Commodity trading is an old, complicated and absolutely vital field of commerce. After all, without the movement of physical goods, the rest of the economy would be a house with no foundation. However, this important market can be difficult to approach for both investors and companies. A lot of money and effort is required to deal in commodities effectively, and small and medium enterprises find it difficult to secure the necessary financing. This is not surprising, as banks and other institutional investors prefer larger, more established companies that are better-known and better-able to sustain their operations despite the waste and risk that accompany shipping.
https://kratospct.io/
Arkratos is a Singapore-based company that wants to use blockchain technology to resolve the various problems of this industry in one fell swoop. By using the smart contracts on its Kratos platform, trading companies should be able to make their business operations much more efficient and reliable. Meanwhile, its innovative token-curated registry process will utilise the wisdom of the crowds and a clever token economy to help potential financiers find worthwhile commodity trading investment opportunities.
How will the Kratos platform work?
Trading companies wishing to use Kratos will need to register and log in on its website and launch a trade ticket. They will then need to decide whether or not to apply for trade financing on the platform. To do so, they will need to stake a certain amount of TOS tokens and provide relevant information about their proposed trade (such as the goods in question, value and their own credit score and past performance). After confirming this information and the company's credentials, the platform will make the ticket available for review. A machine algorithm will select and notify a random set of token holders, who will need to stake their own TOS to function as curators for the trade. Whether the trade should be whitelisted for financiers on the platform will be decided by a simple majority vote with a minimum of 10 active voters over 24 hours. If the application is rejected, the trader will receive 40% of the TOS staked, while the rest will go towards paying gas prices and rewarding curators. Otherwise, all the TOS staked by the applicant will go to the curators. Tokens staked by the minority voters will be distributed among the majority in either outcome.
Participating financiers will be notified about whitelisted trades and all the relevant information through special APIs, without any need to commit tokens. Whether they go through this process or not, Kratos users will be able to use the platform to generate smart contracts with buyers, sellers, shippers, investors and insurers. Kratos will allow sales contracts, letters of credit, bills of lading, shipping lists and certifications to be digitised and used to carry out and confirm complex transactions. While all token transactions will be recorded on the blockchain, the database and storage systems will be stored off-chain on an Amazon cloud server to ensure maximum efficiency. Over time, Kratos will incorporate additional features, such as risk management, finance, administration and logistics modules.
What advantages does Kratos offer to the commodity market?
The platform's whitelisting procedure should help commodity traders – particularly, smaller trading companies – seek out funding on the basis of greater trust, as well as remove many inefficiencies inherent in the current trading process through smart contracts. Potential financiers, whether banks, funds or individual investors, would find both a list of more reliable investment opportunities and a digital infrastructure with which to support them. Meanwhile, TOS holders will be rewarded with more tokens for supporting the system. The platform is designed to ensure automatic, anonymous and therefore difficult to subvert user curation, with a token economy that both directly incentivises making good calls and discourages bad faith behaviour.
The Arkratos team includes seasoned entrepreneurs and software developers. They already have a ready MVP and have secured the cooperation of several early adapter partners among trading companies. Kratos will have advanced security features, including those provided by Amazon and Cloudflare, and will attempt to ensure a wide distribution of tokens.
https://kratospct.io/
Token sale details
Decentralising the commodity market
Kratos is a timely and valuable proposition for a market that is only becoming less hospitable for small and medium companies. The commodity trading market ecosystem is extensive and lucrative, but suffers from systemic issues that undermine smaller players and, in the longer run, hamper its overall growth. Making it easier for those players to operate and find support on the market is a necessary step to overcome this.
While using smart contracts to streamline logistics is a widespread suggestion, user curation is a more unique idea that might put Kratos ahead of its competitors. It is not entirely fool-proof, as the company acknowledges. To work properly, it will need to have a large and diversified userbase and the trust of the industry. Given its list of initial partners, though, it can be said to have a good start on the latter. Though not perfect, its model has the chance of getting adapted and making a large positive difference for commodity trading.
Links:
Website: https://kratospct.io/
WhitePaper: https://kratospct.io/pdf/KRATOS_Whitepaper.pdf
Telegram: https://t.me/arkratos_group
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ArkratosBlockchain/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Arkratos_com
Medium: https://medium.com/arkratos
ANN: https://bit.ly/2PdpNU82
Author: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=980049
Disclaimer
This review by Bonanza Kreep is all opinion and analysis, not investment advice.