transportation: a new solution to supply chain

Based on the case study “Blockchain: A new solution for supply chain integrity”, Please answer the below questions in depth.

1. What are the current issues with managing the supply chain? In general, how can blockchain technology address some of the issues facing the supply chain?

2. Discuss challenges of adopting blockchain technology into a company’s existing supply chain.

3. Ideally, what kinds of companies and businesses can benefit from adopting and implementing blockchain within their supply chain?

11/4/2015
The great chain of being sure about things | The Economist
Blockchains
The great chain of being sure about things
The technology behind bitcoin lets people who do not know or trust each other
build a dependable ledger. This has implications far beyond the cryptocurrency
Oct 31st 2015 | From the print edition
WHEN the Honduran police came to evict her in
2009 Mariana Catalina Izaguirre had lived in her
lowly house for three decades. Unlike many of her
neighbours in Tegucigalpa, the country’s capital,
she even had an official title to the land on which
it stood. But the records at the country’s Property
Institute showed another person registered as its
owner, too—and that person convinced a judge to
sign an eviction order. By the time the legal confusion was finally sorted out, Ms Izaguirre’s
house had been demolished.
It is the sort of thing that happens every day in places where land registries are badly kept,
mismanaged and/or corrupt—which is to say across much of the world. This lack of secure
property rights is an endemic source of insecurity and injustice. It also makes it harder to use a
house or a piece of land as collateral, stymying investment and job creation.
Such problems seem worlds away from bitcoin, a currency based on clever cryptography which
has a devoted following among mostly well-off, often anti-government and sometimes criminal
geeks. But the cryptographic technology that underlies bitcoin, called the “blockchain”, has
applications well beyond cash and currency. It offers a way for people who do not know or trust
each other to create a record of who owns what that will compel the assent of everyone
concerned. It is a way of making and preserving truths.
That is why politicians seeking to clean up the Property Institute in Honduras have asked
Factom, an American startup, to provide a prototype of a blockchain-based land registry.
Interest in the idea has also been expressed in Greece, which has no proper land registry and
where only 7% of the territory is adequately mapped.
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A place in the past
Other applications for blockchain and similar “distributed ledgers” range from thwarting
diamond thieves to streamlining stockmarkets: the NASDAQ exchange will soon start using a
blockchain-based system to record trades in privately held companies. The Bank of England, not
known for technological flights of fancy, seems electrified: distributed ledgers, it concluded in a
research note late last year, are a “significant innovation” that could have “far-reaching
implications” in the financial industry.
The politically minded see the blockchain reaching further than that. When co-operatives and
left-wingers gathered for this year’s OuiShare Fest in Paris to discuss ways that grass-roots
organisations could undermine giant repositories of data like Facebook, the blockchain made it
into almost every speech. Libertarians dream of a world where more and more state regulations
are replaced with private contracts between individuals—contracts which blockchain-based
programming would make self-enforcing.
The blockchain began life in the mind of Satoshi Nakamoto, the brilliant, pseudonymous and so
far unidentified creator of bitcoin—a “purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash”, as he put it
in a paper published in 2008. To work as cash, bitcoin had to be able to change hands without
being diverted into the wrong account and to be incapable of being spent twice by the same
person. To fulfil Mr Nakamoto’s dream of a decentralised system the avoidance of such abuses
had to be achieved without recourse to any trusted third party, such as the banks which stand
behind conventional payment systems.
It is the blockchain that replaces this trusted third party. A database that contains the payment
history of every bitcoin in circulation, the blockchain provides proof of who owns what at any
given juncture. This distributed ledger is replicated on thousands of computers—bitcoin’s
“nodes”—around the world and is publicly available. But for all its openness it is also trustworthy
and secure. This is guaranteed by the mixture of mathematical subtlety and computational brute
force built into its “consensus mechanism”—the process by which the nodes agree on how to
update the blockchain in the light of bitcoin transfers from one person to another.
Let us say that Alice wants to pay Bob for services rendered. Both have bitcoin “wallets”—
software which accesses the blockchain rather as a browser accesses the web, but does not
identify the user to the system. The transaction starts with Alice’s wallet proposing that the
blockchain be changed so as to show Alice’s wallet a little emptier and Bob’s a little fuller.
The network goes through a number of steps to confirm this change. As the proposal propagates
over the network the various nodes check, by inspecting the ledger, whether Alice actually has
the bitcoin she now wants to spend. If everything looks kosher, specialised nodes called miners
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will bundle Alice’s proposal with other similarly reputable transactions to create a new block for
the blockchain.
This entails repeatedly feeding the data through a
cryptographic “hash” function which boils the
block down into a string of digits of a given length
(see diagram). Like a lot of cryptography, this
hashing is a one-way street. It is easy to go from
the data to their hash; impossible to go from the
hash back to the data. But though the hash does
not contain the data, it is still unique to them.
Change what goes into the block in any way—alter a transaction by a single digit—and the hash
would be different.
Running in the shadows
That hash is put, along with some other data, into the header of the proposed block. This header
then becomes the basis for an exacting mathematical puzzle which involves using the hash
function yet again. This puzzle can only be solved by trial and error. Across the network, miners
grind through trillions and trillions of possibilities looking for the answer. When a miner finally
comes up with a solution other nodes quickly check it (that’s the one-way street again: solving is
hard but checking is easy), and each node that confirms the solution updates the blockchain
accordingly. The hash of the header becomes the new block’s identifying string, and that block is
now part of the ledger. Alice’s payment to Bob, and all the other transactions the block contains,
are confirmed.
This puzzle stage introduces three things that add hugely to bitcoin’s security. One is chance.
You cannot predict which miner will solve a puzzle, and so you cannot predict who will get to
update the blockchain at any given time, except in so far as it has to be one of the hard working
miners, not some random interloper. This makes cheating hard.
The second addition is history. Each new header contains a hash of the previous block’s header,
which in turn contains a hash of the header before that, and so on and so on all the way back to
the beginning. It is this concatenation that makes the blocks into a chain. Starting from all the
data in the ledger it is trivial to reproduce the header for the latest block. Make a change
anywhere, though—even back in one of the earliest blocks—and that changed block’s header will
come out different. This means that so will the next block’s, and all the subsequent ones. The
ledger will no longer match the latest block’s identifier, and will be rejected.
Is there a way round this? Imagine that Alice changes her mind about paying Bob and tries to
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rewrite history so that her bitcoin stays in her wallet. If she were a competent miner she could
solve the requisite puzzle and produce a new version of the blockchain. But in the time it took
her to do so, the rest of the network would have lengthened the original blockchain. And nodes
always work on the longest version of the blockchain there is. This rule stops the occasions when
two miners find the solution almost simultaneously from causing anything more than a
temporary fork in the chain. It also stops cheating. To force the system to accept her new version
Alice would need to lengthen it faster than the rest of the system was lengthening the original.
Short of controlling more than half the computers—known in the jargon as a “51% attack”—that
should not be possible.
Dreams are sometimes catching
Leaving aside the difficulties of trying to subvert the network, there is a deeper question: why
bother to be part of it at all? Because the third thing the puzzle-solving step adds is an incentive.
Forging a new block creates new bitcoin. The winning miner earns 25 bitcoin, worth about
$7,500 at current prices.
All this cleverness does not, in itself, make bitcoin a particularly attractive currency. Its value is
unstable and unpredictable (see chart), and the total amount in circulation is deliberately
limited. But the blockchain mechanism works very well. According to blockchain.info, a website
that tracks such things, on an average day more than 120,000 transactions are added to the
blockchain, representing about $75m exchanged. There are now 380,000 blocks; the ledger
weighs in at nearly 45 gigabytes.
Most of the data in the blockchain are about bitcoin. But they do not have to be. Mr Nakamoto
has built what geeks call an “open platform”—a distributed system the workings of which are
open to examination and elaboration. The paragon of such platforms is the internet itself; other
examples include operating systems like Android or Windows. Applications that depend on basic
features of the blockchain can thus be developed without asking anybody for permission or
paying anyone for the privilege. “The internet finally has a public data base,” says Chris Dixon of
Andreessen Horowitz, a venture-capital firm which has financed several bitcoin start-ups,
including Coinbase, which provides wallets, and 21, which makes bitcoin-mining hardware for
the masses.
For now blockchain-based offerings fall in three buckets. The first takes advantage of the fact
that any type of asset can be transferred using the blockchain. One of the startups betting on this
idea is Colu. It has developed a mechanism to “dye” very small bitcoin transactions (called
“bitcoin dust”) by adding extra data to them so that they can represent bonds, shares or units of
precious metals.
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Protecting land titles is an example of the second bucket: applications that use the blockchain as
a truth machine. Bitcoin transactions can be combined with snippets of additional information
which then also become embedded in the ledger. It can thus be a registry of anything worth
tracking closely. Everledger uses the blockchain to protect luxury goods; for example it will stick
on to the blockchain data about a stone’s distinguishing attributes, providing unchallengeable
proof of its identity should it be stolen. Onename stores personal information in a way that is
meant to do away with the need for passwords; CoinSpark acts as a notary. Note, though, that
for these applications, unlike for pure bitcoin transactions, a certain amount of trust is required;
you have to believe the intermediary will store the data accurately.
It is the third bucket that contains the most ambitious applications: “smart contracts” that
execute themselves automatically under the right circumstances. Bitcoin can be “programmed”
so that it only becomes available under certain conditions. One use of this ability is to defer the
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payment miners get for solving a puzzle until 99 more blocks have been added—which provides
another incentive to keep the blockchain in good shape.
Lighthouse, a project started by Mike Hearn, one of bitcoin’s leading programmers, is a
decentralised crowdfunding service that uses these principles. If enough money is pledged to a
project it all goes through; if the target is never reached, none does. Mr Hearn says his scheme
will both be cheaper than non-bitcoin competitors and also more independent, as governments
will be unable to pull the plug on a project they don’t like.
Energy is contagious
The advent of distributed ledgers opens up an “entirely new quadrant of possibilities”, in the
words of Albert Wenger of USV, a New York venture firm that has invested in startups such as
OpenBazaar, a middleman-free peer-to-peer marketplace. But for all that the blockchain is open
and exciting, sceptics argue that its security may yet be fallible and its procedures may not scale.
What works for bitcoin and a few niche applications may be unable to support thousands of
different services with millions of users.
Though Mr Nakamoto’s subtle design has so far proved impregnable, academic researchers have
identified tactics that might allow a sneaky and well financed miner to compromise the block
chain without direct control of 51% of it. And getting control of an appreciable fraction of the
network’s resources looks less unlikely than it used to. Once the purview of hobbyists, bitcoin
mining is now dominated by large “pools”, in which small miners share their efforts and
rewards, and the operators of big data centres, many based in areas of China, such as Inner
Mongolia, where electricity is cheap.
Another worry is the impact on the environment. With no other way to establish the bona fides
of miners, the bitcoin architecture forces them to do a lot of hard computing; this “proof of
work”, without which there can be no reward, insures that all concerned have skin in the game.
But it adds up to a lot of otherwise pointless computing. According to blockchain.info the
network’s miners are now trying 450 thousand trillion solutions per second. And every
calculation takes energy.
Because miners keep details of their hardware secret, nobody really knows how much power the
network consumes. If everyone were using the most efficient hardware, its annual electricity
usage might be about two terawatt-hours—a bit more than the amount used by the 150,000
inhabitants of King’s County in California’s Central Valley. Make really pessimistic assumptions
about the miners’ efficiency, though, and you can get the figure up to 40 terawatt-hours, almost
two-thirds of what the 10m people in Los Angeles County get through. That surely overstates the
problem; still, the more widely people use bitcoin, the worse the waste could get.
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Yet for all this profligacy bitcoin remains limited. Because Mr Nakamoto decided to cap the size
of a block at one megabyte, or about 1,400 transactions, it can handle only around seven
transactions per second, compared to the 1,736 a second Visa handles in America. Blocks could
be made bigger; but bigger blocks would take longer to propagate through the network,
worsening the risks of forking.
Earlier platforms have surmounted similar problems. When millions went online after the
invention of the web browser in the 1990s pundits predicted the internet would grind to a
standstill: eppur si muove. Similarly, the bitcoin system is not standing still. Specialised mining
computers can be very energy efficient, and less energy-hungry alternatives to the proof-of-work
mechanism have been proposed. Developers are also working on an add-on called “Lightning”
which would handle large numbers of smaller transactions outside the blockchain. Faster
connections will let bigger blocks propagate as quickly as small ones used to.
The problem is not so much a lack of fixes. It is that the network’s “bitcoin improvement
process” makes it hard to choose one. Change requires community-wide agreement, and these
are not people to whom consensus comes easily. Consider the civil war being waged over the size
of blocks. One camp frets that quickly increasing the block size will lead to further concentration
in the mining industry and turn bitcoin into more of a conventional payment processor. The
other side argues that the system could crash as early as next year if nothing is done, with
transactions taking hours.
A break in the battle
Mr Hearn and Gavin Andresen, another bitcoin grandee, are leaders of the big-block camp. They
have called on mining firms to install a new version of bitcoin which supports a much bigger
block size. Some miners who do, though, appear to be suffering cyber-attacks. And in what
seems a concerted effort to show the need for, or the dangers of, such an upgrade, the system is
being driven to its limits by vast numbers of tiny transactions.
This has all given new momentum to efforts to build an alternative to the bitcoin blockchain, one
that might be optimised for the storing of distributed ledgers rather than for the running of a
cryptocurrency. MultiChain, a build-your-own-blockchain platform offered by Coin Sciences,
another startup, demonstrates what is possible. As well as offering the wherewithal to build a
public blockchain like bitcoin’s, it can also be used to build private chains open only to vetted
users. If all the users start off trusted the need for mining and proof-of-work is reduced or
eliminated, and a currency attached to the ledger becomes an optional extra.
The first industry to adopt such sons of blockchain may well be the one whose failings originally
inspired Mr Nakamoto: finance. In recent months there has been a rush of bankerly enthusiasm
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for private blockchains as a way of keeping tamper-proof ledgers. One of the reasons, irony of
ironies, is that this technology born of anti-government libertarianism could make it easier for
the banks to comply with regulatory requirements on knowing their customers and anti-moneylaundering rules. But there is a deeper appeal.
Industrial historians point out that new powers often become available long before the processes
that best use them are developed. When electric motors were first developed they were deployed
like the big hulking steam engines that came before them. It took decades for manufacturers to
see that lots of decentralised electric motors could reorganise every aspect of the way they made
things. In its report on digital currencies, the Bank of England sees something similar afoot in
the financial sector. Thanks to cheap computing financial firms have digitised their inner
workings; but they have not yet changed their organisations to match. Payment systems are
mostly still centralised: transfers are cleared through the central bank. When financial firms do
business with each other, the hard work of synchronising their internal ledgers can take several
days, which ties up capital and increases risk.
Distributed ledgers that settle transactions in minutes or seconds could go a long way to solving
such problems and fulfilling the greater promise of digitised banking. They could also save banks
a lot of money: according to Santander, a bank, by 2022 such ledgers could cut the industry’s
bills by up to $20 billion a year. Vendors still need to prove that they could deal with the farhigher-than-bitcoin transaction rates that would be involved; but big banks are already pushing
for standards to shape the emerging technology. One of them, UBS, has proposed the creation of
a standard “settlement coin”. The first order of business for R3 CEV, a blockchain startup in
which UBS has invested alongside Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and 22 other banks, is to develop
a standardised architecture for private ledgers.
The banks’ problems are not unique. All sorts of companies and public bodies suffer from hardto-maintain and often incompatible databases and the high transaction costs of getting them to
talk to each other. This is the problem Ethereum, arguably the most ambitious distributedledger project, wants to solve. The brainchild of Vitalik Buterin, a 21-year-old Canadian
programming prodigy, Ethereum’s distributed ledger can deal with more data than bitcoin’s can.
And it comes with a programming language that allows users to write more sophisticated smart
contracts, thus creating invoices that pay themselves when a shipment arrives or share
certificates which automatically send their owners dividends if profits reach a certain level. Such
cleverness, Mr Buterin hopes, will allow the formation of “decentralised autonomous
organisations”—virtual companies that are basically just sets of rules running on Ethereum’s
blockchain.
One of the areas where such ideas could have radical effects is in the “internet of things”—a
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network of billions of previously mute everyday
objects such as fridges, doorstops and lawn
sprinklers. A recent report from IBM entitled
“Device Democracy” argues that it would be
impossible to keep track of and manage these
billions of devices centrally, and unwise to to try;
such attempts would make them vulnerable to
hacking attacks and government surveillance.
Distributed registers seem a good alternative.
The sort of programmability Ethereum offers does not just allow people’s property to be tracked
and registered. It allows it to be used in new sorts of ways. Thus a car-key embedded in the
Ethereum blockchain could be sold or rented out in all manner of rule-based ways, enabling new
peer-to-peer schemes for renting or sharing cars. Further out, some talk of using the technology
to make by-then-self-driving cars self-owning, to boot. Such vehicles could stash away some of
the digital money they make from renting out their keys to pay for fuel, repairs and parking
spaces, all according to preprogrammed rules.
What would Rousseau have said?
Unsurprisingly, some think such schemes overly ambitious. Ethereum’s first (“genesis”) block
was only mined in August and, though there is a little ecosystem of start-ups clustered around it,
Mr Buterin admitted in a recent blog post that it is somewhat short of cash. But the details of
which particular blockchains end up flourishing matter much less than the broad enthusiasm for
distributed ledgers that is leading both start-ups and giant incumbents to examine their
potential. Despite society’s inexhaustible ability to laugh at accountants, the workings of ledgers
really do matter.
Today’s world is deeply dependent on double-entry book-keeping. Its standardised system of
recording debits and credits is central to any attempt to understand a company’s financial
position. Whether modern capitalism absolutely required such book-keeping in order to develop,
as Werner Sombart, a German sociologist, claimed in the early 20th century, is open to question.
Though the system began among the merchants of renaissance Italy, which offers an interesting
coincidence of timing, it spread round the world much more slowly than capitalism did,
becoming widely used only in the late 19th century. But there is no question that the technique is
of fundamental importance not just as a record of what a company does, but as a way of defining
what one can be.
Ledgers that no longer need to be maintained by a company—or a government—may in time
spur new changes in how companies and governments work, in what is expected of them and in
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what can be done without them. A realisation that systems without centralised record-keeping
can be just as trustworthy as those that have them may bring radical change.
Such ideas can expect some eye-rolling—blockchains are still a novelty applicable only in a few
niches, and the doubts as to how far they can spread and scale up may prove well founded. They
can also expect resistance. Some of bitcoin’s critics have always seen it as the latest techy
attempt to spread a “Californian ideology” which promises salvation through technologyinduced decentralisation while ignoring and obfuscating the realities of power—and happily
concentrating vast wealth in the hands of an elite. The idea of making trust a matter of coding,
rather than of democratic politics, legitimacy and accountability, is not necessarily an appealing
or empowering one.
At the same time, a world with record-keeping mathematically immune to manipulation would
have many benefits. Evicted Ms Izaguirre would be better off; so would many others in many
other settings. If blockchains have a fundamental paradox, it is this: by offering a way of setting
the past and present in cryptographic stone, they could make the future a very different place.
From the print edition: Briefing
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Why Blockchain is a Game Changer for Supply Chain Management
Blockchain—the technology behind the digital asset and payment system Bitcoin—has the
potential to transform the supply chain. In fact, some are calling it the most important invention
since the Internet itself. From conducting payment and audits to tracking inventory and assets,
blockchain technology will enable greater supply chain e ciency than ever before.
What is Blockchain?
Blockchain is a distributed database that holds records of digital data or events in a way that
makes them tamper-resistant. While many users may access, inspect, or add to the data, they
can’t change or delete it. The original information stays put, leaving a permanent and public
information trail, or chain, of transactions (Investopedia).
Think of it like this: If the entire blockchain were the history of banking transactions, an
individual bank statement would be a single “block” in the chain. Unlike most banking systems,
however, there is no single organization that controls these transactions. It can only be updated
through consensus of a majority of participants in the system (Re/code).
In short, blockchain is a record-keeping mechanism that makes it easier and safer for
businesses to work together over the internet.
Bitcoin is Only the Beginning
The most popular application of blockchain technology is Bitcoin, a currency system that has
taken tech-savvy merchants by storm. The exciting thing is that the blockchain protocol can be
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used for non-currency purposes as well. Thought it was initially intended for nancial
transactions, businesses of all kinds are getting creative with the blockchain ledger, as it can be
used to record, track, and verify trades of virtually anything that holds value. From ride-sharing
to cloud storage to voting, companies in all industries are beginning to see blockchain’s
potential.
How Will Blockchain Technology Affect the Supply Chain?
If blockchain technology allows us to more securely and transparently track all types of
transactions, imagine the possibilities it presents across the supply chain. Every time a product
changes hands, the transaction could be documented, creating a permanent history of a
product, from manufacture to sale. This could dramatically reduce time delays, added costs,
and human error that plague transactions today.
Some supply chains are already using the technology, and experts suggest blockchain could
become a universal “supply chain operating system” before long (Spend Matters). Consider
how this technology could improve the following tasks:
Recording the quantity and transfer of assets—like pallets, trailers, containers, etc.—as
they move between supply chain nodes (Talking Logistics)
Tracking purchase orders, change orders, receipts, shipment noti cations, or other traderelated documents
Assigning or verifying certi cations or certain properties of physical products; for
example determining if a food product is organic or fair trade (Provenance)
Linking physical goods to serial numbers, bar codes, digital tags like RFID, etc.
Sharing information about manufacturing process, assembly, delivery, and maintenance
of products with suppliers and vendors
Bene ts in a Nutshell
Regardless of the application, blockchain offers shippers the following advantages:
Enhanced Transparency. Documenting a product’s journey across the supply chain
reveals its true origin and touchpoints, which increases trust and helps eliminate the bias
found in today’s opaque supply chains. Manufacturers can also reduce recalls by sharing
logs with OEMs and regulators (Talking Logistics).
Greater Scalability. Virtually any number of participants, accessing from any number of
touchpoints, is possible (Forbes).
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Better Security. A shared, indelible ledger with codi ed rules could potentially eliminate
the audits required by internal systems and processes (Spend Matters).
Increased Innovation. Opportunities abound to create new, specialized uses for the
technology as a result of the decentralized architecture.
Smart shippers are nding ways to leverage these innovations to increase pro ts and
strengthen relationships across the supply chain. They’re also partnering with forward-thinking
service providers who value transparency and innovation, and understand blockchain’s
potential. What are your thoughts on blockchain technology? Feel free to leave a comment
below.
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Blockchain tech companies focus on the $40 trillion Supply Chain market » Brave New Coin
Blockchain tech companies focus on the $40 trillion Supply Chain market
Luke Parker 01 Feb 2016 17:35 UTC
Adoption
Blockchain
Supply Chain
A supply chain can be a complex and dynamic network of organizations, people, technology, activities, information and resources. It’s the people and
processes involved in sourcing raw materials through to delivering nished products.
A supply chain can be a complex and dynamic network of organizations, people, technology, activities, information and resources. It’s the people and
processes involved in sourcing raw materials through to delivering nished products.
As an industry, the Global Supply Chain is worth over US$40 Trillion per year, and there are seemingly in nite international laws and regulations
governing each step. It’s incredibly ine cient.
“Experience indicates that even the simplest of mistakes or an oversight in a bill of lading can lead to complex and often costly problems.”
–Gard, Maritime Insurance
This global market is based on paper Bills of Lading, detailing merchandise shipment and ownership, and Letters Of Credit, that banks use to guarantee a
buyer’s payment will be received. Every step of the process typically makes use of an auditor too, adding delays, complexity, and expense.
California-based Skuchain thinks blockchain technology can x a large amount of what ails supply chains today, with trustable visibility into the ow of
goods and money. The company has spent the best part of a year working on a plan to overhaul every part of the supply chain process.
The company is attempting to unlock hundreds of Billions of dollars locked up in Letters of Credit and “other arcane and extortionate methods of
prefunding global trade.” Travis Giggy, VP of Customer Development at Skuchain recently told IBTimes: “We think the blockchain is going to enable new
kinds of commerce that are rarely seen in today’s world outside of fully integrated companies like Apple. In ve years we will see an emergence of what
we call ‘collaborative commerce’.”
Skuchain has several investors already, including Amino Capitol, the blockchain-hungry Fenbushi Capital, and Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group.
They’re also far from the only ones who want a piece of the world’s largest market.
Several startups are already in pursuit of similar goals, including Provenance, a well-funded startup with a detailed plan to show the entire supply chain
for every product at your grocery store on your smartphone, just by scanning the barcode.
Wave is also in the running, having completed the Barclay’s accelerator late last year. The company is focused on overhauling the Bills of Lading system,
using the blockchain. Wave is probably Skuchain’s most direct competitor, but the startup’s focus appears to be more concentrated.

Blockchain tech companies focus on the $40 trillion Supply Chain market

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Blockchain tech companies focus on the $40 trillion Supply Chain market » Brave New Coin
Open Trade Docs looks like the latest entry, o ering an open source approach to the supply chain nance process. Their goal is to provide supply chain
participants with better access to nancial services, using private blockchains.
Amongst all the competition, Skuchain’s developers appear to be the rst to propose adding smart contacts to supply chain management. “When the
agreement is met, the money moves automatically,” states their website.
With all of the competition vying for market share, and so much of it well-funded already, it seems likely that supply chains will get their desperatelyneeded blockchain overhaul soon.
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