IBM-Maersk blockchain shipping consortium expands to include other major shipping companies
Last year IBM and Danish shipping conglomerate Maersk announced the limited availability of a blockchain-based shipping tool called TradeLens. Today, the two partners announced that a couple of other major shippers have come on board.
The partners announced that CMA CGM and MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company have joined TradeLens. When you include these companies together with Maersk, the TradeLens consortium now encompasses almost half of the world’s cargo container shipments, according to data supplied by IBM .
The hope is that by using blockchain to solve the problem, all the participants can easily follow the flow of shipments along the chain and trust that the immutable record has not been altered at any point.
The blockchain provides a couple of obvious advantages over previous methods. For starters, [Wieck said] it’s safer because data is distributed, making it much more secure with digital encryption built in. The greatest advantage though is the visibility it provides. Every participant can check any aspect of the flow in real time, or an auditor or other authority can easily track the entire process from start to finish by clicking on a block in the blockchain instead of requesting data from each entity manually.