Fishcoin and Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership Partner to explore Sustainable Trade and Supply Chain Finance

The University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) establish a new partnership with Fishcoin to evaluate innovative models that can transform trade and supply chain finance in the seafood industry.

Mark Kaplan
4 min readMay 30, 2018

Why a partnership with Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership?

CISL worked with the Chief Executives of some of the world’s largest banks to create the Banking Environment Initiative (BEI) in 2010. Its mission is to lead the banking industry in collectively directing capital towards environmentally and socially sustainable economic development.

Recently, CISL expanded the BEI with the Fintech Taskforce, which it organised between March and August 2017. The Fintech Taskforce was premised on the belief that the automation of financial services and their underpinning processes has advanced so far that the application of fintech will stretch beyond the strict provision of financial services.

CISL’s insights into Fintech, forming the coalition behind the BEI and development of the Task Force are a major next step in the application of fintech to help solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. The BEI is now developing next steps towards achieving this in collaboration with the following member banks:

Taskforce Partner Banks

CISL’s leadership in establishing the BEI and its mission alignment with the objectives for Fishcoin are why the Eachmile team are bullish about the potential for this new partnership to enable access to more Sustainable Supply Chain and Trade Finance in the Seafood Industry.

Why Fishcoin for supply chain and trade finance?

Eachmile is leading the industry collaboration for the Fishcoin Blockchain Ecosystem to enable incentives for data logging and sharing across sustainable seafood supply chains. Unlike many blockchain initiatives, Fishcoin is not based on a central company or entity to be a rent seeking intermediary. Instead it is designed to be an open and decentralized ecosystem that incentivizes data capture so that an ecosystem of companies and 3rd party developers can benefit by adding value to the network.

To address the fragmentation of most seafood supply chains Fishcoin has been designed as a peer-to-peer network that allows independent industry stakeholders to harness the power of blockchain using a shared protocol so that data can be trusted, transparent, and secure.

Fischoin data ecosystem shown with illustrative seafood supply chains

Eachmile is creating Fishcoin out of the need to de-risk its supply chains. Banks share the need to de-risk the supply chains they lend into. Fishcoin’s frictionless transactions enables buyers to attribute financial incentives against sustainability criteria or “Key Data Elements” for each supply chain partner on Blockchain. These agreements can then be leveraged by Banks to enable preferential rates for supply chain and trade finance to suppliers who meet the sustainability objectives.

Access to this capital enables suppliers to afford the investments in necessary infrastructure upgrades (like Ocean Acidification monitors, irrigation, sanitation, education, etc) and working capital bridge previously unreconciled supply advances to accounts receivable payments reaching producers.

Eachmile partners with TransferTo enable fishers and fish farmers in over 70 countries and 200 mobile operators around the world to exchange Fishcoin for mobile airtime as an incentive for sharing data

How could Fishcoin do this?

Fishcoin tokenizes data submissions that act as a digital-twin to real-world inputs against each stakeholders block on the chain. Upon data validation by the receiving party the token is issued. The recipient can redeem their tokens according to the real-world terms of agreement according to the transaction’s smart contract.

Interested in becoming a Fishcoin partner?

Companies and organizations throughout the seafood industry are signing up almost daily to be rollout partners in the Fishcoin ecosystem. If you would like to know more about joining our community of partners please read through our white paper, and contact our team.

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Mark Kaplan

Partner, Envisible; Partner, Wholechain and Chicago Council on Global Affairs — Nonresident Fellow, Food & Agriculture and Global Cities