Some industries seem perfectly well-suited for blockchain technology. Supply chain and logistics is one such industry. Many complexities arise during the process of any shipment. Validation, data retrieval, and language translation are just some of the challenges. Two token projects, CargoX (CXO) and OriginTrail (TRAC), are out to improve these processes.

Blockchain shipping

For example, a shipping manifest is a document that itemizes the products within a particular shipment; the manifest also travels with the shipment from beginning to end. 

Each party in the shipping process (buyer, seller, shipping agent, freight forwarder, etc.) must cite this document at each leg of the journey. This becomes cumbersome when a party has to wait for the manifest to arrive at a port before it can be examined and confirmed. 

What is CargoX?

This Ethereum-based dApp streamlines the transfer of digital documents, a crucial aspect of any logistics operation. The team at CargoX aims to make document transfer and ownership secure, fast, and cost-effective. 

In 2018 CargoX tested their native system called CargoX Smart B/L, sending a document from China to Europe in 2 minutes for 15% less than the usual cost. Chances of loss, errors, damage, and theft were also dramatically reduced to almost zero.

In 2019 CargoX launched its smart contract known as Blockchain Document Transaction System (BDTS) to streamline this process. By putting documents like a shipping manifest on a blockchain, it grants access to all parties involved at any given time. 

The BDTS smart contracts also audit logs of documents and ensure no tampering or loss occurred along the way. By managing digital documents on a blockchain’s distributed ledger, CargoX allows all parties to access, verify, and prove ownership of the shipment at each port.

What Is OriginTrail?

The OriginTrail team is working to combine physical and digital assets so they are organized, verifiable, and valuable. They have built the world’s first Decentralized Knowledge Graph (DKG), an advanced knowledge graph used by huge tech companies to link and format data points to yield valuable insights. 

Web3 builders can use the DKG to organize, discover, and verify physical assets, like a shipping container with digital assets, or a shipping manifest file that corresponds to that specific shipping container. This reduces friction in international trade between the many parties involved in the shipping process.

OriginTrail has already seen a 40% adoption rate in the market for US imports, enabling the secure exchange of goods. This security is paramount for delivering sensitive products like pharmaceuticals. Its semantic layout allows all parties to smoothly transition between the physical shipment and digital asset in order to verify and complete the shipment.

Similarities

1. Both can scale easily with users’ needs: 

   • CargoX can service single document transfers as well as larger verticals such as a particular sub-sector, such as air cargo. 

   • OriginTrail can serve a variety of ecosystems by creating organized semantic datasets, making data retrieval functional and efficient.

2. CargoX and OriginTrail can both translate languages on documents so the data is readable in any country where a shipment is sent.

Differences

1. CargoX focuses on the specific problem of document processing while OriginTrail focuses on the multi-layered challenges of organizing blockchain data.

2. OriginTrail uses the Decentralized Knowledge Graph to organize the vast number of physical and digital data points; CargoX uses its custom BDTS smart contract.

3. CargoX is built on Ethereum; OriginTrail is built on Polkadot.

Final analysis

The shipping industry is ripe for disruption and blockchain can disrupt it in spades, providing not only a revolutionary native service but a service that can scale. The importance of blockchain in logistics can be highlighted with Amazon’s adoption of blockchain to support their supply chain operations. 

With such a large and modularized system Amazon had to do away from siloed tools, which cannot easily communicate with each other. The company patented their own blockchain to better coordinate data and provide access and communication between channels.

CargoX and OriginTrail are providing solutions for the shipping industry from two different vantage points; they are organizing data points and streamlining processes at every turn.

Essentially, any industry where a middleman exists is an industry that can be disrupted. Tokens like CXO and TRAC provide great value because they execute the same services on a distributed ledger rather than through a network hierarchy.