By Xu Miaomiao

Has Shipping block chain era arrived?

By Xu Miaomiao

In March this year, IBM and Maersk announced to cooperate to develop block chain solutions for crossborder supply chain; In August, MOL, NYK and K-Line and other 14 Japanese companies set up the enterprise alliance of trade data sharing platform based on block chain technology; on August 15th, Singapore PIL,PSA and IBM Singapore signed a memorandum of understanding, which aims to promote the innovative research of supply chain operations network based on block chain technology; on September 6th, Maersk,Ernst consulting, Guardtime and Microsoft jointly set up a maritime insurance platform based on block chain technology, which is expected to put into use in January next year...... As one of the oldest industries,the shipping industry recently appears to be over enthusiastic toward block chain technology, and industry giants frequently take actions, then, what on earth the block chain technology is? And why is it so charming?

Block chains do have a lot of value. According to Xu Kai, director of the big data laboratory of Shanghai international shipping center, the block chain we are now saying is actually a mechanism of distributed accounting. Distribution is an ideology and a trend.Block chain has at least three advantages: the first is the credibility. Achieve trust through collective restraint and collective supervision. The second is de-center.Without supervision, encryption device can ensure the transaction contents not to be regulated. The third is to have a feature of backtracking. The three technical characteristics will certainly have a great impact on future business.

It can be seen that although the block chain comes with bitcoin, the derivative value of the technology has gone beyond the digital currency. Some insiders believe that the block chain technology may be the next outlet of the Internet financial industry. In addition, with the extensive application of block chain technology in the era of big data, apart from the Internet financial sector,block chain technology has been applied in many fields,and showed great prospects.

As one of the oldest industries, the shipping industry naturally won't miss the opportunity to hold hands with such magical new technologies. As early as in 2015,Wave, newly-established enterprise in Israel, began experimenting with block chaining technology to solve the problem of disunity and lack of trust in EDI data standards. After that, the leading enterprises in the shipping industry have "joined hands" with block chain,which has aroused widespread concern in the industry,making many shipping people exclaim that the "block chain" will change the shipping industry".The block chain is regarded as a "Star" technology,and people often see its advantages and neglect its shortcomings. Xu Kai thinks, "uneconomical" is the biggest reason that this technology temporarily has not been applied to shipping industry so far. Block chain is only the first technology that distributed technology thought being applied in the commercial field, but it may not be the real mature technology in the future.He believes that to make the block chain more suitable for shipping application scenarios, the following four problems must be resolved: firstly, the data redundancy mechanism needs to be further optimized to reduce the resource cost; secondly, delay in transaction confirmation must be restricted in the controllable range of time; thirdly, the privacy mechanism based on cryptography must solve the information transparency on the same business chain, but not limited to the both sides of the transaction; fourthly, it is necessary to make each block chain application party form commercial model.

Although the current block chain technology is not perfect, and not suitable to be combined with all business models, but there is one thing for sure, that is, with the construction of the block chain, the chains in the big data that cannot be connected previously are expected to further open up. Because of the encryption, some data which is not easy to share can be shared through the way of block chain, and the business documents among countries, shipping enterprises, ports, units and various business may be standardized through this round of block chain construction. This would be the most positive impact of the block chain.