In the past few years, the potential of blockchain for business has been touted by everyone from the Alphabet Inc. to Zurich Financial. Among these potential applications, the field of logistics looms as one of the biggest prizes on offer.

That comes to no surprise as the logistics industry is worth trillions of dollars per year. What’s more, experts have emphasised the amenability of transport and logistics to blockchain’s advances.

McKinsey Consulting came to the same conclusion in a recent examination of the different hunting grounds of blockchain solutions architects. Here we can see the relative potential of the different aspects of the logistics industry:

While here, McKinsey rated the logistics industry in terms of overall potential:

Clearly, logistics is up there with the most promising domains for the adoption of blockchain tech. Delving into this, we see a few companies, in particular, leading the charge or presenting fresh takes on the tech needs of the transport and logistics sector.

ShareRing

ShareRing’s main target is the sharing economy. With the explosion of this industry in recent years, big questions remain outstanding and ShareRing is hoping to use ledger technology to tighten up ownership and sharing protections for users.

This also bleeds into the transport and logistics spheres. Firstly because of one of ShareRing’s core offerings, its OneID system. OneID is a simple means to verify the identity of the participant in a network, bringing together all disparate pieces of identity the user might have into one blockchain-backed, decentralised datastore.

The aforementioned has obvious applications in the logistics sphere, where goods can change hands a dozen times across dozens of countries before reaching point-of-sale.

ShareRing’s core problem domain, that of shared goods, also has crossover with the logistics field. Transporting complex cargo and goods across distances involving multiple shareholders evokes the same challenges as that of the issues in the sharing economy.

OriginTrail

The OriginTrail project is one of the front-runners in driving the blockchain for logistics sector forward. Their approach is ambitious and seems to consist of trying to launch as many use cases as is feasible, each with the overarching goal of increasing interconnectedness and security throughout the supply chain.

They have something to show for it so far. Aside from good partnerships with the likes of Yimishiji, a giant food producer in China, OriginTrail is part of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, seeking to bring a new dimension of corporate adoption to crypto tech. In terms of use cases, OriginTrail is looking to bring things like the EU organic farming industry into the new ledgerised era with a network of supply chain verification trails that ensure traceability from farm to fork.

Clash of the Far East: VeChain and WaltonChain

It always makes things interesting when a big head-to-head comes onto the horizon in business. In this area, VeChain is dominating in one of the most promising areas of supply chain management. As such it is no surprise that VeChain is the world’s leading enterprise-grade public blockchain platform. Over 30 of the Fortune 500 including Walmart, BMW, LVMH, Renault and PwC have live solutions running on the public VeChainThor blockchain.

Both Vechain and WaltonChain offer solutions to mass-production logistics, attempting to offer a single version of truth for managers to verify everything about their goods in transport. This includes counterfeit, which affects millions of goods on a weekly basis.
These projects are not targeting the more niche and blockchain-malleable supply chains but the mass-market. From medical to fast-moving consumer goods, the use cases are endless for these two budding platforms.

Why is blockchain the antidote for logistics?

Fundamentally, the attraction of blockchain lies in its ability to remove the need for trust in a system. Since logistics involves the transfer of goods under pressure of time and quality control, which often results in a degree of uncertainty, ledger technology literally takes the work of the hands of those involved in the transaction. When looked at from this perspective, the promise of this confluence of industry and technology is a no-brainer.

About ShareRing

ShareRing is a total solution, servicing consumers and businesses alike. They connect the highly fragmented sharing economy by bringing together sharing services across all industries and geographies. Using ShareRing’s decentralized marketplace, users can securely access, connect, and pay for services anywhere in the world. Rental providers receive payments instantly, without any currency conversion fees, and with incredibly low transaction fees.

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