Blockchain — Bringing us a Step Closer to a World without Middlemen
No matter what your business is, a major part of your time is probably spent dealing with various types of middlemen. While they do play a key role in ensuring smooth functioning of various key operations, engaging their expertise brings about an increase in overall costs and often slows down the speed at which goods and services are delivered. Fortunately, Recent technological innovations can help your business prosper without the need to deal with middlemen, at least in a few key areas. The following are some key areas (especially in commodities trading) where existing blockchain innovations can help cut out the middleman.
Building Trust across the Supply Chain
We live in an age of interconnected systems and most of the stuff we take for granted are delivered through complex supply chains. It is only natural that you would like to know the origin of the food you put on the table, the clothes your wear, the soap you use and the raw materials that drive your business. Unfortunately much of this information is not that easy to find and this often limits the trust among business partners. This lack of trust provides an ideal environment for middlemen to flourish. Fortunately, blockchain provides an irrefutable way to track your goods from source to destination in a simplified manner and in real time. Deploying such solutions can thus help enhance trust among business partners and decrease the need for middlemen.
Aiding Document Verification in International Trade
A major portion of modern-day trade occurs across international borders. Thus it is not unusual for fruits from Colombia sharing shelf space with corn from Arkansas and poultry from China being sold from the same counter as fish from the Atlantic. Unfortunately, even in a world as connected as ours, international trade involves the use of a relatively inefficient paper-based system. Such documents ranging from contracts and bills of lading to goods invoices and tax receipts have to be verified multiple times by different middlemen to ensure their authenticity as well as compliance with various local laws. This obviously impacts delivery schedules and increases the cost for the end user. Here too, a blockchain based decentralised system offers a cheaper and more streamlined solution. The decentralised structure of these solutions reduces the risk of forged documents and support real time verification that can potentially eliminate middlemen at multiple stages of international trade.
Improving Transparency in Commodities Trading
Though commodities trading can be carried out online nowadays, those engaged in the trades will unanimously agree that the overall process still lacks transparency. What’s more, while the global commodities trading industry is valued in excess of US$10 trillion, it features a range of potential problems including but not limited to business transactions built on limited trust and paper documents of international trades. This combination of factors results in higher costs and delivery delays due to the use of middlemen at multiple stages. Fortunately, these are exactly the types of issues that the blockchain innovation KRATOS™ was developed to address.
How KRATOS™Helps Eliminate Middlemen
KRATOS™, which is the pioneering blockchain-based innovation from Arkratos, uses high-end encryption to maintain decentralised records that cannot be altered or forged. This helps enhance trust among parties at various stages of the global commodities trading system. When it comes to digitising trade records, KRATOS™provides a system that is far more efficient than traditional paper-based systems. Using blockchain technology, it allows digitized documents to be stored, shared and verified in real-time. This flexibility ensures that the requirement of middlemen and associated costs as well as turnaround time at multiple stages of commodities trading is reduced significantly, if not completely eliminated. More importantly KRATOS™ provides you with these key benefits without risking the integrity the supply chain or otherwise compromising the process of global commodities trade. So in effect, while blockchain innovations in their current form might not be able to eliminate middlemen completely, they can definitely move us a step closer to a world without middlemen.
