When we attempt to calculate the impact of our carbon footprint, we have to take much more into account than merely how much we drive each month, how much we drive, and our monthly utility bill. We have to look at the food we eat and the carbon impact of producing that food (hint: meat products are far less environmentally friendly to produce). We have to look the services we use, the buildings we live in, and the products we buy.

There's one industry which pretty much affects all these industries; both in terms of the effect on the environment but also affects costs as well. That industry is logistics and transportation. Seaborne trade, encompasses more trade than any other sector, with $12 Billion USD worth of trade per year utilizing the 27 Million Containers worldwide actively being utilized. Shipping goods by sea is by far the cheapest mode of transport when compared to the other forms; road, rail, and pipeline (for certain liquids).

Container Shipping

Despite the vast number of containers in circulation, those containers are all pretty much the same. They are pretty much all either 20' or 40', although there are a few 45' containers in existence as well. The 20/40 ft options work remarkably well since container ships have all their container positioning planned out in advance before the ships are even built. Containers also come in regular height and a 'high cube' variety. A small portion of containers are also equipped with refrigeration units in order to be able to ship fresh, chilled, or frozen goods. External dimensions of the containers are universal.

What isn't universal, are container shipping platforms that shippers or the freight forwards who work with them have access to. The owners and platforms that handle container leasing are numerous, but vary consistently depending the country, port, and origin/destination city.

Global Shared Container Platform

Blockshipping has been building what they refer to as the 'Global Shared Container Platform (GSCP). The lack of a single container platform that can be used across jurisdictions creates a lot of inefficiences, namely

1. Lack of ability to transfer ownership from one shipper to another (known as 'street turning'

2. Poor options for equipment repositioning

3. Restrictions regarding what shipping lines & destinations containers can be utilized on

4. Poor options for interchanging containers

5. Extra miles driven (empty) do to lack of trust between parties and inability to transfer ownership/possession between parties

6. Artifically high container inventory required due to having many container pools available in each jurisdiction which refuse to work together.

7. Environmentally unfriendly due to these inefficiencies

A global shared container problem would solve all these issues, although the solution need not be a blockchain-based one.

Utilizing blockchain technology like Blockshipping is doing creates quite a few further efficiencies that simply can't be done with blockchain based solutions, in addition to being a lot more practical to implement than a non-blockchain solutions. Blockshipping also has no serious competitors right now either (even if you account for non-blockchain based platforms). Beyond it's ability to effectively address the issues above, blockchain technology adds consider value to a shared container platform because:

1. Ability to clearly, universally, and securely note events that have taken place along with when container possession has been trasferred from one party to the other. Should there ever be an incident, the information found on the blockchain be easily accessed and cannot be manipulated or erased.

2. Ability to act as a real-time information exchange between parties that isn't suspectible to hacking and which never 'goes down' like existing platforms do.

3. Easy & quick for parties to transfer money between one another. Blockshipping's CPT token is linked to the price of the USD. And let's face it, the US dollar will continue to be the only accepted unit of value for global trade for the forseeable future. Their CPT token, effectively a USD linked stable coin will enable parties to transfer USD to one another far faster, quicker and cheaper than the current methods utilized (wire transfers & cheques).

Blockstation also has a second token here, the CCC token. Unlike the CPT token, the CCC token will be able to trade on secondary markets and will not be linked to the USD. A percentage of revenue generated via the GSCP platform goes to a revenue share pool which ultimately gets passed onto CCC Token holders.

Conclusion

While the Blockshipping team includes a plethora of individuals from well known steamship lines like Maersk adn CMA-CGM and from freight forwards like DHL, it's very hard to say whether they will be successful at this stage. There's one thing I'm quite sure of. The industry is still operates in an archaic fashion and it's ripe for disruption.