The story of BitNautic, like many others, is born from an ordinary situation: a father and a son. And yet it begins far away, it travels through India, Africa, London and eventually gets here, to Lugano, Switzerland. But let’s start from the beginning.
We’re in the port of Cotonou, Benin, a few kilometres from the equator. Among piles of red and yellow containers that rise in the dazzling African sun, a distinguished Indian man, about forty, suit and tie despite the suffocating heat, is wringing his hands.
His name is Gulzar Bajwa, and he’s a merchant. Following his son Anmòl’s advice, he travelled to sub-Saharan Africa, with the goal to expand his business in those markets, chaotic, but with very high potential. And yet, after just a few months, he has already realised how problematic the situation is: loads stuck for weeks because of a messy bureaucracy, ship owners as powerful as kings, wielding an undisputed and overbearing power over ports and local authorities, and relentless brokers who act as middlemen for the ship owners, pocketing huge chunks of the merchant’s earnings.
For Mr Bajwa it’s yet another headache. Between a lot from Togo that doesn’t arrive and another held hostage in a warehouse for weeks, the losses are enormous. It is at this point that in his head an idea starts to form, an idea that will come alive only years later, in London, where Anmòl is studying for his BSc in Business Management at the Queen Mary University. Gulzar visits him, and it is from this reunion and from their shared interested for cryptocurrencies that the BitNautic concept is born.
What is BitNautic? It’s an online platform, an Uber of naval logistics, that allows ship owners to list their ships, proposing prices and routes, and cargo owners to choose for themselves the best carrier for their merchandise, instead of having to rely on phone calls or friends of friends, often leading to unfavourable deals and unpredictable turns.
The experience is thus extremely simple: a direct agreement between supply and demand, with no middlemen, using the BitNautic Token (BTNT), a dedicated cryptocurrency, as the only means of payment on the platform. The goal of this is to get rid of currency differences between different countries, making the process leaner, offering, at the same time, all-round legal support from sector experts, thus freeing clients from burdens like the writing down the “Bill of Lading”, the essential document that regulates every transport deal.
Another critical problem of naval logistics is the astounding number of empty containers that are transported every day. Estimated losses from bad cargo optimization and overcapacity are over 3,5 billions of US dollars (UNCTAD 2017). This is the reason why the platform includes among its features an advanced AI algorithm, that maximises the efficiency of transport by computing the best combinations of cargo in shipments and suggesting them to the users. This way, besides allowing low-volume cargo to be transported alongside high-volume, the number of segments needed in a route is greatly reduced, and so are the costs for every interested party.
But how is it possible to make completely transparent agreements and transactions? This is where the other key advantage of using a cryptocurrency comes into play: the Blockchain.
The Blockchain is a distributed database. Every transaction, instead of being stored in a single place, the way that banks and other digitals services do, are registered on every single computer that is connected to the network. Each transaction is publicly available (except for the private information of interested parties), in a transparent and easily verifiable way, completely immune from altering and tampering thanks to the nature of the Blockchain.
The platform is currently in its developmental phase in our swiss headquarters, in Lugano, where our CEO Gianfranco Pierini and our Chairman Gulzar Bajwa are coordinating the work of Paolo (CTO), Matteo and Carlo (Development), Ciro and Saverio (Marketing) and the rest of the BitNautic team around the globe. Over the last few years Switzerland is imposing more and more as a centre of the European crypto scene, in part thanks to the commitment of FINMA, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, which has brought Switzerland to be one of the few countries where crypto related activities are completely regulated, thus making them much safer from an investment point of view.
The long journey of BitNautic is now at a crucial step. At less than three months from the release of the first version of the platform, the expectations are high and the Team’s enthusiasm is through the roof: the shipping industry revolution is coming.
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