Blockchain and Supply Chain: The Startup Landscape
Introduction
Supply chain is an umbrella term comprising all the operations, goods and stakeholders involved in the journey of a product, from the manufacturer to the end customer. Today supply chains are highly heterogeneous, often involving multiple countries and means of transportation. This comes with many benefits, for instance reduction of goods cost, due to outsourced manufacturing to cheaper markets, and access to additional industrial capabilities from foreign partners. But it comes with downsides as well, namely increased friction and uncertainties, resulting in poor efficiency overall.
One of the most, if not the most, interesting application of the blockchain to the physical world is indeed in the supply chain sector. The existence of an immutable ledger shared between parties not trusting each other is a dream come true for the industry. The blockchain is not just a solution to the problem, it’s an enabler. Indeed, smart contracts associated with cryptocurrency payments will likely revolutionize the whole sector in the following years. Anyway, for the purpose of this article, we will limit our attention to the problem that can be solved now using blockchain technologies.
In this blog post we investigate the field from the point of view of the many startups trying to tackle the problems with blockchain. We identified three main focus areas:
- Traceability/provenance and anti-counterfeit
- Real time tracking and logistic
- Environmental audit of shipments
Of course, many of these startups are tackling more than one problem at once and in fact the distinction between the focus areas can be somewhat blurred for some use cases.
Traceability/Provenance and Anti-Counterfeit
Going to an European supermarket and finding fruit and vegetables coming from the other continent is totally normal these days. In fact, let’s say that you are an Italian and live in Italy. It would be more suspicious to spot a cheap bottle of olive oil produced in Italy! How confident can you be that the product is really coming from where it is written on the label? This is part of the bigger traceability issue, that for different reasons spans other industries like toys, electronics, luxury goods and clothing. One of the first applications was in the diamond industry, in which EverLedger leverages a mix of public and permissioned blockchains plus computer vision to certify diamonds. Circularise has an interesting approach to the circular economy, using blockchain and zero knowledge proofs to ask questions about a product composition, without revealing additional confidential details. In the food industry we find Provenance, using smart tags and a mobile interface to show the history of the product to the end consumer.
Anti-counterfeit is a very intuitive application of the blockchain. Once a unique identifier is stored on the blockchain it cannot be modified. The tricky part is in the tamper proof labelling of the goods, a task that companies like Blockverify will tackle.
Real Time Tracking and Logistic
Knowing where the shipment is at any given point in time is something that we are starting to take for granted when we order something online. But this is not true for every industry, and becomes increasingly complicated as soon different third party logistic companies are involved, perhaps internationally. In the context of containers shipments, Shipchain is trying to bring order by storing the encrypted geographic waypoints on the Ethereum chain. A similar value proposition applies for Blockshipping, T-Mining, BitNautic and Blockfreight. Particular emphasis is put on disrupting the old bill of lading system by going paperless and decentralized by Wave and Cargox.
Environmental audit of shipments
Smart sensors can tell us not only where a good is, but also at which conditions is exposed during the trip. For instance perishable goods must be transported inside given range of temperature and humidity, light sensor can be used to certify that goods are not opened, accelerometers sensors are suited to monitor possible shocks during the transportation. Some of the most attractive goods to safeguard are pharmaceutics, since they are both expensive and produced in high volumes. Modum is laser focused on this vertical, while Ambrosus includes also the food sector. The latter is roughly ten times bigger than the pharmaceutical one in terms of overall volumes, but the value per shipment is much lower. Chronicled also deals with pharmaceutics, in particular in relation to the MediLedger project, but includes Luxury Goods and precious metals in their addressable market. Bext360 works with coffee, cocoa, seafood, palm oil, minerals, timber and cotton.
Some projects can be considered more horizontal in the supply chain, for instance OriginTrail aims to build a software protocol for companies interested in using blockchain for supply chain. They are essentially a middleware between existing IT systems and blockchain. Eximchain will develop a new public blockchain, while using private smart contracts for enterprise supply chains. Other projects or organizations on this more general philosophy are Skuchain, Hijro, Waltonchain, Vechain, ZervNetwork and Bita (Blockchain in transport alliance). Some interesting reference material can be found at chainofthings.
To summarize, these are all the companies that we identified: EverLedger, Circularise, Provenance, BlockVerify, ShipChain, Blockshipping, T-Mining, BitNautic, Blockfreight™, Wave, CargoX, modum.io, Ambrosus, Chronicled, Bext360, OriginTrail, Eximchain, Skuchain, Hijro, Waltonchain_EN, VeChain, The ZERV Network.
Please, write me down in the comments if you know some other startups that have been omitted. In this article we focused just on startups, but of course many giants like IBM, Accenture, Maersk and others are putting effort in the space.
Conclusion
The space is growing at an incredible pace and it promises to transform the whole supply chain, with positive repercussions on everyone of us.
Hopefully this blog post will be useful to folks interested in this industry and I’m sure it will be already outdated in a couple of months, with new entrants in the game. This list of references is part of a broader market research that we have done before founding AnyLedger. The common issue that we have seen in the space is the lack of an easy to use and secure end-to-end solution, going from the physical assets to the blockchain. Our goal is to allow companies interested in blockchain to cross the chasm and go from proof of concepts to actual production, by lowering the difficulty bar of securely connecting IoT sensors to the blockchain. In this way, companies can focus on the use case, which is encapsulated using smart contracts or on the chain itself.
