ABCDs’ digital/blockchain initiative.
With all our due respect to ABCDs, we are permitting ourselves to comment humbly as follows:
1. Congratulations for the initiative! It is a recognition that digitalization is overdue and fundamental to move forward and that blockchain has a great potential for agri trading.
2. But why, as it sounds like, creating another consortium, instead of joining the existing ones in commodities’ blockchain who have already acquired some expertise (VAKT, Komgo)? Or the companies with serious digitalization offers (Bolero, essDOCS, inspection companies)? That would have saved quite some time and resources.
3. The initiative seems to be targeting, at least initially, post-trade execution processes.
While this obviously is needed for all stakeholders, they also urgently need new ways of effecting the trades themselves (digitally signed smart contracts). And, which is especially true for emerging markets’ companies — new payment tools (in currencies of their choice) and new financing sources (for ex. stablecoins). Our project Cerealia is working on exactly this (including post trade execution).
4. Companies from all over the world might be reluctant to deal (put all details of their transactions, docs) on the platform owned and managed by the ABCDs who currently control the majority of agri trade flows. Instead, in a spirit of blockchain, there is a need for several independent platforms (customers need to have a choice).
Cerealia is using a permission-less blockchain, which is required to obtain fully trustless environment, where everybody can join and perform trade without trusting third parties. In this case Cerealia is only a service provider, but we will not own the contracts (we don’t know the details how the ABCD system will store and manage contracts).
We will explain this more in detail later on. For the moment let’s focus on the word trustless. This means that nobody has to trust anybody else in order for the system to function.
5. The expressed desire of compatibility with other digital/blockchain Apps is very welcome.
