If you need proof that blockchain technology is changing the world, you need look no further than TradeWaltz, a new service designed to digitise, accelerate and validate international trade transactions.
Import and export of goods is a bureaucratic nightmare, generating huge amounts of paperwork and with all kinds of delays created as that paperwork is shuffled from place to place, translated, read, verified, compared with rules and regulations, duty assessments raised, payments made, cleared and verified, etc. There are a huge number of bottlenecks in the system, creating delays all over the place - I recently had a pallet-load sat bobbing around in the English Channel waiting for a docking slot because UK Customs were just overloaded with work.
TradeWaltz is aiming to solve this, initially at least only for large companies and governments working in the East Asian region. It appears to be politically supported by the Japanese government, and it's financial backers are a number of Japanese conglomerates including Toyota, Mitsubishi and Kanematsu.
The goal of TradeWaltz is to enable import/export paperwork to be delivered digitally, using blockchain to provide transparency and authentication, making the system far faster and cheaper than traditional systems and far more resistant to shenanigans. As well as importers and exporters, the banks at both ends, customs and shipping carriers will all feed into the system to create a streamlined process. I believe that initially, some 7000 companies are signed up to start using it very shortly. The longer term goals appear ambitious, with plans for a growing geographical spread, more companies participating. I believe the plan is that eventually a buying company will be able to place a short lead time order (not quite "just in time", but as close as physical shipping allows), and for it to then be rapidly processed through TradeWaltz so that everything else is pretty much automated.
It's fair to say that although it uses blockchain technology, it's not truly crypto because it still appears to be centralised to a great extent. I guess they'll be using a network of the participating companies computers to validate transactions. They haven't issued any kind of publicly available token or involved anyone outside the ecosystem yet, so any decentralisation is clearly within the network rather than at a public level.
There is, of course a political angle; the Japanese government are politically supportive of it, because they are happy to leave the day-to-day workings in the hands of the companies involved. It is clear that they're aiming to gain a competitive edge over China. If the CBDC Yuan the Chinese government is launching is any guide, the CCP will want full disclosure and control over all the data in any blockchain-driven systems they launch. It's unlikely that non-Chinese companies would have enough trust in a system like that to want to use it, especially if TradeWaltz is open to them, and it's unlikely that the US government would want to link it's Customs systems to the Chinese government !
This is definitely a significant use case for blockchain, and one which shows that at least some governments and corporates are open to the technology.
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Disclaimer: I'm not a financial adviser, DYOR etc ! Also, I'm not affiliated in any way with TradeWaltz, any government or company involved with it, I just find it fascinating !
