The logistics industry is getting the blockchain treatment. Prominent companies like IBM has expressed interest in working with large companies like Maersk to disrupt the freight space, bringing much needed technological advancements.
After IBM and Maersk’s announcement to delve into creating blockchain solutions that would help revolutionize the global trading, shipping, and logistics industry, many more companies followed suit.
The latest of these companies that seek to add their contribution to the logistics industry is called Blockshipping.
The ambitious project, Global Shared Container Platform (GSCP), being developed by the new shipping technology firm called Blockshipping seeks to enhance the transportation industry in a specific manner. The GSCP platform will connect entities throughout the shipping industry and would allow them to perform various operations pertaining to container management and trading.
While IBM and Maersk’s partnership remains a marriage between two giant businesses, Blockshipping comes along as a project that has its core focus on building community-specific solutions that would directly benefit the entities and individuals associated with the shipping industry, whether they associate with a big company or a small trading firm.
Blockshipping ICO Review: The Market Opportunity
The GSCP project aims to become the primary registry of all pertinent shipping containers in the world, a whopping number that clocks at well over 17 million units.
By harnessing blockchain’s functionalities of data-sharing, security and reliability, the platform will be able to share real-time data of these shipping containers from all over the world. Since the information available on the blockchain will be transparent and immutable, users would be able to rely on it without issues.
Their tracking solution will be a boon in a market that experiences a loss of at least 10,000 shipping containers per year.
However, GSCP does not only want to stop at becoming a glorified ledger of shipping containers that do nothing else, as it also plans to address bottlenecks that are faced with the processes currently employed in the shipping industry.
Keeping this in mind, it will provide a payment platform for transacting parties that will also be available while leveraging the security and immutability of blockchain technology.
The tracking facility will allow relevant entities to save thousands of dollars that are currently spent on unreliable tracking or trading facilities and still cause the transacting parties to face a number of issues in the end.
The project will tackle various problems in the industry, ranging from issues such as of lack of coordination in the industry, excess supply of shipping carrier capacity, carbon dioxide output, and lack of proper efficiency in the market.
The effectiveness of the solution would not end there, by employing the solutions of blockchain technology and its relevant systems such as smart contracts, GSCP seeks to provide the shipping industry with a chance to benefit from annual savings from a financial standpoint and from an environmental standpoint.
Financial savings should starting from $5.7 billion and a decrease in carbon dioxide output leads to lower industrial pollution.
These offerings would allow GSCP to tap into a market that boasts of a huge potential for growth and a large capital to invest in disruptive solutions, with only a handful of companies currently looking into it.
This provides GSCP with a great opportunity to establish itself as a credible entity in the shipping industry during its early years of integrating the blockchain industry in its day to day operations.
Blockshipping ICO Review: The Crowdsale
The project will have two tokens, the Container Crypto Coin (CCC), a coin which will serve as a revenue share token. The second token will be called the Container Platform Token and it will serve as an internal utility token for transactions on a private permissioned GSCP blockchain.
The team chose to issue two tokens because after seeing what happened to utility tokens that were issues by other companies in the past. They saw that these utility tokens, once traded strayed away from serving its original purpose.
CPT will be deployed on the private blockchain whereas CCC will be deployed on the public Ethereum blockchain. CPT will be used to pay fees for the utilization of the GSCP platform and for clearing settlement between GSCP market participants.
1 CPT will equal 1 USD.
CPT is uncapped.
CCC will serve as the token that will raise funding for the GSCP project. They will be publicly traded and can not be exchanged directly for CPT.
1 CCC will will equal a fluctuating dollar value.
Investors can expect to receive “a substantial part of the gross revenue from the transactions performed on the platform”. The Blockshipping white paper states that investors will be able to receive 20% of the gross revenue from transaction fees paid in CPT on GSCP platform. When monthly goes past $2.5 million USD, the % allocated to token holders will be reduced by certain brackets.
The first bracket of 0-2.5 Million will have investors receive 20% of gross revenues, in the second bracket of 2.5 Million and above, investors will see their share in the revenues decreased by 17%, they will only share 3% of gross revenues.
Investors should still be able to benefit if revenues continue to increase. Individuals should be aware that they would have to have completed the KYC and should hold at least 100 CCC to take part in the revenue share process.
Both coins are implemented in Solidity and are ERC-20 Ethereum Token Standard.
The project’s crowdsale went live on May 14, 2018, where its native token CCC is being traded at the rate of $0.62 for 1 CCC.
The crowdsale is being held through the Ethereum platform, which makes CCC an ERC20 token. Blockshipping and GSCP is accepting Ethereum, Bitcoin and fiat during the sale while entertaining investments starting from $100.
The ICO also has a Market Maker Fund which allows crowdsale participants to have something to fall back on and gives them the assurance of investing their funds without worrying about their safety. This means that Blockshipping will buy back tokens from investors within a certain period of time, if the token falls below a certain percentage.
The crowdsale is set to end on August 31, 2018.
Distribution of Tokens
The CCC have a hardcap of 40 million CCC, with a defined token distribution model that would allow the 40 million tokens to be distributed as outlined below.
70%: Public sale
10%: Pre-sale
10%: Advisors, partners and media
5%: Bonus for pre-sale and public sale investors
5%: Founders
Allocation of Funds
45%: Market Maker Fund
25%: Platform development and operations
20%: Software acquisition
10%: CPT give away
Blockshipping ICO Review: Team
GSCP is going to be developed by its parent company, the Denmark-based Blockshipping, which has pegged GSCP as one of its prime projects ever since its launch in 2017.
Founded by Peter Ludvigsen, a tenured entrepreneur who holds over 38 years of experience in the shipping industry, Blockshipping sought and received initial funding for the GSCP projects by angel investors and notable entities the likes of the Danish Maritime Fund.
Apart from Ludvigsen who serves as Blockshipping’s CEO, the company holds Christian Gyntelbergas its COO – who has work experience with companies such as A. P. Moller and DHL, and JesperVedelsby as its CTO – who holds an experience spanned over multiple decades within shipping and energy industries.
Blockshipping also has strategic advisors such as JesperPraestansgaard, who holds extensive experience in the shipping industry. Investors will find that Jesper has served in leading roles at companies like Maersk, New York Shipping Exchange and, Hapag Lloyd AG.
The company is also working with a couple of key partners to be able to put its best foot forward in all aspects.
They have partnered with Norfico for their token model, smart contracts, and PR communications needs. The firm hails as the first agency in the Nordic region to combine advisory services across communication, technology and, strategy within the fintech domain.
Blockshipping has also chosen to partner with Chainanalysis for AML procedures and compliance and with Coinify for cryptocurrency brokerage services.
Lastly, the company has partnered with Amazix for awareness, community growth and, retention. Partnering with Amazix shows investors that the team at Blockshipping works with prime and leading agencies across the board.
This partnership also means that Blockshipping is seeking to penetrate the market and is tackling important fronts of marketing like awareness of the product and company.
The growth of the community can somewhat be evidenced by the number of telegram members in their group (12,991).
Having the right resources and partnerships gives Blockshipping an edge, they outsource and work with partners who could have more competence in these other aspects while the focus on the key action items that matter.
Focusing on their core items helps them to make the right progress and serves as a great indicator of effectiveness going forward.
Blockshipping ICO Review: Opinion
While the GSCP project has some competition in the form of IBM and Maersk’s joint venture as well as a handful of other solutions that are aiming to leverage blockchain technology in their shipping-based systems, the project has a detailed whitepaper that by the looks of it provides pertinent information to users in a comprehensive manner.
The team behind the project also seems experienced and capable enough to pull this off.
According to their roadmap, they should have completed key tasks such as designing the platform and smart contracts and selecting their blockchain platform.
They should currently be in the stage of integration, smart contract development, platform implementation and data population. They should be progressing to refining smart contract development, mapping of customer EDI, data migration and a soft launch in the third quarter of this year.
In the last quarter of this year, they should be completing data migration and training/preparation for the full deployment and growth of their platform. This means that they should be on par with competitors in this space, they might even have a leg up as they have advisors who have worked with shipping companies such as Maersk in the past in top positions, potentially having more deeper connections in the space.
Competition
300CUBITS – A blockchain based solution targeting the shipping industry, this platform is focused on other aspects of the shipping industry such as No Show and Rolling. These behaviors in the shipping industry can have significant costs and can detract from the financial thrival of the shipping industry.
The platform seeks to cater a solution to these specific issues and progress from there. Is it directly competing with Blockshipping? No.
MAERSK & IBM – IBM and MAERSK are teaming up to provide the shipping industry with a general solution, this solution also is seeking to minimize the pain point of tracking freight goods and eliminating excess paperwork in the industry.
Is there a crossover with Blockshipping? Possibly. Blockshipping seeks to provide tracking through their registry.
How high is the threat? Medium, to assess the threat in its entirety, more information would be needed.
Are there others in the freight space? Yes, yet they are focused on other aspects and pose a low to medium threat level.
BlockFreight– “BlockFreight is an open network blockchain allowing stakeholders to have access to an advanced global ledger and just like the ISO 668 container before it, this is a global trade optimisation technology.”
They, too, are seeking to solve the problem of inefficiency and variability in the data aspects of the global shipping movement.
Do they pose a threat? There is certainly crossover but there doesn’t seem to be much activity or updates on what they have done so far.
The last news piece was released at the end of last year.
Threat level – Low
Weaknesses
The project promises that it will not have any issues pertaining to scalability or usability and mentions that it will be built upon a permissioned blockchain so users do not have to face lag times or related issues due to unwanted traffic on the platform. However, it does not really define which blockchain platform it will choose to build its solutions upon or whether it will create its solutions from scratch.
We would like to see more technical details on the project, if one were to look at their Github, they would only see a code repository for the ICO Smart Contracts as opposed to further technical details on their actual platform.
That content would be great to see as that is the core of the project but since the actual project will be on a permissioned blockchain, they might be trying to keep all specifics in-house.
This lack of clarity in regard to the technical aspects of the platform does create questions on an otherwise propitious offering by the platform.
Differentiation
The project could be termed to be similar to supply-chain management or a tracking service for shipping containers along with facilitating payments on its platform, which could make it a good standalone solution while standing side by side to what IBM and Maersk are currently developing together.At this point in time, it would be a matter of who gets to unveil their product first and provides a tangible solution to the end user. If Blockshipping and GSCP can achieve that feat, then it would make the project a powerhouse to look out for in the near future.
Blockshipping ICO Review: Conclusion
The company has quite a few components going for it. The team has significant experience in the space, indicating that they have credible professionals and the right initial network to be effective.
They have proven that they have the insight and knowledge to outsource non core activities to entities that specialize in them (community management, ICO compliance, token metrics, etc) so they can focus on the key activities that they know.
They seem to be pushing the boundaries even with their ICO process as the team has worked with strategic partners to come up with their ICO 2.0 to be legally compliant and serve the needs of their token holders as well.
But it seems that investors should pay attention to the larger picture in this market.
The fundamental questions in this age-old market is a bit more macro-economic: Will these blockchain based innovators get buy-in from market participants (i.e, people who want to use these services and products)? Will potential customers in the marketplace recognize the value that they and other competitors are providing and opt in sooner than later?
Are security threats, overcapacity, environmental regulations and tracking problems a pressing concern for market participants? If it is, have they already figured out substitutes to address these issues?
These are the questions that make some investments in this sector especially tricky.
We will see some indicators and answers to these questions over the course of this year.