Why move away from Paper Transactions?
‘Why’ is not a question that should be asked after generations of global warming and increasing carbon footprint. The question should be ‘How’?
But let’s take a step back to elaborate our stand. While scientists around the world are looking for solutions to reduce carbon waste and pollution, the root cause remains — Deforestation unbalancing the nature. The world is fast adapting to digitization to lower the usage of paper and hence reduce the cutting of trees. But, in the race of worldwide innovation and digitization, there is one industry which is still lagging behind –The Commodity Trading industry.
A single commodities cargo by sea requires around 36 original documents and 240 copies, from as many as 27 or more parties involved in the trade*. With an average 8 pages per document, a single trade uses close to 4 reams of paper. For commodities trading industry, which is valued at 10 Trillion USD annually worldwide, digitization is a huge step to save millions of trees cut down for documentation purposes.
So how do we move away from paper documents?
Digitization is surely the first step that helps in reducing paper transaction but on a deeper level, the issue is much more complex. If the industry requires signed paper documents to be moved across the world for payment/ logistic clearances, we need to take the next step beyond digitization to completely omit the dependency on paper.
Meet KRATOS — the first commodity trading platform that runs on blockchain technology and self-executed smart contracts to digitally record the details of the transaction from the point of origin to the point of final delivery. The details are available in real-time to all parties involved in the trade. Blockchain solves the challenge of fake contracts and manual documentation discrepancies. Currently, the industry makes several copies of one document to ensure every party has the same documents. With KRATOS, smart contracts inbuilt into the platform help execute terms and conditions as and when they are met. Thus, removing the requirement of printing several copies of contract and sending them across companies seeking approvals.
While KRATOS aims to revolutionize the commodity trading industry by making it more transparent, faster and efficient, it will also contribute to a greener planet.
Currently KRATOS is under development with its’ beta product in testing stages, soon ready to join the big guns in fighting the Global Warming issues.
