The Power of Location Swaps
How TokenWARP “Teleportation” Can Save Supply-Chains
There are very few sci-fi and fantasy tropes more alluring than teleportation. Click a button, whisper a spell, call Scotty to beam you up, and then *poof* you’ve arrived. During the Covid-19 lockdowns, I’m sure many of us at one time or another wished we could teleport somewhere else. The same is true for our goods and services. While local delivery times for consumers have dropped below “same day” in many parts of the world, for raw materials and global supply chains overall wait times can be incredibly long and costly.
The recent six day blockage of the Suez Canal by the container ship MV Ever Given puts this situation in a pretty stark light. Approximately 12% of global trade flows through the canal each day, and the week long blockage led to some pretty staggering financial figures. According to the BBC, “data from Lloyd’s List showed that the stranded ship was holding up an estimated $9.6bn of trade along the waterway each day. That equates to $400m and 3.3 million tonnes of cargo an hour, or $6.7m a minute.” Meanwhile, “German insurer Allianz said “its analysis showed the blockage could cost global trade between $6bn to $10bn a week and reduce annual trade growth by 0.2 to 0.4 percentage points.”
Because of how tightly scheduled global supply chains are, each day of blockage disrupted an additional $9 bn worth of goods. It affected everyone whether you felt it or not. Vehicle manufacturers, already hit by a micro-processor shortage, were helpless as their finished vehicles sat there in Egypt; the price of oil went up, which impacted consumer gas prices; even gardeners in the UK faced a shortage of garden gnomes.
Cutting Supply Chains Some Slack
Obviously, things do not magically change location. But there may actually be a workaround that, for all intents and purposes, has the same result— getting you the things you need, where you need them, without having them physically travel. Perhaps you own assets in one location and you want to move them somewhere else. The simplest way to explain this is with something that can be stored, like commodities or raw materials, which may sit in a warehouse for long periods of time.
For example, let’s say your company just bought a commodity in Asia and the goods are now on a ship heading for Rotterdam. But the ship is delayed, perhaps because the Suez Canal is blocked, which as we’ve seen above is an expensive problem for you because you needed that shipment on schedule. However, someone on the continent already has the same commodity in their warehouse, and might be willing to sell or trade it to you in the meantime. But you just spent a lot of money on the goods now stuck in transit, so you can’t afford to buy the same amount again. And anyway, how would you even find someone willing to trade? Thanks to tokenization, and a technology called TokenWARP, the answer is actually pretty simple.
TokenWARP & Location Swaps: The closest thing to Teleportation
Let’s say you have some copper in Warehouse A, but you need to have it in Warehouse B on another continent for some reason. Normally you would have to physically pick them up from location A and transport them to location B. But that is expensive, takes weeks, and is unsustainable. But what if there was someone who already had the copper near location B and would be interested in swapping it against your stash in location A? Such a case might sound far-fetched, but when it comes to goods like commodities and raw materials, and considering how long supply-chains these days are stretched, it’s actually fairly realistic. For bigger companies, this makes perfect sense. The complication is how to ‘pay’ or what to trade.
Here is where tokenizing these goods becomes important, and unlocks the ability to make Location Swaps possible. If all assets that are needed for such a transaction exist as digital assets (tokens), a digital claim to the real item, then all offers, for example gold into fiat or vice versa, would be records on blockchain, too. The connection in between would be made via TokenWARP, which makes the swaps atomic, unbreakable, and instantaneous. It’s almost like teleportation. Without tokenizing these goods, even if there might be someone willing to buy your material in location A with fiat money, selling the goods in location A and re-buying it in location B doesn’t often make sense; you could lose a lot of money on exchange rates, local value, or even a sudden market drop, plus there’s fees and wasted time, etc.
In plain english, here’s how this works. You can connect location A with location B without actually “selling” your tokenized goods. Instead you trade your tokens for other tokens (these could be anything, other goods, crypto, fiat currency) until you get to where you want. It’s like those trading games where someone starts with a rock and trades their way up to a house, except it happens instantly (and with similarly valued tokens). All this can be done quickly and easily by using TokenWARP to chain together any number of swaps and payments between parties until every one has gotten what they need, where they need it, and for the currency or barter product they have. TokenWARP does the math and picks the optimal path through the available trades based on the criteria you’ve set. Because all these trades can happen instantly, for all intents and purposes it’s as if you’d simply teleported the material from location A to location B (or close by, anyway).
Location Swaps are Just the Beginning
Now to be fair, such a use case is still a bit exotic today, but this is not some far fetched scenario. On the contrary, supply chain and logistics cases have been quick to jump on blockchain technology because of all the business cases out there it’s one of the easiest and most logical implementations. TokenWARP itself is a thoroughly developed technology and because supply chain cases are becoming more and more open to utilizing blockchain, it’s perfectly realistic to think that sooner or later a large part of the billions of dollars in assets that are shipped across the globe each day will be tokenized, and thus eligible for Location Swapping. There’s also benefits to cost and time savings, and a huge benefit to being more environmentally friendly.
Once these goods are tokenized, TokenWARP is an incredibly powerful and complex tool that, believe it or not, does even more than just enable Location Swaps, or make it possible to trade virtually anything for anything else. But those features are topics for another article.
So, while teleportation is still very much in the realm of the imagination, TokenWARP is a practical solution for tokenized assets that is ready to use in the meantime, at least until we invent some sort of Star Trek transporter technology. And if the recent Suez Canal blockage has taught us anything, it’s that this solution has never been more important.
You can learn more about TokenWARP technology on our website.
At CoreLedger, we believe that blockchain is a practical technical solution to improve and solve a wide variety of issues across industries and sectors, which is why we try to cut through the hype and focus on real world applications, not just what’s technically possible.
CoreLedger’s mission is to help businesses of all sizes quickly and affordably access the benefits of blockchain technology. From issuing a simple token, to enterprise- grade token economy solutions, we have all the tools you need to integrate blockchain into your business.
Interested in our results-focused, real-world approach? Then visit our website for more information, or get in touch with us directly to discuss your project.
