Announcing the Closing of Fr8 Network

It’s with immense sadness that I am announcing the closing of Fr8 Network. To begin this post I’d like to highlight some of my favorite things Fr8 Network has accomplished:

Building Community

This community is easily #1. The team, our customers, contributors, and the thousands of followers across our social channels; it was the people that kept us going. Your interest and encouragement made this possible to begin with! Thank you!

Influence

With more closed JIRA tasks than we can count, thousands of code commits, two white papers, and one protocol paper, the legacy of Fr8 Network will live on through the solutions we designed and developed to prove our hypotheses. It’s no secret that blockchain technology is here to stay, and supply chains will be powered by blockchain sooner than we realize. I’ve personally seen the impact of our message change the perspective of key leaders in this space.

It’s hard to describe how truly challenging it is to make nascent technology like blockchain so easy to use that a busy trucker or tired warehouse worker can meaningfully engage in the network. The simplicity of the design of the token economics, the concentration on user experience, the architecture of the protocol — all these decisions are meant to help spur adoption of the vision. Leading by example, marketing our ideas, and publishing designs and demos helped accelerate the adoption of blockchain technology.

Journey

I knew before I joined Fr8 Network that supply chains struggled in many respects, but they worked. Whatever we built would have to be an ambitious 10x improvement over the status quo to succeed. We started with trucking, shining lights into the dark corners of paper-laden and accountability-lacking ways of doing business. It is abundantly clear blockchains will massively improve trucking efficiency in many respects, and we launched with a mission to target trucking first.

Soon after, the team acknowledged that US trucking was a small fish in a massive global logistics pond. That by expanding our horizon to global shipping, we could apply the same technical solutions and bring the same transparency and simplicity to the international sector.

We prophesied, evangelized, and, at times, mesmerized our way through conferences, TV News, podcasts, and boardroom presentations. Yahoo Finance, MSNBC, and dozens of publications spread our story the community, arguing that they should demand more from this industry. We’re seeing the results play out.

This brings me to part two: why we’re closing down. In mid 2019 the company made a strategic decision to focus heavily on commercializing our platform for the moving and relocation industry. We felt that as a small subset of the international shipping market with an intimate community, we could successfully launch the Fr8 Protocol.

Buy-in happened quickly. Within a few weeks I was invited to the largest industry conference to speak on a private panel of industry executives and its largest customers (I wrote about it here). Meanwhile, as committees were formed to address technology needs, I was having governance discussions with moving associations, and speaking on webinars to educate the community on how blockchain will improve their business. We even filed a proposal for a government grant to install the Fr8 Protocol for the US Department of Defense (a massive challenge still in need of a solution)!

When COVID hit a few months later, the relocation industry came to a halt. Moving was no longer an option during a global pandemic when borders were closed, lockdowns issued, and employees went to full remote work. What used to be lively discussions about standard and architecture design became unanswered emails as the companies in this space slashed R&D budgets to weather the pandemic.

We hunkered down and waited as long as we could for moving to pick back up and technology budgets to improve but we cannot wait any longer. I have hope that business will resume with time and once again the Fr8 Network team and our solutions will resume building. Until then we must close indefinitely.

If you’re interested in keeping up with the progress of blockchain adoption in supply chain and logistics, the Blockchain in Transport Alliance (BiTA) members dexFreight, CargoX, chain.io, and CargoChain are some project I believe incorporate the Fr8 Network vision.

I want to wish you and your loved ones a safe and healthy 2021.

Thank you for everything, sincerely,

Sloane