COSCO and OOCL join GSBN blockchain project for security certificates
The Global Shipping Business Network (GSBN) has completed a collaborative project with COSCO SHIPPING Lines (COSCO SHIPPING), Orient Overseas Container Line (OOCL) and the Shanghai Research Institute of Chemical Industry Testing (SICIT), which saw the organizations collaborate on the exchange of safety certificates for the transport of chemical cargo using blockchain technology.
As best practice in the industry, special cargo with designated goods, such as chemicals and lithium batteries, should be certified as safe to transport before they are handed over to logistics and shipping companies for export.
For exports from China, SICIT is one of the organizations authorized to test and issue safe transport certificates, which are usually collected by shippers from an accreditation body and provided either as a paper copy or as a scanned copy to the transporters.
As the project partners note, certificates shared in this form can be difficult to verify, thus entailing risks such as mislabeling and fraud. To digitize this process, the four companies have completed a proof-of-concept using GSBN’s blockchain-enabled platform to manage the exchange of secure transport certificates, with verification of the information from the original source.
The project included shipper Midea, an electrical appliance manufacturer, with both COSCO SHIPPING and OOCL using the GSBN blockchain to verify certificates obtained from Midea directly with SICIT.
Using blockchain technology ensures that the certificate data is immutable and structured, providing security and accelerating the overall certificate exchange process. In the future, GSBN says it can also facilitate improvements in automated verification, as well as circulation of data stored on the blockchain among multiple parties.
– The shipping industry is undergoing a once-in-a-lifetime digital transformation leap. As part of this, it is becoming increasingly important to be able to share information while having full control over who it is shared with as well as ownership of this data, says Bertrand Chen, managing director of GSBN.
“The use of blockchain infrastructure in this proof-of-concept with SICIT enables systematic and reliable verification to occur directly with SICIT, which, combined with the future use of data from IoT devices, will make a significant difference in risk reduction and efficiency improvement generally.”
