Israeli startup LogChain demonstrates world’s first international maritime shipment using blockchain technology

The Maritime market is worth over $2 Trillion, about 80% of the global trade volume, over 70% in value and the market continues to grow at the annual rate of 3-4 percent. The industry is still faced with challenges and pain points. The maritime shipping heavily depends on old and cumbersome
legacy processes. The lack of transparency between market players makes it hard to establish trust. The shipping process is pricey and fraught with endless paperwork and signatures. On top of it all, each trade transaction involves multiple market players of about 20-30 parties.

With these challenges come opportunities for technology to transform the disrupt the industry. Hundreds, if not thousands of startups are already leveraging new technologies to revolutionize this space with very few using blockchain technology. One of these startups is Israeli-based LogChain, a blockchain startup that provides a safe digital space for the maritime ecosystem, enabling importers, exporters, shipping companies, freight forwarders, banks, and ports to easily connect, submit business requests, and store transaction information. The company’s platform is designed to reduce manual work overload, improve customer experience, and reduce time and costs.

Today LogChain, announced it has successfully completed a pilot program to demonstrate the feasibility of performing a full shipping and trade finance digitization process across the supply-chain. LogChain completed a full cycle of an international Blockchain-backed maritime shipment. The successful shipment was carried out over the unique end-to-end digitized and tamper-proof LogChain platform, handling all aspects of the supply-chain by implementing electronic bill of lading (e-BL) and Letter of Credit (LC) digitization.

The shipment, from Belgium to Israel, demonstrates the feasibility of performing a full shipping and trade finance digitization process across the supply-chain. LogChain’s end-to-end Blockchain solution handles all aspects of the e-BL supply-chain and a digital Letter of Credit audit – to dramatically reduce costs and paperwork, improve customer experience and SLA, increase transparency and minimize fraud risks.

Founded in 2018, LogChain is a global supply chain and trade finance Blockchain platform, and is backed by technology and IT leader Aman Group. Aman Group uses technology and innovation to help businesses improve their performance and create value for their customers, offering a broad range of services and solutions in digital, cyber security, data, software development, knowledge management, and blockchain. With approximately 2,500 employees, Aman Group serve clients around the world. Aman Group and LogChain are headquartered in Israel.

The shipment, transferring beverages from Belgium to Israel, was fully conducted using the unique LogChain e-BL, which encompasses the ownership lifecycle and business workflow, as well as digitally signed attached needed documentation.

As the maritime shipping industry continues to expand, growing 3-4% annually, it now stands at over 80% of the global trade volume, which is currently valued at over $2 trillion. With the advancement of digital payment and documentation technologies, the relatively traditional trade market is slowly opening up to new solutions, creating a significant opportunity for LogChain to introduce and implement its innovative digital vision.

In average, the LogChain platform reduces 7 to 9% of shipment costs for shipments partners. In terms of workload, the unique platform can reduce approximately 2 weeks of documentation down to few minutes, removing altogether the need for original documentation using carriers.

As all features are fully orchestrated by LogChain’s smart contracts and invoked by the freight-forwarder, exporter and the importer involved – they are all accessible and visible to all parties in the supply chain, until the shipment is successfully released by the shipping company. LogChain platform is running on Microsoft Azure cloud solution, using Ethereum private consortia.

LogChain CEO & Co-Founder Dudi Avni, commented on the announcement: “We are very proud to have successfully completed this important international cycle, one of the very few in the world. We are on the brink of a new digitization era in the trade market, disrupting the old, cumbersome processes, minimizing fraud risks – and literally saving billions of dollars, which we’ve become so used to spending for the mere sake of bureaucracy. As we progress with our unique end-to-end platform, we are working together with leading shipping companies, banks, freight-forwarders and global importers & exporters in order to create a new ecosystem that could enable this much needed revolution.”