution, Inter-enterprise container exchange has been enabled, albeit inadvertently, by the blockchain technology, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things.
Let’s see how;
Relocating empty containers is expensive and poses environmental hazards due to unnecessary ‘air haulage’. Most carriers will do that because they must use containers they own.
But the blockchain can change all this. What about the deficit-surplus container tracking system that allows any shipper to use any nearby empty container to load cargo using lease trust lines?
With a decentralized system, everyone knows how many containers are owned by who and are currently being used by whom, and where they are. More importantly, using the tokenized fee payment structure, a transparent IOU system can be built in with proper hard coded safeguards.
The sweetener is that the container ‘exchange’ model has a fee to it that could allow for maintenance and in the process, ensure that container storage costs due to overcapacity are tamed.
This model also provides decentralised but permissioned monitoring and tracking of all containers for such interested parties as insurance and finance providers, shippers and importers. For example, the system provides other qualitative data for exporters and importers alike, including the temperature, humidity, quantity and expiry details of consumables, and integrity of all merchandise.
It is time to forget about branding containers, and concentrate more with building truly consumer friendly opportunities that make it irrelevant to have many containers, but rather have many users of a shipping service.
Hell, it will spurn a whole new industry where container manufacturers will make new containers not to sell, but to lease to the blockchain, based on an immutable and verifiable demand! Because no one will be buying containers as a branding initiative, or keeping whole soccer-field yards of idle containers!
Street-turn solutions
Another spin-off to the decentralized trucking is the final and complete solution to the street-turn problem. It is similar to the Greybox, but this time, it is inland.
Imagine you are in a town, with a consignment that you want to ship via Maersk through a particular port. The only problem is that they don’t have an empty container in your town, or if they have, it is further from you than another two or three empty containers from another shipping company that have just been offloaded and are heading back to port, empty.
You would have to pay for ‘empty mileage’ for Maersk to bring their faraway container to you, and the now empty containers will head in the same direction to the port.
Now imagine if there was a neutral redistribution of empty container shipping space, no matter who is providing the service.
The just-emptied container that is just next door would just turn through the street gate and collect your cargo, so long as your shipping requirements and the capabilities of that containers were perfectly aligned.
This is the power of the Street-turn effect!
It promises to reduce haulage costs enormously, and reduce the global carbon emissions by a colossal 1.8 million metric tonnes, annually!
Monetize Data insights that use ML, AI, IoT and Blockchain
Now, all these functionalities of the GSCP are not going to be possible without the synergistic efforts of a staggering amount of new technologies that were not available just recently.
The use of machine learning will allow for many AI based solutions in the industry. For example, regular platform users will have preferences and the decentralized worldwide Ethereum Virtual Machine will ‘learn and customize’ their preferences for a continually automated and customized experience.
Artificial intelligence will help in many things, including global positioning, parameter reporting, distress signalling and fraud detection.
All this will be helped by integrating ‘things’ like sensors and devices into a mesh of interconnected and communicating ‘internet’ which allows the artificial intelligence built into the platform to employ cognitive judgement and therefore execute immutable tasks by instructing smart contracts deployed on the blockchain.
These could range from alerting interested parties of the fate of a particular container in transit, trapping and transmission of ground-zero intelligence to combat insecurity and fraud, etc.
Another benefit of this incredible mix of technology is the advent of smart ports. Whole countries are currently bogged down by intentional port inefficiencies due to fraud, corruption, nepotism, cronyism and other vices.
This blockchain has the power to force efficiency down ports, and save carriers, forwarders and clearers, shippers and importers and ultimately taxpayers, the pain of waiting for overpriced services, often to the detriment of the goods and the very business for which the freighting was sanctioned in the first place.
3. Explain about CCC and CPT tokens?
Now, GSCP proposes to roll out its operations using two blockchain based tokens.
The CCC
As much as Angel funding has been accessed by the blockchain to kickstart operations, the Container Crypto Coin, aka the CCC, is issued on the global Ethereum network to assist in funding the GSCP initiative.
It is regarded as the external token, and will be mainly traded for speculative purposes, and also to allow for distribution of the blockchain gains amongst the holders of the funding token.
The GSCP is interesting in that it will incentivize the movement of CCCs by first liquidating the Container Platform Token (aka the CPT) – much of this below- in the sharing pool, to ETH, and offering an Eth price to CCC holders in exchange for theirholdings in timed and escalated auctions.
The price will keep on increasing in the course of the auction, and the CCC purchase will continue until all recovered Eth is spent. All the CCC thus recovered will be redistributed to the updated list of CCC owners on a pro-rata basis, meaning that CCC holders stand to benefit whether they sell or not!
The CPT
The Container Platform Token, aka the CPT, is the transaction token. It is the internal currency that will be used to make transactional payments, and will be pegged on the US dollar.
A percentage of the CPT earned by anyone trading on the platform will go to a ‘revenue sharing pool.’ this will be the main distribution point for the CPT to CCC owners, and the fund will be disbursed as described above.
4. So how will this blockchain help the environment?
The increased efficiency in container utilization will see an overall improvement by 15% of container usage, which will lead to a global annual reduction of around 2.2 million tonnes of CO2 worldwide as a saving from container materials (steel) and container processing.
The Greybox concept will lead to a further reduction of half a million tonnes, with a further 1.8 million being saved from the street-turn concept.
Overall, this project is forecasted to have the potential to reduce emissions by more than 4.6 million tonnes of CO2 annually. Those are a whopping 4.6 million carbon credits from GSCP alone!
Final thoughts
He is a fool, the man who does not look at such ICOs like the GSCP and ponder about the potential for global disruption of the largest international trade enterprise in the world, the container shipping industry.
From solving inefficiency, fraud, corruption, insecurity and delays found in the industry, the GSCP is poised to also be a springboard to world peace and environmental conservation.
This blockchain based initiative will lead to a worldwide reduction of shipping costs, reduced carbon emissions, increased container use efficiencies and an improved overall Industry performance.
And their token sales are happening in 2018. Internal and external tokens are available for shippers, stock holders, speculators and you and me.
Investment decisions are personal. This article pre-supposes that you understand a little about shipping, a little more about the blockchain technologies and even far less about other geeky technologies like machine learning, neural networks, Internet of Things and general artificial intelligence.
But the bottom line is that it supposes that for all investments you do in this industry, you do your own research and base your investments upon your own conclusions!