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More Universities Forced to Grapple with Logistics of Accepting Crypto Donations
As more and more graduates of prestigious universities go on to make a name for themselves in the rapidly expanding cryptocurrency space, the institutions where they learned their skills are increasingly on the receiving end of donations made using digital assets. However, many universities are completely clueless as to what to do with the funds gifted to them.
Are Cryptocurrency Donations More Trouble Than Their Worth?
The list of higher education institutions receiving donations in digital assets such as bitcoin continues to grow each year. However, not all universities are keen on accepting unfamiliar assets. Whereas you or I would be eternally grateful for such a gift, most endowment managers have no idea how to handle cryptocurrencies.
Firstly, there is the matter of setting up a suitable wallet to accept digital assets. Then there is the issue of selling them as quickly as possible. The volatility associated with crypto markets is something many endowment managers seek to avoid. Rather than grapple with these relatively basic facets of digital currency use, donations are frequently rejected.
According to a report in Bloomberg, in the US the University of Puget Sound, the University of California at Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cornell University have all successfully taken undisclosed numbers of donations in cryptocurrency.
Meanwhile, the highly prestigious Harvard University is yet to accept gifted digital cash. Nor have fellow ivy leaguers Yale – although a spokesperson for the institution did state that it had tested the process but it was an idea not being actively pursued.
One of the earliest known examples of a higher education institution accepting a cryptocurrency donation was that of blockchain wallet service provider co-founder Nicolas Cary. He gifted Puget Sound 14.5 BTC in 2014. After a change of their endowments policy and several lengthy conversations about the logistics of accepting such an unconventional donation, the university relented and took the bitcoin. They, of course, quickly liquidated it quickly and missed out on around ,000 at today’s prices.
That said, it seems curious that Yale has turned down donations made via digital assets. Its highly successful endowment manager, David Swensen , has been linked with investments in two funds focused on cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.
It is not at all uncommon for universities to reject non-conventional donations. Bloomberg state that all manner of weird and wonderful gifts have been turned down over the years. These have included timeshares, paintings, and even areas of wetland. If the process of liquidating the asset is not quick and familiar, the endowments manager will simply deem it more trouble than it is worth. Evidently, some institutions feel that this is the case with bitcoin, ether, or any other digital coin they might receive.
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China Favors Blockchain for Logistics, Government, and Healthcare, Survey Finds
A joint survey conducted by PwC and VeChain between November and December 2017 has found that logistics, government, and medical services are the sectors with the greatest potential to adapt blockchain technology in China.
PwC and VeChain Survey Finds Logistics, Government, and Healthcare Are Favorites for Blockchain Adoption
The Popular Republic of China has declared war against cryptocurrencies, clamping down on digital currency trading and prohibiting initial coin offerings, but it has consistently supported the underlying blockchain technology as a tool to disrupt most economic sectors. In 2016, the government has written the technology into its roadmap for the country’s development in the five years to 2020.
PwC and VeChain surveyed 130 companies online and 40 others through face-to-face interviews while focusing the questions on the application of the technology on non-financial sectors. Half of the companies surveyed have revenue of more than US0 million.
While Mainland China regulators oppress the surge of cryptocurrency exchanges and the use of bitcoin as a means of payment, over half of respondents expect the underlying technology to have a significant impact on business. Sunny Lu, chief executive officer of blockchain company VeChain, confirmed that sentiment.
“Blockchain’s tamper-resistant and distributed data storage features enable us to improve traceability and transparency for logistics and supply chain management. These characteristics will be put to use in optimizing business transactions and trade relations”.
Excluding finance, logistics is considered a key industry to use blockchain technology for its capabilities of tracing the origin of stocks as well as track transport and store data. In second comes government as decentralized ledger technology is able to disrupt governmental documentation storage and transfer, as well as provide smart city planning.
The National Audit Office is preparing to use blockchain for its data infrastructure and a few governmental bodies in Mainland China have shown interest in the technology. This includes Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province, which will be entering with 3 billion yuan (US1 million) in a 10-billion-yuan fund dedicated to investing in blockchain development in China.
The third place goes to medical and healthcare services, which could use blockchain to verify the authenticity of personal, diagnostics and prescription information. Regulatory policy could limit the short-term reach of the technology, but policymakers have no intention of staying away from the disruption. For instance, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology wants to set up a national blockchain standardization committee.
“Blockchain has transformative potential, its implementation can affect a company’s underlying business model”, said Cheung Chun Yin, a PwC China partner in Shanghai, adding that more companies will join the technology once there is a solid and comprehensive industrial policy.
Cost is not a considerable concern for the participants surveyed, ranking the lowest of the worries on whether companies will go ahead and adopt the technology.
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IBM-Maersk Blockchain Project Adds Logistics Provider Agility
Agility will share and receive information about shipments through the blockchain in hopes of reducing the cost of administration and documentation.
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FedEx Moves Forward With Blockchain Logistics Plans
Global shipping company FedEx has become the latest to join the Blockchain in Transport Alliance.
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Blockchain Technology Is Changing the Logistics Industry
Blockchain is gaining momentum in a number of growing industries. Because of the rise in popularity of Bitcoin, Blockchain technology has proven useful in the financial arena. A growing number entrepreneurs are utilizing Blockchain to transform a number of industries.
Blockchain is known for driving greater transparency and security across the digital information ecosystem. Armed with this knowledge many startup companies are beginning to implement use cases for the nascent technology.
This has caused a heightened awareness around the technology in areas stretching from payments to public policy. As popularity grows, the need for more information and training will increase as well. Learning how these industries are using Blockchain to advance their companies is becoming more and more accessible with more events and conferences happening every day.
Impacts on a global logistics
The transfer of goods, service and value drive the way humans exist. This important reality of life is accomplished through communication flow and logistics. CEO of Shipchain, John Monarch, believes that the logistics sector employs more people than any other industry. Due to the natural growth over time, it has required innovative ways to scale in order to handle the growth of the shipping and logistics needs.
Monarch said, “Connected devices revolving around the Internet of Everything (IoE) need a higher level of security. Blockchain technology is a matchless solution in this regard because it provides the best protection through distributed ledgers, advanced encryption, smart-contracts and reduced intermediaries. As a result, this will tackle corruption, ransomware, theft, premium-fees and tracking issues.”
His estimates predict that more than billion per year could be saved just in the beginning, and after maturity, as much as 0 billion annually when Blockchain networks are implemented on a mass-market level.
Blockchain’s key role
Efficiency isn’t the actual selling point of Blockchains for the logistics industry, according to Monarch. Plenty of other options outside of Blockchain can provide more efficient systems. What Blockchain does offer, however, is a way “to make systems more transparent, more robust and less dependent on intermediaries.”
When there is a change of ownership, tracking this information becomes an issue as it relates to the chain of custody. One example of this is how a car’s history is tracked as noted by Christopher Bates, COO of Bitland:
“It is pretty important to know if a car has been in a major accident and has frame/structural damage,” he says. “If there was an immutable accessible record that kept track of the car history, there would be no way a car salesman could sell a car that had been extremely damaged.”
Bates also explained the problem as it relates to ownership of land. In some places, land titles are tracked on paper only or by one individual. Fraud happens in situations like these because the land can be sold two to three times without truly knowing who the real owner is.
Providing safety
There is a constant battle over the imperfections of shipping. Tracking the chain of custody when it is passing through so many hands begins to break down. There is no perfect way to find who is responsible for the break in the chain. Bates observes:
“The issue therein is that since they are mutable, shipment records can be hidden or erased completely to the detriment of the people at large. Governments are able to hide their black budget spending by erasing shipping records or preventing records from being issued at all.”
Blockchain fixes this issue by implementing technology that decreases the potential of malicious action and creates better transparency with immutable record-keeping.
Creating new opportunities
As Blockchain technology continues to find traction among industry insiders and new markets, the potential for adoption continues to grow as well. Of particular note are new startups and existing businesses that are conducting Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). This model of decentralization provides a way for Blockchain technology to enter various industries.
Arcade City is a startup up company similar to Lyft and Uber. They are now facilitating all of their transactions through a Blockchain system. They are providing their drivers the freedom to establish their own rates with Blockchain tracking all of the data. This will appeal to drivers who would like to build up their own business instead of being controlled by a corporation. They can build their own customer base, determine rates and offer additional services (deliveries and roadside assistance).
This is just one example of many new ICOs who are starting to take advantage of the Blockchain technology. The movement of putting freedom and control into the customer’s hands will be an upward trend that many will begin to use to their advantage. ICO provides industries with a platform to offer tokens to pay for services. It is a great way to establish the capital for a new company while providing services to your customer base.
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ShipChain Using Blockchain to Change the Shipping & Logistics Market
January 1 will be the start of the Public Sale for ShipChain, the project that will use blockchain to change the shipping & logistics market.
ShipChain encompass all methods of freight, and will include an open API architecture that can integrate with existing freight management software.
Simply put, it’s a fully integrated system across the entire supply chain, from the moment a shipment leaves the factory, to the final delivery on the customer’s doorstep; trustless architecture, and transparent blockchain smart contracts.The movement of goods has a significant and growing influence on the daily lives of people around the world.
According to a market report published by Transparency Market Research, “The market’s global value was .1 trillion in 2015, and is expected to grow to .5 trillion by 2023 , making it one of the largest industries on the planet. The industry is currently 10% of the United States GDP.
Today, the supply chain has serious bottlenecks. The lack of a unified platform prevents the various players from interacting efficiently. Most of the participants in the supply chain use outdated ways to track their shipments. Given that upwards of 65% of the value of a company’s products or services is derived from its suppliers and its supply chain, utilizing older highly ineffective systems results in tremendous amounts of wasted time, resources, and money.
ShipChain was established to address the most significant problems facing the logistics industry today. The fully integrated system will track across the entire supply chain–from the moment it leaves the factory, field, or farm–to delivering the finished product to the customer’s doorstep; a trustless system, and transparent blockchain contracts.
The ShipChain system uses an Ethereum smart contract that can be used by anyone to orchestrate a shipping escrow on the distributed ledger. The overall shipment completion will be stored on the main Ethereum blockchain, and to keep costs low, individual tracking waypoints and load data can be stored and verified in an associated side-chain operating on the ShipChain Protocol, such as the one ShipChain Foundation.” Large partners will be able to operate their own ShipChain side-chains, with aid from ShipChain Foundation.
The public sale will be held in January 2018. 29.17 million SHIP tokens will be sold.It is planned to raise approximately million in ETH. .342 per token is the ICO price.
Company website:https://shipchain.io/index.html
White Paper (EN/CN/RU/ES/KR/JP):https://shipchain.io/shipchain-whitepaper.pdf
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US Logistics Agency Launches Blockchain Sector Mapping Tool
The U.S. government’s Emerging Citizen Technology program announced a new open-source Atlas to provide resources on blockchain technology.
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ICO LIVE- LWF (Local World Forwarder), World’s First Decentralized Logistics Platform
When someone thinks about logistics, the first thing that comes to mind is DHL, UPS and, why not, Amazon or other major service providers involved in the global delivery system. More than 88% of the world’s packages are managed by a third party company. They take the package forwarding it through one of these large … Continue reading ICO LIVE- LWF (Local World Forwarder), World’s First Decentralized Logistics Platform
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ICO LIVE- LWF (Local World Forwarder), World’s First Decentralized Logistics Platform
When someone thinks about logistics, the first thing that comes to mind is DHL, UPS and, why not, Amazon or other major service providers involved in the global delivery system. More than 88% of the world’s packages are managed by a third party company. They take the package forwarding it through one of these large … Continue reading ICO LIVE- LWF (Local World Forwarder), World’s First Decentralized Logistics Platform
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